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"If I can't bring my book with me, I'm not going."
Matt Karamazov
March 03, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 35 minutes
📚Hey, good evening!
First off, let's welcome all the new people who joined us since last time!
There are 1,699 of us in total now
Thank you (yes, you!) for trusting me to bring you the absolute best book recommendations I can each and every week!
As always, these are long emails full of great books and tons of cool surprises.
But I never expect that everyone will be interested in every single thing I publish.
So, feel free to jump around and dive into whatever does interest you!
Today we've got...
An introduction to today's "5 Books"
The best of what I'm reading and sharing right now
Two fantastic online creators you need to know about
A new book alert from an executive leader who wants to help you “win the moment”
The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom
The evolutionary psychology of "costly signaling"
My monthly reading recap, including the epic adventure novel that gave me a wicked “book hangover”
How to figure out what truly matters - and see that almost everything else doesn’t
How to “invoke the Muse” by maintaining prodigious levels of self-discipline and consistency
My top 5 book recommendations this week
A special gift for reading all the way to the end
In a single sentence…
The Long Game is an extraordinary business book about thinking several moves ahead in your career and becoming a recognized expert in your field.
The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation is perfect for beginners in the gym and for people who simply need a little bit of a (supportive) kick to help them get into the best shape of their lives.
Make It Stick represents the gold standard in books about learning, and it’s helped multitudes of students and lifelong learners remember more and perform better in exams and at work.
The 1% Rule is an extremely practical self-improvement book about getting 1% better each day, and about protecting your extremely valuable “mental real estate.”
The Velvet Rope Economy is an incredibly insightful nonfiction book about the current (and growing) split between people who can afford to pay for extra services and privileges and those who can’t, and about how the public sector loses in the exchange.
Here in this email are summaries of each book, along with a sample of my best notes, and if you want my complete set of notes on these books, you can find them on my Patreon .
Pro Learning Tip:
Getting a membership to Medium is one of the best investments I've ever made in my continuing education. The quality of the writing on Medium is superb, and some of the smartest, most interesting thinkers publish there regularly.
1) Hey look! I did it somewhat on time this month! I updated my book notes on Patreon pretty close to the start of the month!
Patrons will now have access to my latest book notes (I took detailed notes on all 1,150+ books I’ve read since I started counting and now I’m sharing them online), and new people can go here to check them out.
2) So…Jordan Peterson followed me on Twitter this week and I can’t say that I don’t find that super cool.
I know it’s totally not a big deal…and you may even hate the guy…but that honestly did brighten my day quite a bit! Not sure what that means psychologically haha.
3) Speaking of Twitter, my growth has EXPLODED over recent weeks - thanks in part to this thread on The 48 Laws of Power - and I’m now within striking distance of 3,000 followers!
I also hit my Instagram goal of 85,000 followers a few days ago, and this month I’ll be focusing on getting my YouTube channel up to over 1,000 subs.
I talk more about these goals, what I’m doing to achieve them, and how I can help you achieve yours in this month’s Achievement Report.
4) A few great books that I'm reading right now are The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs, Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen , and Life Force, by Tony Robbins .
I'm also listening to The Secret to Success, by Eric Thomas, on Audible. I used to love his YouTube videos - he’s got great energy - but I haven’t paid attention to him in a while! Time to rectify that.
Nowadays, I listen to about 3-4 audiobooks a month, and I always listen to them on Audible. No other audiobook service even compares. You can also get a 30-day free trial right here .
You know I love to support new and old friends of mine who are doing awesome things (or simply amazing people I've stumbled upon across on the internet), so here are a few people you should know about:
1) First up is a new friend and Instagram connection, Will, otherwise known as KnowleDJ!
KnowleDJ is a Vegas DJ that's toured the world opening for Ariana Grande, The Backstreet Boys, Mariah Carey, and more. But he's also a huge book lover and passionate about connecting the world with great music and great ideas and with his own beats and his podcast featuring amazing authors and scientists.
You can join his interactive community on WhatsApp with this link or read more about him at www.KnowleDJ.net - and make sure to check out his podcast too! He’s interviewed some really cool authors, like Luke Burgis, and his taste in books is excellent.
