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Five Books to Feed Your Mind
Matt Karamazov
July 11, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes
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To be alive today, AND to be a reader? We’re all so incredibly blessed!
My five main book recommendations today have all been out for a while, but there are also a bunch of awesome new releases I want to (briefly) tell you about first.
My friend Nat Eliason just came out with Crypto Confidential and I have been seeing it everywhere I look on Twitter, Instagram, etc. And for good reason!
It’s just…compulsively readable, and I’ve loved reading about the crypto casino/circus and Nat’s adventures in winning and losing millions of dollars there. Fantastic book.
My other friend Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino also just came out with her book, called The Success Guidebook, and if you’re a fan of Jack Canfield and other similar authors, you’ll be interested in reading about her “Ten factors of success.”
World-class behaviors and results aren’t a mystery any more, thanks to authors like her and Jack. Her book will help you identify and implement them.
Then finally (not finally, I mean there are tons more new releases but I don’t want to drag this on forever) we’ve got Byron Morrison’s new book, The Effective CEO 2.0, which is coming out on July 25th.
You heard it here first, people!
His previous book, Maybe You Should Give Up, is also VERY well worth reading, and I’ve got something to tell you about that one.
It has to do with my upcoming referral program for this newsletter, and the fact that Byron has generously agreed to give away free copies of Maybe You Should Give Up to anyone who refers 10+ people to The Reading Life!
I’m still putting the finishing touches on the referral program itself, but it’ll definitely be live next week, and MAYBE live before this weekend, although that might be a little bit of a stretch.
There will be some fantastic incentives for sharing this newsletter with friends, though, and I’m also working on extra bonuses that I can give to Premium Members for upgrading as well.
More to come on that!
Two more super quick things before we get into the books.
One, the next book breakdown I’m working on right now is for a book called Success is a Choice, by John C. Maxwell, a leadership expert who’s made a tremendous impact on my life and thinking ever since I started reading his books 10+ years ago.
When the breakdown is ready, I’ll be letting you know about it.
And two, the following book notes have been updated on my Patreon:
So Good They Call You a Fake, by Joshua Lisec
How To: $10M, by William Brown
Acres of Diamonds, by Russell H. Conwell
Attitude is Your Superpower, by Eduardo Clemente
10X Is Easier Than 2X, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
Join here to get my complete book notes and summaries of these 5 books and 1,250+ others for just $1!
And now, here are 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 hit the books!
“Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist, you don't have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves."
Just because you're old doesn't mean that you automatically have much valuable wisdom to share. Some people haven't really lived 10,000 days, they've just lived the same day 10,000 times. Kevin Kelly, however, is an exception, and it turns out that the brilliant and insightful tech innovator gives excellent life advice.
For anyone hearing about Kelly for the first time, he is the co-founder of Wired magazine and a highly-praised futurist and author whose optimistic outlook on the next chapter of human history has inspired a generation to think bigger and to advance confidently into the next stage of human evolution.
It's not controversial to point out that humanity faces tremendous internal and external survival pressure, including some fairly intimidating existential threats that we can no longer ignore if we wish to continue to exist as a species.
But we've all had enough of that pessimistic, misanthropic "life advice" from people who don't even try to come up with any answers to our problems. This much is now clear: if you want to change history and survive long enough to do so, you bring in an optimist.
The life advice presented in this book was originally intended for his young adult children to help them navigate the hazardous future we all find ourselves hurtling towards.
But the very act of writing them down caused him to realize that he had much more to offer than he thought he did when he began, which resulted in him eventually compiling this wonderful collection of 450 wise, practical, and incredibly valuable aphorisms.
The range of subjects they cover is as wide and deep as life itself, and so you'll find here advice about setting ambitious goals, cultivating peace of mind and equanimity, dealing with loss, organizing your life around adventure and spontaneity, dispelling anger and sadness, minimizing regret, and so much more.
“Truth is a thing that is living from moment to moment - to be discovered, not believed in, not quoted, not formulated. But to see that truth, your mind and your heart must be extremely pliable, alert."
Thinking that you can find one Ultimate Truth that's going to be final and complete for all time is like a musician trying to hold down one note forever and ever; like trying to close your fist around a flickering flame; or like trying to stop a sunset and hold it in place until the end of time.
Trying to pin down the truth of human existence is an impossible task, and trying to fossilize that truth with words is always a mistake. Not only that, but no one can lead you to the truth either. Sure, they can suggest ways of approaching the truth, but they can never simply hand you the real thing.
