YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

It’s FINALLY done. At long last! I must have spent 40+ hours putting this breakdown together, but it’s absolutely one of my top business book recommendations, and you’ll enter a new tax bracket if you put these strategies to work for you.

My full breakdown of the No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules can be read for free here, and in this (long, very long, oh so long email) you’ll get a preview of some of the Key Ideas, Action Steps, etc.

There are now 4,700+ people subscribed to this newsletter(!), and I know that not every one of you reads business books, so I’ll offer a few additional, non-business-related books you might like too before we get started!

📚 Stronger Than Yesterday, by Michael Matthews - 169 insights for transforming your body, mind, and motivation, from one of the world’s top fitness experts (this is the second book of his I’ve read, and at this point I’ll read basically anything he puts out!)

📚 Diary of a Gym Addict, by Tom Moss - I’ve only just started reading this one, but it’s great! Tom’s a natural bodybuilder, and extraordinarily down-to-earth, so you won’t find any unrealistic fitness tips or hype in this book. Just real, science-based stuff that works. Very high opinion of this one so far.

📚 Better & Better, by Bob Stiller - Severely underrated business/leadership book by the man who led Keurig Green Mountain to a $1B valuation while making a massive positive difference in the world at the same time.

📚 Retirement Money Secrets, by Steve Selengut - This is the book that got me excited about investing again, and the author had $110,000,000 in assets under management (AUM) at the time he sold his company. This book contains all his wealth-building secrets from his 40+ year investing career.

📚 The Power of a Positive Mindset, by Jason Wolbers - A wonderful daily reader written by a good friend of mine and one of the most positive, supportive people I’ve met so far on Bookstagram.

And now…Dan Kennedy!

This is a very, very long email, but like I said the full breakdown is here, and you can read that online for free.

Now let’s shed some limiting beliefs, ditch a whole bunch of horrible advice you may have picked up from unsuccessful people, and start making money hand over fist!

Let’s read the…

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This Book is For:

*Extremely ambitious entrepreneurs who always want to go faster faster faster, and who want to learn how to focus all of that excess energy into the high-leverage activities that will help them accomplish their goals sooner.

*Business owners and leaders at all levels in the corporate hierarchy who want to learn the open secrets and best practices of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country, including mindsets, strategies, and tactics they can use to wield greater influence and make a larger impact within their organizations.

*Anyone who is perpetually dissatisfied with the "culturally approved" pathways to success, and who harbors secret suspicions that there's a better, more exciting, and more profitable path forward that most of the people around them either can't or don't want to see.

*Creative thinkers and visionaries who are willing to work harder and longer than most people, but who want to be steered toward the activities and inputs that are going to make the biggest difference, and who don't want to waste time traveling the "slow lane" to success (or be held back by the advice and thinking of people who will never be successful at any speed).

Summary:

Most of the advice you're likely to receive out there - regardless of whether it's well-meaning or malicious in intent - is going to come from unsuccessful people who do not have what you want in life. But ask yourself: if you don't want to live like them, why are you listening to them?!

In this book, legendary marketer and multimillionaire-maker Dan S. Kennedy inspires you to seize control of the very last of your human freedoms - the freedom to choose your own way and walk your own path. He shows you why you should follow the law but not the rules, and how you can claim the kind of rewards - financial, emotional, and otherwise - usually reserved for the top 1% of our society.

The truth is that each of us possesses a dizzying amount of personal freedom, but our awareness of that tremendous power has been sucked out of us by a society that doesn't want any of its semi-depressed, psychologically-stunted worker ants to escape and realize they could actually ask for more out of life.

As just one example of many I could give, here's what society tells you at every step of your journey through life:

Get Married (Sink $20K Deeper Into Debt)
Buy a New Car (Sink $50K Deeper Into Debt)
*Go to College (Sink $100K Deeper Into Debt)
*Buy a House (Sink $500K Deeper Into Debt)

Then Society Says: "Congratulations!!!"

Suddenly, you're saddled with $670,000 of debt or more, forced to slave away at a job you (probably) hate for 40+ years, fed scraps tossed from the plates of your employers bringing home 10X more than you, toiling in obscurity and insecurity for decades of the most precious, vital years of your life...

And what's more is that this obsequiousness is met with shining approval and words of encouragement and praise from masses of desperately unhealthy and unhappy people who are being forced into the very same trap as you are.

For what it's worth, I will admit that it's possible to be happy and healthy while doing all of the above: getting a "good" job, getting married, buying a house, etc. Maybe you like what you do, and you are actually staying on top of your health and fitness while working a corporate job that adequately pays for your lifestyle. Too many people in the entrepreneurship space ruthlessly rip on 9-5s without ever considering that for a meaningful number of people, there's nothing "wrong" with that life at all! It can work for some people.