Needless to say, I’m glad that Instagram brought Will and me together! You might appreciate what he’s trying to do with music and ideas as well.
2) The second person I want to introduce you to is another new friend of mine, this time from Twitter.
His name is Simon, and he’s going to be a GREAT BookTuber one day. Just check out his awesome video summary of The Richest Man in Babylon!
He’s also on Twitter (obviously haha), and definitely worth following there as well. He’s just at the beginning of his career, but he’s got the knowledge, experience, and passion to help you maximize your reading time and get more out of the books you do choose to read.
I’m glad to have met Simon too!
Do you know someone I should know?
I’m always looking to connect with accomplished, inspirational, and good-hearted people who share the same interests that I do…especially books!
So if you have a favorite author, influencer, creator, etc. that you think I might love to meet (and maybe feature here), let me know! You can just hit reply to this email anytime and tell me about them. Thanks!
Would you walk away from a game of checkers after being jumped one time? Of course not. You still have eighteen pieces left and plenty of opportunities to win. But as adults, we lose sight of life’s entire board.
Once we mess up, we think the game is over.
To counter this negative, self-destructive mindset, we have Winning the Moment, which is your guide to living the life you want and becoming the person you want to be. Inside, author and mindset expert Cody Adent shows how much life has to offer when you change your mindset and your focus.
Too often, we don't take enough time to define for ourselves what a win looks like; instead, we take the easy way and let other people define it for us.
Cody can help. He has more than a decade of executive leadership experience, and as I’ve come to know him personally on Instagram, I’ve seen how passionate he is about sharing these empowering ideas and beliefs with the people who could most benefit from hearing about them.
Eternally optimistic and relentless, Cody is one man you’re definitely going to want on your side, as you turn each and every moment of your life to your advantage, and use them to free yourself, one ephemeral moment at a time.
His book, Winning the Moment, came out early this year, and you should definitely consider checking it out!
“If anyone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor. Love sees what is invisible.”
There are certain people who have lived on and inhabited this earth who make us want to be better than we are. Simone Weil is one of those people for me, and to exist in the same reality as her, to be able to draw inspiration from her life and thought, seems to me to be a real blessing.
Weil was a 20th-century French philosopher and Christian mystic who wrote about love, beauty, and the obligations we have to make others' lives better with our loving presence, our sincere attention, and our genuine affection.
Once, the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, Albert Camus, called Weil "the only great spirit of our time," and a second Nobel Prize winner, André Gide, said that she was "the most truly spiritual writer of this century." Popes and presidents and philosophers the world over have said pretty much the same thing, and yet, tragically, the wider world seems to have nearly forgotten her.
This particular book, Love in the Void, draws from material Weil wrote for her books, Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace. It deals with the practice and demands of true attentiveness (very important to her thought), the love of our neighbors and the beauty of the world, and different kinds of love and how they draw us beyond ourselves into the larger reality of the world (which, to her, would be God's reality).
As you might be able to tell from some of my other work, these ideas have been nothing less than transformational for me. I hope to do them just a little bit of justice here and transmit to you as much as I can of her luminous example.
I don't believe that Simone Weil was a particularly "happy" woman, but by assimilating some of her better ideas into our daily lives and actions, we can be, and we can position ourselves to receive the Good, no matter what religious or spiritual beliefs we may hold.
Costly Signaling:
“Animals, including humans, often show off the most expensive signals they can afford, whether those signals are peacock tails or Hummer H1s. In each case, reliable signaling demands some sort of ‘conspicuous waste’ - a highly visible expenditure of resources that brings no material benefit, but that simply signals the expender’s ability and willingness to waste those resources.”
You can't fake a well-defined physique or an expertly performed guitar solo, and so these are honest signals of your conscientiousness and intelligence respectively.
Getting down to a low-enough body fat percentage for your abs to show, or practicing enough to develop the skill to perform a perfect guitar solo, is costly as well. You had to sacrifice something to get there; you can't just say, "Yea I have a six-pack, but I can't show it to you right now." That's why they say talk is cheap.
All of this helps to bring conspicuous consumption into greater clarity. If you say to yourself, "That person is so dumb! Don't they realize they'll never be able to live in all those houses at once?" you haven't quite understood yet. That person knows, at least unconsciously, that they'll never be able to drive all of their cars at once, or what have you - that's not the point.
