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Burning the Boats and Going ALL-IN on Success
Matt Karamazov
August 06, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 21 minutes
Creating a life you love is easier than you think.
It might take longer than you expect - and frankly, most people give up way too soon - but it’s available to all those who want it badly enough…
To all those with a burning desire to succeed and the willingness to hold nothing back. You can build it.
My friend Amy spells it all out for you in her free “3 Pillars of Wellness” guide, and it’s also my pleasure to pass along her best expert advice on how to experience less stress, richer relationships, and more energy every day.
That’s in her “Living with Purpose” guide. I’d encourage you to download it (for free, of course) before diving into tonight’s five incredible books.
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
🧠 Who I’m Learning From Right Now
📜 Nick Velasquez on the Greatest Power of the Human Mind
🎥 The 7 Great Books I Read Last Month
✅ New Book Releases Coming Soon
📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations
🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
There’s a lot to get to, so let’s hit the books!
Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson: I’m about a tenth of the way through this biography of Musk and it’s excellent. It’s the first Walter Isaacson book I’ve ever read, and I can see what the big deal is! He’s a fantastic biographer and Elon’s story is like a novel unfolding in real time. Highly recommend!
Play a Bigger Game, by Markus Kaulius: This is a book I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, and it just came out a few weeks ago. It’s about 7 “universal principles” you can use to experience true fulfillment and win at life.
Retirement Money Secrets, by Steve Selengut: Steve’s been an investor for 44 years(!) and this book details his investment strategy that works whether the market is going up or down. I’m about halfway through this one right now, and I’m really enjoying it!
Jay Clouse: Jay is easily one of my favorite creators, and he’s helped me tremendously when it comes to up-leveling my professionalism, uncovering hidden revenue opportunities in my business, and just generally building a more sustainable career as a creator.
His podcast and YouTube channel are incredible as well! I always learn something new that I can apply immediately to either make more money, become better at what I do, and usually both.
Lea Turner: Lea is the LinkedIn lady and what she’s done on that platform (and for me as a business owner) is just awe-inspiring. She does LinkedIn the right way - the real way - as an actual, helpful person who wants you to succeed.
She has about 225x more LinkedIn followers than I do right now, but with her help, I’ll be catching up to her before too long!
William Brown: First, Will’s book is an absolute must-read for literally anyone who’s serious about building a coaching business the right way and becoming profitable as soon as possible. It’s one of my top business book recommendations, hands down.
But his YouTube channel is essential viewing as well, because he literally holds nothing back. He’s a 2-Comma Club member (meaning he’s sold more than $10,000,000 over his career so far), and he doesn’t gatekeep anything. It’s all there for you, available to anyone with the desire to learn.
“Learning is the greatest power of the human mind. Everything we've built, everything we've created, everything we've become has been the result of our ability to learn. And this great power is inherent in all of us. We are made to learn."
I finished reading 7 books last month, including the 1,300th book I've read ever since I started counting way back in 2014!
It was a wonderful reading month, and most of these books can make you rich, but the last one, Robin Sharma's latest book, goes into the 8 different forms of wealth, and how a truly rich life includes all of them.
My very next video is going to be about the 20 books I plan on reading this month (not a typo lol), and I'm also working on a video summarizing 100 popular self-improvement books in one sentence each!
If you got value from this latest video, though, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
Watch the Video: I Read 7 Books Last Month (Including My 1,300th Book!)
The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom: It’s happening! It’s actually happening! Sahil Bloom is coming out with a book!
I’m really looking forward to this one, and it’s going to be about the 5 types of wealth - Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth - that will lead to a durable satisfaction and happiness you can build and maintain across the seasons of your life.
What’s Your Dream?, by Simon Squibb: Simon’s the founder of HelpBnk.com, and he started his first business when he was homeless at 16, later selling his agency for more money than he’ll ever need.
Now, he’s built up a massive social media audience by giving free help to aspiring entrepreneurs and asking them, “What’s your dream?” This is his first book and I am HERE for it!
And now, here are my five main recommendations for tonight! They are…
I don’t want to keep you here all day (I’ve got reading to do), so let’s get right into it!
“To accomplish something great, you have to give yourself no escape route, no chance to ever turn back. You throw away your backup plans and you push forward, no longer bogged down by the infinite ways in which we hedge our own successes.”