Jiddu Krishnamurti understood this from a very early age when in 1929 he voluntarily dissolved the religious organization that sought to name him the new World Teacher and get him to take the lead of their new movement.
In a famous speech entitled Truth is a Pathless Land, he stated that it's impossible to follow anyone to truth and that you'll never find out the basic truth about the structure of Reality by listening to some leader or guru.
So naturally, Krishnamurti in this book - which is a collection of his public talks about the nature of truth and the various ways in which the mind distorts and obscures it - never claims to have access to some special truth that you or I don't have.
In my own life, Krishnamurti motivated me to question everything I thought I knew (and was told) about the world and the mystery of existence. He made me aware of the inner workings of my own mind and helped me see how truth arises when effort stops, when the mind is perfectly empty, and when there is only direct experience of the present moment.
All this is to say that this book won't teach you anything that's "true." There is no authority "out there" that can lead you to the truth, no "script" that you can follow that will lead you to the answers to the most important questions of life. But that's what makes being alive at all so damn exciting!
Dead, lifeless "truths" are just...boring. Life is always moving and changing, and so is the truth of Reality and Existence. The search for what's true is the wildest adventure in the whole damn universe, and we're all living it right now.
“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.”
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 reigning theory is that this is going to continue to cause big, potentially harmful changes in the economic landscape going forward.
With that background in mind, Nelson D. 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.
Schwartz is an economics reporter for The New York Times, and The Velvet Rope Economy is his sometimes intriguing, sometimes infuriating, but always illuminating investigation into the invisible rift that divides how poor Americans and rich Americans live.
In numerous areas, from health care, schooling, travel, leisure, and more, there is something akin to a velvet rope separating those have-nots and the have-yachts, yielding outrageously skewed, unfair outcomes in a country that claims to offer unlimited freedom and opportunity.
This is a challenging book; not for its difficulty level, style, 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.
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 steadily depreciate and degrade, and the entire fabric of society will be worse off than it was before.
Nelson D. Schwartz plays the part of the lookout on the Titanic which is the ship of American inequality. We have time to veer away from the iceberg we've built with the unfairness of our current system. But the 1st Class passengers need to start talking to the Coach passengers, and the ideas put forth in this book represent an excellent first meeting place.
"I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live."
The chances of a perfect life path being successfully scripted for you by someone else are precisely zero. We exist in a community of others, but individually, we are completely alone and our lives are up to us.
More than that, we have the opportunity - the ability - to curate our own reality every moment, and by definition, no one can do this for us. We think that the meaning of life is "out there" and that we have to find out what it is. When in reality, it is Life that asks us the questions, and how we live is our answer.
In the same way, Paul Millerd doesn't have any answers. There are no hacks or step-by-step formulas in this book, no mandatory reading lists, and no milestones you have to hit in order to live a meaningful life.
Instead, The Pathless Path is about the invisible scripts that shepherd us into prescribed modes of living and being in the world; it's about freedom and creativity; it's about money, meaning, and work; and it's about being fearlessly, unapologetically yourself, in a world that shouts back, "You can't do that!"
The Pathless Path is Paul Millerd's answer to the question of what makes meaningful work and what we might aspire to in our lives. But you and I can never be Paul Millerd. His life is taken. You can only be yourself, and I can only be myself. The pathless path is narrow, wide enough for only one person. You.
“If you were to select a single habit that you would like to have, and then work on that habit for a month, until it became automatic, and then select a second habit, and develop that, in the course of a year you could develop ten to twelve new habits. With twelve new life-enhancing habits, you could transform your life.”
Brian Tracy is a legend in the personal development space, and he’s one of the first authors I read in my early twenties who actually showed me what’s truly possible and how to get there. I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Make More Money is more of a high-level overview of some key concepts in his and other people’s work, and much of it isn’t strictly “new.” But it’s fundamental.
If you wanted to read one short, 70-page book that contained some of the most important things a person could know about becoming a self-made millionaire, this is one you should read. It’s also a great refresher on some of these ideas, which are so important that it really is a great idea to keep coming back to them.
The book is based on his intense personal study of self-made millionaires in all fields and how they became one. Some of the statistics he quotes can be taken with a grain of salt (some of them frankly seem made up), but the basic ideas are solid. Like I said, they’re fundamental.
Tracy covers the business strategies, personal habits and qualities, and mindsets and mental models common among high-achievers everywhere, and these ideas are supremely valuable. You can base your entire professional success and personal wealth on these ideas, and you probably should.
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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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