The point is that it's a signal, a grandiose claim about their desirability to potential partners, and that's why they do it.
Furthermore, Miller also explains that desirable products usually evince "precision" or "reputation" as well as waste. Precision goods, which can include things like expensive watches or certain vintages of wine, are meant to display good taste, attention to detail, an appreciation of craftsmanship, etc. Reputational goods, like a degree from a prestigious university, appeal to status consciousness as well.
It's costly to hang a Harvard degree on your office wall (if you didn't actually go there, someone would probably notice eventually), whereas if you just told people, "Yea, I'm wicked-smart," you wouldn't be believed.
Further Reading: Spent, by Geoffrey Miller
Note: This is a sample from my other newsletter, Stairway to Wisdom. Along with the book breakdowns, you get a premium weekly newsletter packed with insights and ideas like this one. Get your 14-day free trial here .
The 8th book I read last month gave me the BIGGEST book hangover, and I still can't stop thinking about it.
Besides that book, though, I read 9 other books last month, more than a few of which were EXCELLENT.
They include Steven Pressfield's latest memoir, a classic French adventure novel from the 19th century, some really good business and productivity books, a somewhat controversial dating book (I provide a few alternatives if you don't want to read that one), and more!
I cover a few different genres here, and there's BOUND to be something that captures your interest! I know that #8 book is one I'll be thinking about for a long, LONG time...
Essentialists, by definition, focus their limited time and attention on the activities and pursuits that are going to yield the most meaning, the highest rewards, and the largest returns on investment.
They know that almost everything doesn’t mean anything, but they also know that there are still a large number of valuable things that are drowned out by all this inconsequential nonsense.
Even though, statistically, almost nothing matters, Essentialists realize that there are things out there that matter an exceptional amount, and it’s their job to explore the world widely enough in order to find them. [ Read Time: 5 Mins ]
To gain the assistance of the “gods,” we first need to show up. Replace “gods” with “luck,” “the universe,” “probability,” or whatever else, but the fact remains: discipline, routine, and focus will take you where you need to go.
And sometimes, where you need to go is straight to your writing chair, painting easel, dance studio, squat rack, or workshop.
You need to be in the same place, at the same time, exhibiting the same high level of commitment to your chosen craft — you can’t let up for even a single day or even a moment.
Once you’re there, you need to really be there.
You need to say, aloud or to yourself: “This is the level of effort I’ve committed to. This is where I said I would be. And this is when I said that I would be there.” [ Read Time: 3 Mins ]
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While the rest of the world thinks we're playing checkers, readers of this book will know that we're actually playing chess instead. The greatest Grand Masters in chess plan many, many moves ahead, and the best players in the game of life tend to do the same thing. That's what The Long Game is all about.
Creating the white space in our lives necessary in order to step back and take in the whole picture is one of the goals of this book, and here Dorie Clark presents a ton of high-level concepts to help you make this kind of thinking more common in your daily life.
Your personal goals need a long-term strategy, and this book will help you craft one for yourself. It will encourage you to "think in decades" and help you to think bigger.
In my complete breakdown of this book, I cover several extremely important ideas such as strategic patience, raindrops of success, and more. I also uncover the truth about ridiculous goals and how to tell if what you're doing right now is working.
“The whole point of playing the long game is understanding that ridiculous goals are ridiculous right now – not forever. When we force ourselves to take our goals to extremes – What would ultimate success look like? – we can create an honest road map for ourselves. It might take five years, or ten, or twenty. But that time will pass anyway. If a goal is worth pursuing, it’s worth pursuing the version of it we actually want – not one that’s watered down to protect our ego.”
***
“The challenge for all of us is an inner one: to keep going when it seems like no one is paying attention or cares. And to believe that eventually, the world will catch up.”
***
“What I’ve come to love about patience is that, ultimately, it’s the truest test of merit: Are you willing to do the work, despite no guaranteed outcome? We earn our success by toiling without recognition, accolades, or even any certainty that it’s going to come to fruition. We have to take it on faith and do it anyway. That’s strategic patience.”
