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Discipline is Destiny and Attitude is Your Superpower
Matt Karamazov
April 30, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
Whoa, the newsletter’s got a new look! What do you think?
I made it a LOT shorter - and much more skimmable - so you can go through all the different sections and dive into what interests you, instead of having to scroll past huge blocks of text.
There are also just 11 spots remaining inside my private business mastermind, The Competitive Advantage.
We just had our first live call last week, and I’ve got a bunch of guests lined up to give free workshops for our members over the next few months.
Plenty more benefits and rewards for being a Member too, and I lay them all out right here.
But in today’s issue, we’ve got…
🏅 Today’s Sponsor: The Competitive Advantage
🎥 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: Attitude is Your Superpower
📜 Book Notes From the Archives
🧠 Learn This Concept: Competitive Greatness
📚 Book Breakdown: Discipline is Destiny
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!
Today’s edition of The Reading Life is brought to you by The Competitive Advantage, a like-minded community of creators and entrepreneurs deeply committed to extreme personal, professional, and financial growth.
Inside my private coaching community I’ll not only help you to achieve your yearly goals in 6 months or less, I’ll also buy you a book of your choice every single month. Join us here.
📚 My friend Jon Brooks is one of the leading voices of modern Stoicism; he’s also a podcaster and meditation teacher who writes a practical philosophy newsletter that goes out to 6,500+ wisdom seekers each week.
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📚 After reading more than 1,277 books in the last 10 years, these 5 will increase your intelligence.
📚 April goals update (I have a lot of work to do!)
“It’s not hours in the day you lack, it’s a vision for your life that makes time irrelevant.”
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I’ve been digging into this book these past few days and I’ve been extremely impressed with it!
From what I’ve read so far, there’s wisdom and power on every page.
It’s quite short too, with easily digestible chapters and actionable advice, so you could either rip through it in a single day, or read bits and pieces of it every day over the span of a month.
That way, you’re constantly reinforcing these ideas of positivity and power and keeping them front and center in your mind.
Either way, read this book if you want to increase your confidence, resilience, and adaptability, and if you want to develop both a growth mindset and a problem-solving mindset at the same time.
Buy the Book on Amazon: Attitude is Your Superpower, by Eduardo Clemente
📚 Nine-Figure Mindset, by Brandon Dawson (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 Rigging the Game, by Dan Nicholson (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 Make More Money, by Brian Tracy (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 Hyperfocus, by Chris Bailey (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 Rise of the Reader, by Nick Hutchison (Complete Notes + Summary)
📚 My Summaries and Notes from 1,250+ Books (Patreon)
“Competitive Greatness includes a love for the hard battle and teaching those under your supervision the same.
It is the competition itself - a worthy opponent - that gives you and your organization the opportunity to find out how good you are, to reach deep inside and perform at your best when it counts.
This is Competitive Greatness. In my book, the score doesn't always reveal whether you achieve it."
Brief Summary: Everything that most people believe about self-discipline is wrong. In this book, through inspiring stories and using fundamental truths and hard-won insights, Ryan Holiday illustrates the true power of self-discipline to shape our destinies.
Key Idea #1: Discipline Equals Freedom
“At the core of this idea of self-mastery is an instinctive reaction against anything that masters us. Who can be free when they have lost, as one addiction specialist put it, ‘the freedom to abstain?’”
Key Idea #2: Consistency is a Superpower
“Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.”
Key Idea #3: What If You Actually Did It?
“How much progress could you make if you made just a little each day over the course of an entire life? What might this journey look like, where might it lead, if each bit of progress you made presented both the opportunity and the obligation to make a little more progress, and you seized those opportunities, you lived up to those obligations, each and every time?”
Action Step #1: Start Showing Up
You don't have to write a mega-successful screenplay your first time out, but you do have to sit down at the typewriter (I guess nobody uses typewriters anymore, but you get the idea). You don't have to set out to become Mr. Olympia, but you do have to lace up your running shoes.
Show up when you say you're going to be there, and follow through on what you said you wanted to do in the first place. But most importantly, show up for yourself, and remind yourself through your actions that this is important to you, and that you're the kind of person who shows up and takes action.
Action Step #2: Practice Going Without
Human beings can survive 30 days without food; you don't need to eat just because you’re hungry. But it's about more than that. It's about freeing yourself from dependency, and quitting while you actually can.
So, for this to work, pick one thing at a time that you absolutely love more than anything in the world, and practice going without it for just one month. See how you feel. Whether it's coffee, video games, cigarettes, or something else, deprive yourself of it temporarily so you can give yourself the freedom to abstain.
Action Step #3: Do the Hard Thing Instead
Instead of putting off the most difficult tasks and activities in your day, do them first. And instead of doing the easiest possible version of that, do it the hard way.
Not the inefficient way - just the same activity at a higher difficulty level. Increase the speed of the treadmill by 2.0. Instead of putting off that uncomfortable conversation, tell the other person how what they did made you feel. Read the philosophy book instead of the romance novel.
Full Breakdown: Discipline is Destiny, by Ryan Holiday (48-Minute Read)
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OK, that’s it for now…
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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