The only thing that having a Plan B does for you is distract you from Plan A. The title “Burn the Boats” comes from the age-old practice of all the great conquerors of literally setting fire to the ships they arrived on and forcing complete focus on winning no matter what.
Your Plan B should be to succeed at Plan A, and this is the playbook.
Matt Higgins was a high-school dropout caring for his sick mother in Queens, New York, before burning his own boats and eventually (and I do mean eventually) becoming an investor on Shark Tank, a lecturer at Harvard Business School, and a serial entrepreneur with a billion-dollar portfolio of some of today’s most iconic brands.
Burn the Boats is such a fantastic book, and I really do hope that you’ll read it. But more importantly, I hope that you launch that business; try out for that sports team; ask out that girl (or guy)…
Laser in on the highest vision you can possibly imagine for your one and only life, lock in, gather a team of mentors, shut down the haters, and move fucking forward no matter what. And that boat in the back of your mind? Burn it.
“Naturally, the 80 percent diligently obeying all the rules made for them and by them despise the 20 percent who defy some of the rules and the 1 to 5 percent who defy ALL the rules and get extraordinary, exceptional, infinitely better results.
If you listen to and conform to the 80 percent, you will be one of them. Here, I’m showing you how the top 1 percent to 5 percent think and act very, very differently, and get very, very different results.”
I’m not a rule-follower by nature, so this one naturally spoke to me.
Exactly as the title says, it’s an unconventional guide to success that flies in the face of most of the advice circulating out there about how to succeed in business and in life.
Quite frankly, most of it is written by theorists and wannabes who will never get what they want out of this life. That may sound harsh, but it’s true.
The bottom line here is that there’s always a way to succeed, but you’re not likely to find it by following the crowd. To borrow from The Third Door by Alex Banayan (another excellent book), life is like a nightclub.
Most people are standing in line in front of the main entrance, waiting patiently, quietly following the rules, hoping eventually to get in. There’s also the VIP line going back in the opposite direction, where celebrities and people with money and connections also clamber to get in. Then there’s “the third door.”
The third door is the one you make yourself. It’s where you go around the back of the building, crack open a window, climb in through the kitchen, slipping past security and the rest of the staff and making your own way in.
Dan Kennedy’s book helps you find the third doors that exist all around us. Now, all you need to do is find or develop the courage to walk through them.
“Reading can be learned only because of the brain's plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually."
Somewhat shockingly, human beings were never meant to read.
There are no genes that code for the development of reading skills, and so each human brain has to rearrange itself in the process of learning how to read, moving beyond its original state to learn how to make sense of these strange, squiggly markings on the page.
Proust and the Squid is a wonderful book that details that whole process and how it works - or not - in the brains of humans, especially young children.
“The worst time to think about the thing you are going to say is in the moment you are saying it. This book prepares you for nearly every known eventuality and provides you with a fair advantage in almost every conversation.”
This is a fantastically useful handbook of words, phrases, and psychological tools that will give you a fair advantage in sales, business, and the world at large.
Sometimes - often - the difference between a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ is knowing exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. What you never want to do, though, is head into any important conversation unprepared.
And honestly, this book has something helpful for basically every situation that you could ever encounter in your life. That’s quite an achievement for a 90-something-page book!
Having this knowledge of human psychology, effortless persuasion, and effective speech patterns honestly feels like some sort of cheat code.
My advice - after having been involved in hundreds (thousands) of important, high-stakes conversations, is to return to this book often, and practice bringing some of these words and ideas into one or two conversations of yours throughout the week until they feel natural.
Until you just know…exactly what to say.
“To see what no human has seen before, to know what no human has known before, to create as no human has created before, it may be necessary to see as if through eyes that have never seen, know through a mind that has never thought, create with hands that have never been trained."
Legendary music producer Rick Rubin has probably guided more of your favorite songs into existence than you realize, no matter whether you listen to country, rock, rap, metal, or anything in between.
Ever since co-founding Def Jam Recordings from his college dormitory in the 1980s, he's produced albums for Slayer, Adele, Jay-Z, Neil Young, Johnnie Cash, and a huge number of other artists that have very little in common other than the fact that they all record songs.
In this book, Rubin will teach you how to deepen and strengthen your creative instincts, produce great work, and discover your authentic self through artistic expression.
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
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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, (and rapidly scale your personal brand while earning more money in your business), click to join us inside The Competitive Advantage - 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
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:
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