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Five Books to Feed Your Mind
"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." -Frederick Douglass
Matt Karamazov
April 12, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 36 minutes
📚Hey, good evening!
First off, let's welcome all the new people who joined us since last time!
There are 1,969 of us in total now.
Thank you (yes, you!) for trusting me to bring you the absolute best book recommendations I can each and every week!
As always, these are long emails full of great books and tons of cool surprises.
But I never expect that everyone will be interested in every single thing I publish.
So, feel free to jump around and dive into whatever does interest you!
Today we've got...
An introduction to today's "5 Books"
My personal news, and the best of what I'm reading and sharing right now
Two fantastic online creators you need to know about
A new book alert from an award-winning author whose last book made a massive impression on me
The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom
Why what’s obvious to you might be amazing to others
NEVER apologize for being OBSESSED
Why our ordinary state of consciousness is like trying to view a beautiful museum in the dark
“The Velvet Rope Economy” and the growing split between the “Have-Nots” and the “Have-Yachts”
My top 5 book recommendations this week
A special gift for reading all the way to the end
In one sentence…
How to Read Novels Like a Professor is a crash course in the structure and themes of some of the greatest novels ever written, and how to get the most out of reading them.
A Field Guide to a Happy Life is a short, fast read that is like a modern-day updating of the Stoic classic, The Enchiridion, a book about overcoming adversity and finding happiness in the center of life’s storms.
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre - man that’s a long title - is a sort of “greatest hits” album of some of the most famous and influential Existentialist philosophers who ever stared into the abyss.
Head Strong is a science-y book by bio-hacker Dave Asprey, who has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars optimizing and upgrading himself and reports back to the rest of us with what he’s found.
Religion and the Rebel is another philosophy book by one of my greatest intellectual influences of all time, Colin Wilson, and it’s about becoming more fully alive while living in a society that seemingly breeds only death.
Here in this email are summaries of each book, along with a sample of my best notes, and if you want my complete set of notes on these books, you can find them on my Patreon .
Pro Learning Tip:
Getting a membership to Medium is one of the best investments I've ever made in my continuing education. The quality of the writing on Medium is superb, and some of the smartest, most interesting thinkers publish there regularly.
1) I was boring this week! I really just had my head down and worked, gradually getting ahead on some stuff. I had a good time, but from the outside, I didn’t do much!
I did, however, record what I think is the best YouTube video I’ve made so far, probably because I spent a lot of time working on my scripting, and I also discovered the “cinematic” setting on my camera! Makes a huge difference!
2) I’ve opened up just 5 more spots for personal coaching, where I will help you achieve your yearly goals in the next 3 months.
If you want to accomplish more in the next 90 days than most people will in their entire lives, click here and apply.
If I think I can help you, I will! If not, no worries! We’re still friends, and I support your self-improvement efforts 100%.
3) A few great books that I'm reading right now are Hyperfocus, by Chris Bailey,, Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen , and Life Force, by Tony Robbins .
I'm also listening to Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter, by 50 Cent, on Audible. It’s read by him, and I’m getting a ton out of it. He’s a wicked-smart businessman and a super valuable mentor. I also loved the book he co-wrote with Robert Greene, The 50th Law!
Nowadays, I listen to about 3-4 audiobooks a month, and I always listen to them on Audible. No other audiobook service even compares. You can also get a 30-day free trial right here .
You know I love to support new and old friends of mine who are doing awesome things (or simply amazing people I've stumbled upon around the internet), so here are a few people you should know about:
1) First up is my new friend Virgil Brewster, a $10,000,000 entrepreneur who teaches people how to monetize their minds through courses and online education.
He’s got a newsletter that I’m also subscribed to (and loving) called The Building Block, where every Friday he lays out roadmaps for creators to build their online businesses and claim freedom.
As I always say, to get the results that you want, it pays to associate yourself with people who have actually achieved the result that you want.
So, if you have an online business that’s not generating as much revenue as you want it to, Virgil Brewster’s your man, and The Building Block is where you want to be!
2) The second person I want to introduce you to is another online business owner who I have a lot of faith in, Greg Madder.
