- The Reading Life
- Posts
- Choose Your Enemies Wisely (Plus 9 Other Excellent Books)
Choose Your Enemies Wisely (Plus 9 Other Excellent Books)
Matt Karamazov
July 16, 2024 ā¢ Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes
YOUTUBE š THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE š PATREON
Reading 200 books a year is NOT impossible, but honestly, itās just a number. It doesnāt really mean anything, and itās certainly not a race.
My goal for 2024 is (was?) to read 200 books, but with expanding my business, growing my community, and really justā¦having a life, itās going to be tough to reach that (admittedly arbitrary) number by the end of the year.
I did, however, recently finish my 46th book of the year, and the 1,296th book ever since I started counting way back in 2014.
Below is my video review of Book #45, Crypto Confidential, by Nat Eliason, as well as Dude, Where's My Car-tharsis?, by Phil Stark (the screenwriter of the Ashton Kutcher movie, Dude, Where's My Car?).
I also bought a bunch of new books recently, and so I'll tell you what I picked up, as well as offer a few bonus book recommendations at the end of the video.
Weāve also got that book giveaway coming up, and if youāre subscribed to this newsletter, youāre already entered and thereās nothing else you need to do.
Twelve (12) winners will receive an audiobook version of Youāre Too Good to Feel This Bad, by Nate Dallas, whoās generously donated them for the giveaway. Thanks, Nate!
And now just one more thing before we get into the five main books (and book summaries) I have for you tonightā¦
The next book breakdown Iām working on right now is for a book called Success is a Choice, by John C. Maxwell, a leadership expert whoās made a tremendous impact on my life and thinking ever since I started reading his books 10+ years ago.
Iāll be publishing the breakdown on Wednesday night, and once I do, youāll be hearing about it first!
And now, here are my five main recommendations for tonight! They areā¦
I donāt want to keep you here all day (Iāve got reading to do), so letās hit the books!
āYour psyche has to be rewarded for paying a price. You program your psyche by using a reward to reinforce your dream. When you decide on the award in advance of achieving your dream, you are programming your mind to believe Iām willing to pay a price because this reward is going to happen. This is a continuous feedback loop that you must integrate into your plan.ā
It turns out that having the right enemies in your life can help launch you straight towards extreme success and significance. This is a book about selecting the ārightā enemies, however, and engaging your emotions in the proper way - channeling those feelings into productive pursuits instead of self-destructive ones.
Patrick Bet-David is a legendary entrepreneur who came to America with basically nothing (his family literally escaped from Iran, crossing a bridge moments before it was destroyed) and inspired millions of others to put real effort into their own personal development, curb their vices, and help build up their communities.
The man also has enemies, which heās used in productive ways, instead of getting stuck in a cycle of anger and retribution that would have scuttled his chances of any meaningful success long before he ever got started.
Choose Your Enemies Wisely explores the link between logic and emotion, and acts as a bridge between the two. Myself, Iām much more logical than emotional. Which is great for business planning, but sometimes I just donāt feel anything when I think about what I have to do each day. I donāt automatically get fired up, which can be just as harmful to oneās dreams as boiling over with emotion, yet having no actual plan.
The book is phenomenal - Iāve read three of his books so far and heās never let me down yet - and itāll teach you how to build a solid business plan, fortify it with logic, amplify it with emotion and feeling, and dominate your competition in business and in life.
"Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn't drag us down; it can lift us up."
Hereās one of my favorite jokes: "I took the road less traveled, and then I had to eat bugs until the park rangers rescued me." (Hold for Laughter)
Jokes aside, it's more or less a universal human experience to look back on the path we never followed and feel a nagging, painful, sometimes sinking, sickening feeling that we've somehow missed our chance, that we've traded our many unlived lives for this one, real life, and that it could have been so much better had we simply acted differently.
Anyone who says that they have no regrets is also usually viewed with suspicion by most people who have taken the time to reflect on their own personal history.
In this book, The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink refers to regret as our most misunderstood emotion and shows how it can potentially be transformed, transmuted into something extraordinarily valuable.
We can reflect on our regret, reorganize it in our minds, reconceptualize it, and then use it to live better with all the time we have left.
While philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche took a different view of regrets, Pink believes that they are a universal and healthy part of being human. He supports his arguments by offering evidence from the largest sampling of American attitudes about regret ever conducted - including his own World Regret Survey - which has collected regrets from more than 15,000 people in 105 countries.
What he found was that the most important, nagging, and painful regrets often fall into one of four categories: foundation, boldness, moral, and connection regrets.
But he also mentions how people tend to overvalue positive emotions and undervalue negative ones.
Everyone wants to feel good, be happy, and avoid pain and discomfort, but ignoring and suppressing our negative feelings and emotions - including regret - cuts us off from a key source of potential growth and self-knowledge.
Importantly, if you know what people regret the most, you also know what they value the most. In terms of the core four regrets, human beings tend to value stability (health, wealth, etc.), with a dash of adventure (taking chances, making bold moves, learning, and growing), doing the right thing (and experiencing hurt when we stray from the moral path), and connecting with others (forming and deepening relationships of all kinds: social, economic, and romantic).
As you can see, however, by valuing such a wide range of important human experiences, we also open ourselves up to profound regret from multitudinous sources. There are so many ways that one single person can go wrong. Against the emotion of regret, it turns out, we never really stood a chance.
But we are not helpless against regret, as Daniel Pink argues in this book. We can enlist this misunderstood, potentially painful emotion in service of living a larger life, gaining redemption, and reclaiming at least a portion of our remaining unlived lives.