***
“In life, we just don’t know what’s going to happen or how things will play out. But if it’s important enough, we have to try anyway.”
I haven't been this impressed with a fitness book in a long time, and as someone who knows a thing or two about a thing or two when it comes to fitness, it is my PLEASURE to introduce you to this one.
I really think that reading it could be the start (or continuation) of something great for you.
This is a thinking man's (and woman's) fitness book, and somehow...SOMEHOW...Mike Matthews finds a way to bring Epictetus, Solzhenitsyn, Teddy Roosevelt, Socrates, and more into a book about health and fitness and still make it accessible, easy to get into, valuable, and FUN.
And fitness SHOULD be fun.
It should make your life BETTER and not be seen as a chore, a fearful obligation, or something that's beyond your reach.
Mike and I also share the conviction that training isn't just about training.
People think, "Oh, yea that's just the gym."
But the gym is...LIFE.
And once you learn that you control what happens to your muscles inside the gym, you find out that there's a lot more that you can control outside the gym too.
“What we’ve done or failed to do doesn’t forever determine who we are or will be. In fact, I believe that we have no idea what we can really do. We may never find out, either – there may always be another level – but striving to reach the top is the most rewarding adventure life has to offer.”
***
“We can only be as great as our circumstances demand.”
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“In many competitions, you don’t have to be the best to win. You just have to be harder to destroy.”
***
“Where you are now is a result of who you were, but where you go from here and ultimately end up depends solely on who you decide to be from this moment forward.”
Everything you want in life is on the other side of effort and sacrifice. In life, we appreciate what we worked hardest for, and in education, we remember what we struggled to learn.
That's one of the core messages in Make It Stick, which represents the gold standard when it comes to books about effective study strategies and efficient learning.
Basically, we remember the information that we recall to mind most frequently, and the more effortful it is to do so, the more entrenched it becomes in our minds and the less likely we are to forget it when we need to use it.
At the end of the day, the universe rewards effort, exertion, and striving. We need to go beyond what we think we can do if we want to find out how far we can really go.
This same theme - the hardest path usually being the best - shows up again and again in life, and Make It Stick will show you how applying that wisdom to your studying and your practicing will allow you to reach levels of mastery that are simply unavailable to people who aren't familiar with the science of successful learning.
***
***
“How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging comprehension because you must recall the salient points from memory, put them into your own words, and explain why they are significant - how they relate to the larger subject."
***
If you’ve only read a few self-improvement/personal development books so far in your life, then this one could be a formative book for you, while veterans of the genre will have read about many of these ideas before.
That being said, I was still able to come away with some fantastic insights, including one that, for me, made the entire book worth reading.
That one idea is a simple one (like most of the greatest ideas are), and it’s simply the idea that your “mental real estate” is extraordinarily valuable, and if someone or something is going to take up residence in your mind, they’d better pay for that privilege.
There had better be a great reason for you to allow those thoughts to enter your head – otherwise, you’re doing yourself a major disservice by letting yourself even think those thoughts.
The rule itself is pretty straightforward: Do something every single day to get at least 1% better in all the areas of your life that are important to you. Dead-simple idea, yes. Now you have to actually do it.
The 1% Rule: 1% Progress + Daily Application (Consistency) + Persistence (Focus) + Time (Endurance) = Success
***
“You’re experiencing wins every single day, most of which go unnoticed or unacknowledged. Celebrating your wins gives you jet fuel to keep going and extends a token of appreciation for how far you’ve come instead of focusing on what’s missing.”
***
“The moment you learn to execute regardless of how you’re feeling, everything changes.”
***
“One day, you’re going to look back and reflect on this period of your life – and miss it. You’re going to miss the excitement, the doubt, the beautiful mess of ambition and desire, the growth, the studying, the wins, and the losses. Sure, you will love your results and the life you’ve created, but don’t miss out on the moment right now.”
In the near future, society will be divided between the have-nots and the have-yachts. Between the people who have just enough and the people who have more than they could ever need or spend.
Even though we are lifting people out of extreme poverty at an unprecedented rate, the very wealthiest people in the world are also adding to their riches at an unprecedented rate, and the theory is that this is going to continue to cause big, potentially harmful changes in the economic landscape going forward.