So no, I'm not here to say that everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, or a "laptop millionaire" or anything like that. But if you do want more out of life, it's available to you, and Dan Kennedy's books will show you how to get there.

Speaking for myself, I'm not really a rule-follower by nature, so this book naturally spoke to me and my propensity to search for a better, more efficient, more profitable way of doing business and realizing my entrepreneurial vision. Exactly as the title says, it's an unconventional guide to success that flies in the face of the shamefully bad advice out there about how to succeed in business and in life.

No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules dismantles ideas like these and others that hold too many good people back from achieving astronomical levels of personal and financial success:

*Positive Thinking is the Answer to All Your Problems

*You Need a College Education to Be Successful in Life

*You Should Be Humble and Non-Threatening at All Times

*You Need to Have Brilliant, All-Original Ideas to Get Rich

*It Takes Money to Make Money in This World

*Some People Were Born to Be Successful and You Weren't

*All You Have to Do is Just Never Give Up

Many of these statements are half-truths at best, applicable in some situations and not others, and all of them have a deeper level of nuance to them that most people just don't understand (or are never taught).

For example: positive thinking is great! But it's not the answer to everything, and sometimes, reality-based, neutral thinking is what's called for.

You don't need a college education to be successful, but it's right for some people; and necessary for certain careers and life paths but ruinous for other people.

Sometimes you do have to be more aggressive and assertive - to take up more space in this world - and as Zig Ziglar said, timid salespeople have skinny kids.

You also don't need original ideas - the massive money is made in the execution of ideas, not just having them. The graveyard is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world because of the value of the ideas that are buried there.

Having money can definitely help you make more money, but it can also sink your wealth-creation efforts in surprising, non-obvious ways.

Many successful do have natural talents and abilities, but there's a whole other layer to their lives and stories that most people don't see. So natural ability and unfair advantages aren't the whole answer either.

And sometimes, giving up is the right answer! Sometimes you should stop trying to succeed in one area so you can free up time, energy, and other resources and put them into something else that will work. All these ideas and more are explored in this book, and knowing these things could save you decades of wasted and unnecessary pain and frustration.

Again, most of the advice you're going to hear out there in the world will come from people who will never be successful and will never get what they want out of life. That may sound harsh, but it's true. Real success - and the accompanying massive paydays - are reserved for those daring enough to break free from convention and play by their own rules. I've done it, Dan's done it, and now he shows you how to do it here in this book. He'll show you how to crush convention, command respect, and conquer your rivals on your road to success.

Your best thinking of yesterday is simply the old baggage you're carrying around today, and a lot of this outdated, antiquated, and sometimes downright harmful advice needs to be swept aside if you're ever going to the ascend to the heights you're truly capable of reaching.

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 unseen and making your own way in. Dan Kennedy’s book will help you find the third doors that exist all around us, as well as show you how to make your own. Now, all you need to do is find or develop the courage to walk through them.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: "The Rules" are Barely Even "Suggestions"

Question everything in business, just as in life. One of the many, many reasons to read books like those of Jiddu Krishnamurti (and Dan Kennedy, of course) is that they get you to question all your assumptions about how the world is "supposed to" work, what's actually going on here, and what the rules are.

Because in a lot of cases (a surprising number), the rules are just made up.

Here's the real crazy part: the rules weren't put in place by anyone smarter than you! They just came before you, became habits and patterns of thinking for the people and wider society that raised you, and so you just kinda went along with them. You were like one of those baby elephants tied up with a string when you were too small to resist, and now that you've grown up, you're still being held in place by that little tiny string, even though you're a massive, full-grown elephant now that could easily rip it out of the ground if you believed you could. Sorry for calling you an elephant, but you know what I mean!

"The Rules" are just suggestions made up by someone else, and although many of them absolutely do have merit, you must question all of them. Especially the ones that seem too self-evidently true to be false.

They may not be true any more, if they ever were, and in business (again, just like in life), you need to be asking why that's the rule. What's it there for? What's its purpose and who proposed it? And most importantly, who does the rule benefit?

Incentives rule the world, and the status quo exists to serve the purposes of the people who built the structure. Rules often serve the people who made them up, and not you. So push back against them. Question them. Challenge them, and see if they're there for a good reason, or if they're just dust and smoke to serve the interests of the already powerful.

#2: "The Rushing Sickness"

There's another amazing book that I highly recommend, The Hypomanic Edge, by John D. Gartner, that goes into this as well.

