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How to Become SO GOOD They Call You a Fake
Matt Karamazov
May 11, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes
In partnership with
The right people are going to love me for tonight’s main book recommendation.
By the “right” people I mean experts in their field who are good at what they do but are finding it difficult for the marketplace to recognize their value.
I have the perfect book for you to read, in that case.
Or, rather, Joshua Lisec has the perfect book for you, and it’s called So Good They Call You a Fake.
Full summary and a sample of my notes are at the bottom of this email.
I finished that book a few months ago, but another one I’m loving right now is called Attitude is Your Superpower, by Eduardo Clemente.
You can just tell by reading his book that he’s one of “the good guys” and he genuinely wants to help you and see you succeed. His book is just great.
Two more quick things to tell you about:
My friend Rana has been delivering solid book recommendations on Instagram for a while now, but she has a new website too!
Her reviews are always so thoughtful and well-done, and now she’s done basically the same thing as she’s always done on Instagram except better and even more in-depth on her site.The author of another phenomenal book I read earlier this year, Jody Raynsford, is hosting a free 5-day challenge to help you build a…cult?
Yeah! His book is called How to Start a Cult, and it’s one of the best business books I’ve read in a while.
The free challenge is to help you build belonging, and attract a band of devoted followers in just 5 days. Sign up here.
But in today’s issue, we’ve got…
🏅 Today’s Sponsor: Gamma
🎥 Three Other Smart Creators I’m Learning From
📲 Five Recent Posts From Me
📖 Book Quote of the Day
💵 Inside My Private Business Mastermind
📘 New Book Alert: The 90 Day Brand Plan
📜 Book Notes From the Archives
🧠 Learn This Concept: The First Domino
📚 Featured Book: So Good They Call You a Fake
There’s a lot to get to, but it’s all spaced out in a way that’s not overwhelming, so you can just dip in and out wherever you’d like.
And if you want me to buy you a book of your choice every month, click here.
Now, let’s hit the books!
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📚 My friend Thomas Haynes is someone whom I wish more people could get to know. In a big huge fake internet, he’s one of the only guys I trust to tell it to me straight.
He’s also got a great newsletter where he helps readers conquer personal growth and business success and helps them find purpose in every moment.
📚 My other friend, Taylin Simmonds is just a force of nature - in general, I mean, but specifically when it comes to personal branding and “monetizing your mind” online.
His newsletter is pretty damn good too, and although I think I’m behind on a few issues, it’s usually one I never miss. Read it if you want to learn modern monetization strategies that school will never teach you.
📚 And then there’s this guy! Virgil Brewster…how do I even explain him to you?
For one thing, he’s one of the chillest people I know, always relaxed, super successful in the course creation business, and now he spends his time teaching the rest of us how he made $10M in course sales.
His newsletter breaks down how. Again, I rarely miss it!
📚 After reading 1,282 books, these five rewired my brain for the better.
📚 Everything gets easier when you know that you’ll never quit.
📚 How I read an extra 1,095 pages a year.
📚 An authority-building lesson from one of America’s greatest fraudsters.
“The marketplace pretty much accepts you as you position and present yourself, especially if you put yourself forward forcefully and aggressively enough, utilizing the time-tested and proven strategies of self-promotion.”
📚 The Only 2 Ways to DOMINATE Social Media (Members Only)
📚 How Matt Gray Gained 1.8M Followers (Members Only)
📚 The $10,000/Month Revenue Split (Members Only)
I’m a simple man…
When I see what looks like a great book, especially one that’s likely to be fantastically helpful to me in my business and/or in my life, I buy it!
Such was the case with The 90 Day Brand Plan, by Dain Walker, which just came out a few days ago!
If you want to become a known name and authority in your field - not to mention unlock infinite money-making opportunities, you need two things:
A personal brand.
This book!
Inside The 90 Day Brand Plan you’ll discover how to nail and scale your likeability, charisma, and character as you channel your personal brand’s attention into whatever company or product you’re building.
You’ll also find:
Strategies to use your creativity, sales abilities, action plans, and fun daily mental exercises to create the right mindset and skillset for growth
Ways to eliminate fear, rejection, and self-doubt as you learn to unpack personal belief into the creation of content of all sorts
Techniques to harness a variety of income streams, including those from social media, speaking, selling, podcasting, marketing, pitching, and advertising
Buy the Book on Amazon: The 90 Day Brand Plan, by Dain Walker
📚 Who Not How, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 The Practice, by Seth Godin (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 Big Money Energy, by Ryan Serhant (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 As a Man Thinketh, by James Allen (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 My Summaries and Notes from 1,250+ Books (Patreon)
The First Domino: Each and every one of us can think of at least one person in our lives who “set us on the path.”