We met through our mutual mentor, JK Molina, who introduced me to Greg. He helps people break free from 9-5 slavery by creating a full-time income online, and he’s an example of someone who’s doing online business right.
Going from being alone at 28, depressed, with no meaning or purpose, and with years of failure and family trauma behind him, he’s now, at 33 years old, deeply connected to purpose, has formed incredible friendships, and he’s got a growing business on top of all that.
Follow him on Twitter if that’s the sort of transformation that you’re looking for in your own life! And don’t forget to check out Sovereign-Hustler.com either.
Do you know someone I should know?
I’m always looking to connect with accomplished, inspirational, and good-hearted people who share the same interests that I do…especially books!
So if you have a favorite author, influencer, creator, etc. that you think I might love to meet (and maybe feature here), let me know! You can just hit reply to this email anytime and tell me about them. Thanks!
I’ve featured Matthew Desmond’s previous book, Evicted, at the Stairway to Wisdom, and here’s the one-sentence overview of that incredible book:
In this award-winning nonfiction account of the scourge of homelessness in the USA, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond takes to the field and follows eight families in Milwaukee as they battle the indignities and hardships of being poor in 21st-century America.
Now, he’s got a new book, Poverty, by America, and I have a feeling it’s going to affect me as powerfully as his previous book did.
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.
Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.
“There’s perfection within you, and that perfection is seeking expression within and through you. It is always for expression, expansion, and greater good."
If you want to have something you've never had before, you have to do something you've never done before.
Growth happens in the extremes, near the limits, never from the safety of the sidelines. The trouble is, however, that when we do try to break free of our perceived limitations, when we make a different choice, our brain actively resists this change in an effort to maintain comfort and stability.
Positive change is often uncomfortable, and I've just never found a way to get around that. Anyone who tells you otherwise? Proceed with caution.
Our prior programming keeps us stuck in patterns that don't serve us anymore - in our old paradigms, as Bob Proctor puts it - and his book is all about giving you a fighting chance to shed these limiting beliefs and stimulate real, lasting change.
If only it were that easy.
The truth is that we each face enormous external and internal pressure to remain the same. Pressure in the form of societal expectations, the downward pull of "cultural gravity" and the people we spend time with, the demands of our parents and family members, and even unspoken, unconscious beliefs passed down from generation to generation.
When we want to make a big change in our lives - when we're setting out to do something extraordinary - our habitual, ordinary mental programming will try to subconsciously slow us down.
It's not comfortable to make these kinds of changes, but it's possible, and in order to do that, we each need to constantly and consistently reinforce ourselves with the mental images of what and who we're becoming. We need to gather evidence for our new, desired state, and we have to keep doing that for as long as it takes for our subconscious mental programming to catch up and admit that yes, this is who we are. This is what we deserve.
This is extremely important to understand:
The external conditions of your life will rise and fall in accordance with the level your internal thermostat is set to. It's literally impossible to live life at Level 100 when your thermostat is set to 75. You need to raise your standards and refuse to settle for anything less than a Level 100 Life.
That being said, once you do set your thermostat to, say, Level 85, the mental forces of anxiety, worry, self-loathing, imposter syndrome, etc. will try to drag it back down to 75. Honestly, it takes work - strong, consistent effort - to raise your thermostat back up to 76, and then to 77, and beyond, and it's definitely not easy to do. Most people fail.
That much is obvious. But what I will say is that the effort will always be worth it, and the results of changing your paradigm - raising your standards, setting your thermostat higher and higher - tend to last a long time, perhaps even forever. If you quit and never try again, though, that will last forever too.
"Hit songwriters often admit that their most successful hit song was one they thought was just stupid, even not worth recording. We're clearly bad judges of our own creations. We should just put them out there and let the world decide. Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share?"
This is something that held me back for a long time. It still comes up occasionally: I always assume that everyone already knows what I've just learned.
Over the last 10+ years, I've read more than a thousand books, started two businesses, grown a big online following, etc., etc., and I'm often still surprised when someone expresses shock or amazement after I tell them about something I learned years ago. Has this ever happened to you?
It's far too easy to err in the opposite direction, of course, going around thinking that you know the answer to everything and that nobody will ever have the knowledge base that you have. I think you're going to want to avoid adopting that attitude! But you'd be surprised how common the former situation is!