The prefix "hypo" comes from the Greek word meaning "under" or "below," and in the term hypomania, it indicates a state that is less intense or below full-blown mania. Hypomania therefore refers to a milder form of mania, characterized by elevated mood, increased activity, or energy levels, but without the extreme behaviors or impaired judgment typically seen in full mania.

The author's argument is that any immigrant population is more likely to be seeded with people who could be characterized as hypomanic, given the energy, drive, motivation, and willingness to take risks necessary to pick up everything, brave unforeseen and unimaginable dangers, and attempt to settle an entirely new country. Incidentally, since America is a nation of immigrants, Gartner hypothesized that many of the people who built that country likely suffered from hypomania, and he went on to study the lives of people like Christopher Columbus, Alexander Hamilton and others to prove this was the case.

Okay, so what does this have to do with business and making money? Well, money loves speed, and the hypomanic, afflicted with the "rushing sickness," is highly motivated to get after it. Hypomanics move move move - they take bold, aggressive action, and they seize the initiative wherever and whenever possible.

This is the approach that most successful businesspeople take as well, regardless of whether or not they'd meet the medical criteria for hypomania per se. You see this in the Napoleon biography as well. General Bonaparte couldn't sit still! He traveled hundreds and hundreds of thousands of miles over the course of his life, wrote tens of thousands of letters, proclamations, commands, and orders, and through his sheer relentlessness brought the entire continent of Europe to its knees.

You don't have to conquer a continent or found a country - you don't "have to" do anything - but in business it literally pays to move fast. It pays to move forward relentlessly, and to leave your competition bewildered and delirious in the dust.

#3: "Supposed To" is For Other People

To get what most people will never get, you have to do things they won't, can't, and refuse to do. You have to become someone they will never become, and you have to move through the world differently. "Supposed to" stopped applying to you the very minute you decide to become an entrepreneur.

Ignore the advice of anyone who doesn't have what you want, too, by the way. You're going to have lots of people tell you that something you're doing "isn't how it's done," or some variation of that refrain. Don't listen. Sure, take input and advice from others. Seek out wisdom and knowledge. Pursue excellence and never-ending improvement. Always! And read! Learn! Constantly! But at the end of the day, you have to return to yourself and decide what YOU think! What's right for YOU!

At this point, it's safe to assume that you won't go far wrong if you'll just do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. They are quite literally The Herd, and most people do not have what you want. Think differently! Act differently! Live differently! Be different!

Question everything, even and especially what I say and write. Always think for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Of course, it's a little bit trickier because sometimes the herd is actually right! This is an idea worth exploring. For example, do you want to buy a house?

Plenty of people would absolutely love to own their own home, and they structure their lives and make decisions around the pursuit of that goal, at least unconsciously. But whose idea was it that the be-all, end-all of human existence is to own a house? Do you actually want that? Some people do, and that's perfectly fine! That could very well be the right answer for them, and I'll never try to convince them to abandon their own ideas of what they want for themselves. But at the end of the day, you have to realize that most of the people who preach on and on about "the dream of home ownership" are actually realtors.

Go to college if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Get married if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Buy a car if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). Buy a house if you want (and go into debt to pay for it). But don't do it because you're supposed to. You're an entrepreneur. A critical thinker and a massive doer. Your days as an unthinking member of The Herd are now over.

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

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Action Steps:

#1: Observe the Masses

Look around you. Most people simply aren't thriving. A quick glance at the mass of people within your society and you'll see that they're in worse shape than they want to be (physically, financially, mentally), they're less happy than they want to be; they have fewer friends than they want to have; more problems, more worries, more emergencies and distractions.

They are miserable, complaining, excuse-making, pessimistic shells of their true selves, and you will become like them if you don't make a sincere, concerted effort to avoid a similar fate. And it is an avoidable fate, by the way. You're not destined to be like them. You can change. You can change right now.

Simply observe what you don't want - the characteristics and circumstances you don't wish to reflect the conditions of your life - and find models for what you do want. Find the people who are thriving, and determine to be more like them in any and every way that's important to you.

Now's the time and place to point out that you and I are not somehow "better" than those unfortunate people we observed in the first paragraph here. We are no better and no worse. We and they simply are.

Every single human being on this planet possesses infinite worth, dignity, and human value simply by virtue of the fact that they are human. We are more like them than we are different. But that doesn't mean we have to live like them!

So you really do have to keep two (seemingly) conflicting thoughts in your head at the exact same time: most people don't have the life you want, and if you allow yourself to slip into apathy and despair like they have, you will be desperately unhappy for the rest of your life. And also, you are no "better" than they are.