āUnfair advantages (just like disadvantages) build one on top of another and have a snowballing effect. They donāt just add together, they often multiply together.
In other words, the more unfair advantages you can stack up in life, and the earlier in life you can develop them, the stronger they will be. As unfair advantages lead to success when leveraged, a positive feedback loop develops which only increases the success further.
Just as with the āmagic of compound interestā which, when started early, leads to massive success over time, similarly unfair advantages and early success lead to stronger unfair advantages, and that success begets more success.ā
Leverage is one of the most important concepts for a person to understand ā not just in business, but in life as a whole.
Leverage is the ability to use what you have to your greatest advantage, to take your unique strengths and opportunities and use them in such a way as to put yourself in the best possible position to win.
Thatās basically what this potential business classic is about, and itās essential reading as far as Iām concerned. Thereās a wealth of knowledge and expert advice in here about startups, entrepreneurship, and the benefits of learning and striving with all youāve got, even if the subject is too huge to be fully covered in a single book.
Now, obviously the subject matter is controversial and there are excellent points to be made about fairness, leveling the playing field, and all of that. The authors would agree.
But their nuanced, genuinely helpful and understanding approach is going to be insanely valuable for anyone who either has their own business or is thinking of starting one, whether they want to build it up into some giant, international company, or they just want to never worry about money ever again.
Unfair advantages come in many forms, as they explain in Part II of this book. They even put forth their āMILESā framework to explain many of them, which consists of Money, Intelligence and Insight, Location and Luck, Education and Expertise, and Status.
They also touch on a few others, like time (a huge one, in my opinion, and one that I would have loved to read a deeper investigation into), genetics ā even the love that people receive as a child. All of these and more come together to form You, and underneath it all is your Mindset, which supports the total MILES framework.
The bottom line is that no one, anywhere, ever in the history of the universe, will have your unique combination of interests and skills, advantages and disadvantages, experiences and worldview.
Your situation is completely and totally unique, and even if you think you want someone elseās life, most of that other personās real life is forever hidden from you. If you knew their full story, you might not even want their life. Itās a total package, and you have to do the best you can with what youāve been given.
This book is an excellent manual about how to do that, and yes, reading is a massive competitive advantage as well. The ability to read, to learn from the best books and the wisest people who have ever lived? Even the inclination and the desire to pick up these great books in the first place?
Youād better believe that those are unfair advantages as well.
āAt the core of his work lies this notion that we possess greater powers than we realize, and that our apparent limitations are due to a peculiar form of laziness ā a laziness that has become so habitual that it has developed into a mechanism.ā
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was one of the most charismatic, enigmatic, powerfully self-possessed mystical teachers of the 20th century, and this book is a short introduction to his life and work.
Gurdjieff taught that most humans exist in a state of "waking sleep," where they remain unaware of their infinite potential and ultimate value as human beings.
His "System" (which he never claimed was the system, but simply a system, albeit a very effective one) was also known as "The Work," tending to mean "work on oneself."
The Work was Gurdjieff's method of achieving higher consciousness and "keeping the mind awake." As such, his life and work can be thought of as the "war against sleep," i.e. sleepwalking through life and remaining unfulfilled, apathetic, and miserable.
The present book was written by Colin Wilson, one of the most important philosophers of the late-20th century, and he tells the fascinating story of Gurdjieff's arrival from seemingly nowhere to found an influential school of personal development and to show human beings all over the world that they were habitually living as inferior to their full selves.
If this all sounds rather abstract, as Gurdjieff's philosophy plays out in real life it is extremely practical, and the opportunities to "wake up" are always available to everyone at all times.
Colin Wilson believed that most human beings are like great big and powerful jet airplanes attempting to fly on just one engine. That is, we possess vast lakes of "vital reserves," or extra energies that we habitually fail to call upon.
So if you feel as though there is something missing from your life, that the world is more gray and bleak than it could be or should be, then you're beginning to wake up.
āIf your conscious brain is a lot more limited than you realized, your nonconscious brain is vastly more powerful than you have ever imagined."
There are valid criticisms to be leveled against this book, but I was sufficiently impressed with the flashes of brilliance I found to recommend it here. It's a great book, extraordinarily helpful, and it could benefit you enormously, whether you own a business or not.
The two authors, John Assaraf and Murray Smith, are incredibly accomplished businesspeople with deep domain experience in the areas of business and personal development, and they share dozens of fantastic insights about the true power of the human mind, how to live up to your inherent potential, how to spot profitable business opportunities and capitalize on them, and more.
You can probably take the "quantum physics" stuff with a grain of salt, because that's not John Assaraf's area of expertise. His area of expertise is in helping people rewire their brains for extreme success and building the belief systems and processes that allow normal, everyday people to build extraordinary lives.
Together, the two authors tackle the beliefs, habits, thoughts, and actions that they used personally to build eighteen multimillion-dollar companies, and frankly, anyone who's done that must know a thing or two that most people don't.
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.
To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.
āClick here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).
OK, thatās it for nowā¦
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
And if youād 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 - weād 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 timeā¦happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:
Work with me personally to scale your business past $5K per month and experience the intoxicating freedom of finally being in control of both your time and your income. High-performers only.
Become a Premium Member of The Reading Life and enjoy unlimited access to 150+ Premium Book Breakdowns, my complete notes from 1,250+ books, exclusive discounts, monthly donations made on your behalf to an incredible literacy charity, and more!
Join The Competitive Advantage, my private business mastermind for creators looking to add at least $1,000/month to their revenue and save at least 20+ hours of productive time each and every week.
Reply