With that in mind, Schwartz’s book is about the increasing split between the segment of consumers that are willing and able to pay for extra privileges and accommodations and those who will have to take what they can get in this two-tier system.
This is a challenging book, not for its difficulty level or language, but simply because it forces you to think deeply about what this trend could mean for our public spaces and how we relate to each other as individuals.
If you don’t have to use public spaces (because you can just fly private, or get someone else to go in your place), then you won’t really care what happens to those spaces. And when those spaces are public schools…well you can see where all this is going.
Schwartz’s contention is that as the better-off contribute less and less to the public good, the quality of our public spaces – and even our public discourse – will degrade, and the entire fabric of society will be worse off than it was before.
His arguments demand deep thought and deliberation, and I also thought highly of his discussion of the two types of envy: malignant and benign. Benign envy is a relatively healthy reaction to the success of others, where we are inspired or motivated to do better ourselves when we see other people succeeding. Malignant envy, on the other hand, is the desire to tear someone down just so they will have as little as we do.
This is one of the better nonfiction books I’ve read in recent memory, and open-minded thinkers of all persuasions would benefit from reading it. I didn’t feel as though I was being pressured to accept a political agenda; instead, I just felt as though someone who cared about those who are less fortunate was trying to get me to pay attention to something incredibly important and real.
“Whatever the arena in contemporary life – health care, education, work, travel and leisure – on the right side of the rope is a friction-free existence where, for a price, needs are anticipated and catered to. Red tape is cut, lines are jumped, appointments are secured, and doors are opened.
On the other side of the Velvet Rope, friction is practically the defining characteristic, with middle- and working-class Americans facing an increasingly Darwinian fight for a decent seat on the plane, a place in line with their kids at the amusement park, a college scholarship, or a doctor’s appointment.”
***
“Separation is now taking place within public institutions as well, subverting the values that made them public in the first place.”
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“Sticking with a hardworking family physician, rather than seeing a concierge doctor, is more equitable and won’t harm your health. You don’t have to stay in the ship-within-a-ship on your next cruise. You might actually meet new people and broaden your horizons by traveling with everyone else.
Patronize an independent grocery store instead of a chain dollar store, and add to, rather than subtract from, social capital.
If you donate money to an educational institution, consider setting aside a portion for a school that doesn’t have a multibillion-dollar endowment, like New York’s City College or Chicago State.
Support local tax increases when the beneficiary is the public school system, the community hospital, the fire department, or public transit.”
***
“Capitalism exists with the consent of democracy, and the more the vast majority find themselves not just outside the Velvet Rope but treated with disdain, the system itself is threatened. It’s up to all of us – including those well-ensconced inside the Velvet Rope – to create a less segmented society, where Americans from different walks of life actually meet one another and find common ground. If they do, maybe there will be more talking and less shouting in public life.
It won’t be easy. There are huge profits to be made in the Velvet Rope Economy, and the temptation there is always to raise the cordons even higher. That’s the way things are going. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s room enough for all of us inside the Velvet Rope.”
You made it to the end! Congratulations!
You're now among the rarest of the rare.
I mean, that was a lot of books!
But I hope you found something here that looked interesting!
Personally, I’m obsessed with sharing the magic of books and reading, and so I love it when one or more of my book recommendations “hits.”
Also, if you know someone who might love this newsletter, you can just send them this link!
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I also want to thank you for reading this newsletter all the way through to the end and to thank you for real, I’m going to give you a 1-month free trial to the Stairway to Wisdom.
That’s twice the free trial period that most people get, because people who finish what they start - and have the patience to do a lot of reading - are usually the ones who love the Stairway to Wisdom the most.
Enjoy!
And remember, you can just hit "reply" to this email to ask me a question or offer a book recommendation of your own. I may take a while to respond, but I read every one!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you apply the wisdom found in the greatest books ever written to your life:
I have one spot left open for personal mentoring, and the first choice always goes to the people on my email list. Simply reply to this email if this is something you're interested in working with me on, and I'll let you know more about it, answer all your questions, etc. It's not cheap, but it will be extremely valuable for you if you're willing to work as hard on yourself as I'm willing to work for you.
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