You're just choosing to make different, more life-affirming choices, and by so doing, opportunities will become available to you to achieve success and fulfillment that the great masses of humanity would never be able to dream of in their common hours.

#2: Stack the Probabilities in Your Favor

Dan Kennedy's book will help bring to light the many ways that we get in our own way, and it'll help you realize that the way "things are done" isn't necessarily the way that you need to do them. In fact, "business as usual" is usually synonymous with stagnation, if not downright poverty.

Again, most people are poorer than they want to be, and they've reached that sorry state because they've faithfully lapped up advice and opinions from people who've never even achieved success in the first place.

Instead, what you need to do is start finding things that work, and then double down on those things. Find your native advantages, develop others, and secure assistance from other people and add that weight to your side of the scale too. Basically, what you want to do is stack up every single advantage you can, and take ruthless advantage of those advantages until they stop working.

You start stacking the probabilities in your favor by eliminating negative, fruitless behaviors, and adopting as many positive, success-oriented, money-getting behaviors as you possibly can. You embark on a sincere search for the best way to win, the highest-leverage actions you can take to become successful, and then you relentlessly hammer away at those things until you do win.

Perhaps most importantly, you can't stop doing things once they start working, either! If a particular traffic channel, say, YouTube, has been insanely profitable for you, don't all of a sudden turn around and coast on YouTube while starting at zero with Facebook ads or partnerships. YouTube was working! You were doing great! You were winning! Why would you just throw that away and chase after the next shiny object? It makes zero sense!

Once something starts working, you double down on it. You get damn good at it, and you leverage it for all it's worth. If your YouTube channel is starting to gain traction, you can stack the probabilities in your favor by hiring advanced video editors, paying top-notch designers to create epic thumbnails, maybe employ a scriptwriter to take your message to the next level...you have plenty of ways forward there. Take acting classes! Anything you can do to improve.

After every little bit of success you experience, you also have to ask yourself, Why did that work? What did we do right? What should we keep doing? Then do more of that! More of what's already working! This is the way.

There's virtually no limit to the advantages you can give yourself and the ways in which you can level up. Whether that's investing in books, courses, and mentors for yourself, expanding your team, increasing your ad spend, etc. Every single thing you can do will give you an advantage over your competition.

A final, enlightening question you can ask yourself is this: If you had to live your life over again 1,000 times, and could only do the same things you're doing now, would you be happy and successful in at least 999 of them?

#3: Trigger "THE PHENOMENON"

THE PHENOMENON is Dan's word for the massive, meteoric, mysterious momentum that he's been able to ride at several different points during his career. THE PHENOMENON isn't really something you can "control" per se, but it's very hard to stop once it starts happening. It's the golden wave that you want to catch and hold onto for dear life.

As it happens, I'm living through this period now, at the time of this writing. I'm now experiencing THE PHENOMENON in my own life, and it's manifesting as a seemingly never-ending stream of epic opportunities and chances for profit and growth.

After going through something of a "dark night of the soul" last year, everything's finally coming together, and my one task right now is to ride this current momentum right to the finish line.

The point is that you can't always control when THE PHENOMENON shows up, but you always have to be ready for it, and there are also things you can do to make it more likely that it does show. Stacking the probabilities in your favor is one of those things, for sure. Create the conditions for THE PHENOMENON to appear and begin acting in your life, and you make it more likely to appear.

Part of this means capturing and relentlessly executing on every single opportunity that comes your way, until your calendar is completely full and you can't possibly expend one additional muscle fiber in service of creating your success.

If you have a prospect that says "Maybe call me back next month," you damn well call them back on the first of the month. If you got decent results with your latest Google Ads campaign and you have a spare $100 kicking around, invest it into running more Google Ads to grow your business.

You can handle posting 3 times per day on Instagram instead of just 2? An extra YouTube video on Wednesday instead of just Monday and Friday? You damn well do it. Everything you possibly can. Whatever it takes. Always. All the time. Relentlessly. Until you make it happen. Until you reach escape velocity.

In celestial mechanics, escape velocity or escape speed is the minimum speed needed for an object to escape from contact with or orbit of a primary body - in the case of a rocket, this would mean the earth. It's the momentum required to take off, smash through the gravitational resistance, and maintain propulsion toward the objective. 

THE PHENOMENON shows up when you reach escape velocity in your work. It graces your life when you've done everything possible to set yourself up for victory. And if you want to make your entrepreneurial vision a reality, you'd better do whatever it takes to be there when that rocket ship takes off.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

This Book on Amazon:

No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, by Dan S. Kennedy

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More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

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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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