There was - or is - someone in your life who believed in you when you didn't. Someone who saw something in you that you didn't yet see in yourself, and who helped you actualize your latent potential.
The luckiest among us will have had parents who were our "first dominoes," but these influences would also have come in the form of books, teachers, coaches - role models of all kinds.
Some people go their entire lives without hearing someone tell them that they love them, support them, and believe in them, and it's always an exceptional event when these first dominoes appear in our lives. We remember them for the rest of our lives.
The important point here, though, is that you can be the first domino for someone else.
Keep up the momentum.
Become a domino for someone else, and show them that what came before them is nothing compared to what lays dormant inside them, and what could be in store for them if they fully committed to actualizing their own potential.
Summary:
Joshua Lisec is the multimillion-dollar ghostwriter of more than 80 books and this particular book is for underpaid experts whose paychecks don’t measure up to the actual value they provide to their clients and customers.
There could be several reasons for such a state of affairs, but one of them is probably that you are dealing with an obscurity problem:
No one knows who you are! Much less how you can help them, and why you are the answer to their biggest, scariest, keep-them-awake-at-night problems that they’d pay big money to have solved.
Besides dishing out quite possibly the best marketing advice of all time (and I’m not just saying that), Joshua’s book will help you develop a genius-system with no steps skipped that will allow your clients to experience sensational, almost literally unbelievable results, such that people don’t believe they could possibly be true.
In fact, one of the counterintuitive pieces of advice you’ll find here is the value of cultivating a small army of organic haters - a loud, vocal minority of people who spread your name far and wide, unintentionally bringing you to the attention of the people most likely to hire you and pay you exorbitant sums of money for what you do (and be glad to do it).
Not everyone should read this book. For one thing, you have to genuinely be good at what you do. And not just good; you should be phenomenal at your craft.
You need actual results from real clients, and if people follow your genius system, they should be able to get great results, every single time.
Once you have that, though, your task becomes one of attracting as much attention and hysteria in the market as possible, to the point at which the haters start coming out of the proverbial woodwork.
You’re already good at what you do. Now you have to become so good that they call you a fake.
Book Notes:
“Bad reviews from bad people are good reviews.”
“All publicity is good publicity, you’ve heard it said. But I say unto you: The best publicity is absolute hatred.”
“When your ideas, your services, and your track record are indistinguishable from magic, you find yourself building up an army of word-of-mouth marketers who, contrary to their malignant intent, generate precious attention for you, your brand, and your business.”
“If you’re not accused of fraud, you’re just not that good yet.”
“The opening chapter of your book is a sales letter for the rest.”
“Legends-in-the-making do the Hard Work. They rack their brains. They pull up every past project completed and invoice sent related to their work so they know every step their readers, users, and clients can, would, or must take in order to get the top job done.
Legends record themselves doing their work, then ‘watch the tape’ like a professional athlete and note every task completed in what order and why they did it that way.
That’s what it takes to be great; that’s what it takes to be called a fake.”
“We don’t say, ‘She’s a course creator, let me tell you about her new masterclass.’ We say, ‘This author wrote THE book on the topic. She knows what she’s talking about.’
The mastery of subject matter as conveyed by authorship commands respect in a way no other marketing investment, information product, or services package can.
As my friend and client Greg Reeves puts it, ‘You can’t mail a tweet to a client.’”
“Everything hard about business gets easier when you have a book.”
“Your book is the absolute best salesperson for your brand, working while you sleep to find, vet, and seal the deal on opportunities you didn’t even know about until they were all yours.”
“You belong in the spotlight and you know it. But there’s no skipping the trials and tests - the demonstrations of proficiency at getting remarkable results. Which you will have because there is no other way.
And with those hard-won results, you will impress the important people. Impress important people, and they will tell everyone in their network about you, too - a network that happens to consist of numerous other important people.
Your name will spread forever.”
This Book on Amazon: So Good They Call You a Fake, by Joshua Lisec
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
And if you’d like me to buy you a new book every month, join us inside The Competitive Advantage and that’s exactly what I’ll do - we’d love to have you!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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