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Five Books on Achieving Exponential Growth, Navigating Modern Life Using Eastern Wisdom, Lobsters, and More!
Matt Karamazov
September 02, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 21 minutes
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Good evening! I’m back with five great new books!
The only thing I’ll mention quickly is that I’m recording a podcast interview tomorrow with Steve Selengut, author of Retirement Money Secrets.
It’ll take me a few weeks to edit and publish the episode, but I’m really looking forward to it, and his book is excellent.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get notified when the interview goes live.
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
🧠Who I’m Learning From Right Now
đź“ś The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 Their Secret to Success is NOT What You Think
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
âś… 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!
Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes: A classic novel about chivalry and madness, beloved for more than 400 years, that I’ve been reading for months because I’m enjoying it too much to finish it.
Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson: A fantastic biography of Elon Musk that reads more like a novel than the true story of some dude’s actual life. Wild!
Plagued by Fire, by Paul Hendrickson: Another excellent biography, this time of Frank Lloyd Wright, the brilliant architect and inspiration for the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead.
For Those Who Seek Unbiased News.
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Matt Stone and Trey Parker: Excellent writing advice from the creators of South Park.
Jerry Seinfeld: How to write an iconic joke.
William Brown: How he earns about $261,901 per month profit in his business.
“The ultimate morning routine is to be able to wake up whenever you want.”
Their Secret to Success is NOT What You Think: Everyone you look up to in business right now has done this one thing better than the rest of their competition, and it’s something anyone can do.
If you do what I recommend in this video (what I’ve done myself, and what every other successful businessperson has done), you’ll become one dangerous entrepreneur. [Watch Time: 4:11]
If you got value out of this short video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
What This 9,000,000-Copy Bestselling Novel Taught Me About the Greatness of Humanity: Whether it’s greatness or awfulness, you’ll find whatever you’re looking for.
I Finished 10 GREAT Books Last Month, Bringing My Yearly Total Up to 60 So Far: Plenty of fantastic business books here, but I regret not reading anything from this other genre…
The Human Mind is Like a Jet Airplane Flying on Just One Engine: What could you accomplish if you turned on ALL the engines?
Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell: After twenty-five years, Gladwell’s returning to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time examining their dark side. Expected: Oct 1, 2024
The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom: This is one of my most-anticipated reads, and it’s about the 5 types of wealth: Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth. Expected: Feb 4, 2025
What’s Your Dream?, by Simon Squibb: Simon started his first business while homeless at 16. He later sold it for more money than he’ll ever need, then built up a massive social media audience by giving free help to aspiring entrepreneurs and asking them, “What’s your dream?” Expected: Jan 16, 2025
Below are my complete notes, summaries, and breakdowns of 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!
“We who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.”
This is one of my favorite collections of essays by David Foster Wallace, author of the insanely good (and insanely difficult) Infinite Jest.
Consider the Lobster is tough to pin down, but you could think of it like the smartest man you’ve ever met, tackling subjects as complicated and diverse as political correctness, abortion, language, racism, Kafka’s novels, and yes, lobsters, contorting his mind into uncomfortable shapes and pursuing the truth to its last hiding place, exhausting all logical and emotional possibilities, until he just starts making so much…sense that when you finally raise your head from your book, you realize that yes, the world is like that!
The essays are also hilarious, by the way, and deeply thought-out…constructed in a way that’s just incredible. Wallace was absolutely one of my favorite writers and I love how he could write essays on things I didn’t think I cared about - lobster festivals, dictionaries, John McCain’s 2000 presidential race - and help me discover that I actually do.
“Going 10x means you’re living based on the most intrinsic and exciting future you can imagine. That 10x future becomes your filter for everything you do, and most of your current life can’t make it through that 10x filter.”
Almost everything you're doing now is a distraction preventing you from making a 10X leap - in revenue, leadership ability, significance, and more. Exponential transformations are actually easier than these small little 2X improvements, and Dr. Benjamin Hardy will prove it to you here in this book.
Total transformations are never linear, and they are rarely obvious. It requires something completely different than what came before, a radical change in behavior and thinking, and if you're not consciously aiming for these types of 10X transformations, you'll never experience them.
One of the major themes of the book is that, in aiming for these kinds of 10X transformations, you'll have to let go of about 80 percent of what you're doing now. What got you here won't get you there, and as you keep ascending higher and higher in developing your own “Unique Ability,” you'll have to keep zoning in on the 20% that will get you to that next level.
"But whilst the thing we long for is lacking, that seems good above all else. Thereafter, when we've touched it, something else we long for."
On the Nature of Things is a poem by the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, written in 50 B.C. Because it was written so long ago, modern audiences may have some difficulty deciphering it, but it’s completely and totally worth it, for all sorts of reasons.
Lucretius noticed so many things that we’ve since explained through modern science but that completely mystified him while he was alive. What’s especially fascinating about the book, though, is how intensely and devotedly he’s committed to finding out.
Sure, he gets lots of things wrong: he thought that images of things were sent out from bodies, and that’s why we can see reflections in mirrors and other surfaces; he thought the sun was a lot closer than it actually is; he thought that every sound was corporeal because they acted upon the senses. Clearly he didn’t know about sound waves - what a dummy! (Just kidding).
Through all this, like I mentioned, there’s his intense desire to know, to figure out the universe and understand what’s really going on.
He didn’t know why the stars move (although he recognizes that light travels faster than sound), but he was still curious, and he desperately wanted to find out. He never heard about evolution or the unconscious, but he hints at those things as well, the latter when he wonders why images appear in the mind and at the behest of whom.
Lucretius was a deist who didn’t believe that “the gods” need us or get involved in our affairs, but that didn’t preclude a deep reverence for the universe and its mysteries, feelings and emotions that survived his death and can be experienced by reading his wonderful book.
“Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.”
In this business classic, one of the biggest breakout entrepreneurial success stories of the modern era lays out his personal playbook for how you can out-think, out-plan, and out-execute your competition in the fight they never even saw coming.
Your Next Fives Moves is a high-level, high-impact playbook for how you can maximize your effectiveness in five areas: gaining self-knowledge, mastering the ability to reason, developing and building the right team, learning strategy to scale, and deploying power plays that will help you negotiate more effectively and take down some of the biggest competitors in your industry.
This is how you separate yourself. This is how you enter the highest echelons of business and show the world that you deserve to be there.
“The purpose of life is simply to be alive. It is so plain, and so simple, and so obvious. Yet everyone rushes around in a great panic, as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
Alan Watts introduced millions of Western readers to Eastern religion and philosophy, and personally, I’m well on my way to reading every single book he’s ever written. All of them have made my life demonstrably better in some way, and I’ve just kept coming back to him over and over.
This book is a compilation of a few of his more controversial lectures, delivered at various American universities throughout the 1960s. Western culture wasn’t “the enemy,” except perhaps to the good life. Americans were “missing the point” of being alive, and their way of life alienated them from reality by making them feel rushed and harried, inadequate and insecure.
In his own way, he showed audiences why and how they became sick - why they never felt they were “enough” - and what to do about it. Or, not do about it, as the case may be. Because maybe we’re not actually sick at all? Maybe there’s nothing wrong with us at all? Maybe it’s our society that’s sick, and to be well-adjusted to it is no measure of good health in the first place.
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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
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