All of this is to say that there is probably something that you know, or that you've done, or learned, or can do, that is just a regular part of your life, but that would absolutely blow someone else away. Something that's obvious to you, but would be amazing to others. Something that you barely even have to think about, but that to someone else would be revelatory. That they might even gladly pay you for!
Not that you have to turn it into a marketable skill or anything; it's just that maybe you should let the world decide if what you can do is amazing or not.
If I can use myself as an example again, sometimes I'll mention something that I read about in a book years ago, and the person I'm speaking with will just get it, and they'll get this...look. I've seen it many times, and it always comes out of nowhere. It's the look of someone who's just had the dirt cleared from their mental windshield because of something I said, something that was just a throwaway statement to me, but that made a measurable difference in their life.
The best part is that this is probably true for you as well!
Or, at least it could be true if you kept working on your art. Or your skills. Or whatever it is that you do that most people can't.
Sometimes, we're poor judges of what's actually amazing, and what's worth sharing. Get the world's opinion before you decide that there's nothing special about you because maybe it's there and you're just not seeing it.
Further Reading: Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing, by Derek Sivers
Note: This is a sample from my other newsletter, Stairway to Wisdom. Along with the book breakdowns, you get a premium weekly newsletter packed with insights and ideas like this one. Get your 14-day free trial here .
If people can't do something, they're going to try and tell you that YOU can't do it. Get these people the f*** out of your life.
NEVER apologize for being OBSESSED, or for having big dreams that you're pursuing with everything you have WITHIN YOU.
The late nights and the early mornings will all be worth it.
The training to failure will lead you to new muscle growth.
The stretching of your mind by reading the best books will lead you to the best ideas you've ever had. It will all be worth it.
NEVER apologize for being OBSESSED, and NEVER apologize for being SUCCESSFUL, either.
Most people will NOT understand. But I'm with you.
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Individuals tend to have much greater control over their internal and external circumstances than they believe and, within reason, you can change your moment-by-moment perception of reality by working to strengthen your consciousness.
The way Colin Wilson conceptualizes it in his book, Super Consciousness, is that life is like a vast museum just full of beautiful artwork that we could perceive, but it’s as if we’re trying to see in the dark. [ Read Time: 11 Mins ]
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 theory is that this is going to continue to cause big, potentially harmful changes in the economic landscape going forward.
With that in mind, Nelson Schwartz’s book, The Velvet Rope Economy, 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. [ Read Time: 8 Mins ]
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At the time I read this one, I had already more than 800 books and I still took a bunch of excellent, fascinating notes. So there’s plenty to learn and enjoy here, regardless of what level you’re at as a reader.
In fact, I would argue that the more books you’ve read, the greater the chance you’ll have something literary in common with Professor Foster here, and the more you and he will get along. He’s a great professor and an even better writer.
In this book, he explains narrative voice, stream-of-consciousness writing, character development, how various writers begin their novels and the various merits of doing so, and the purpose and meaning of all stories in all places and at all times.
I know, it’s an ambitious goal, but Foster is among the best-read and least-pretentious people I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, and I’m sure that most people who love books will love this book too.
“In choosing this opening and not another, the writer has closed off some options but opened up several others. A method of revealing characters both limits and determines what sorts of characters can be revealed. The way the story is told, in other words, is as important as the story being told."
***
“The novel will dictate what sort of sentences it requires; the sentences will determine the sort of novel that can be written.
Hemingway's books embody a cultural amnesia, or maybe a desire for short-term memory loss. Who would want to remember the terrible events of this century, this war?
Faulkner's articulate a war between nostalgia and revulsion, a wish for a stable past containing horrors that he cannot avoid confronting. His aim is to include, to draw from everywhere, Hemingway's to exclude, to keep at arm's length.
No surprise, then, which one would write complicated prose, which one simple. Their sentences are nothing alike, except for one thing: they're perfect."
***
“Or Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. He may reach something like enlightenment, but the bulk of the novel is taken up with the searching, error, and struggle prior to attaining insight. Why?
Because saints lack desire. They don't want anything and as such aren't going anywhere we'll be interested in watching. Admire? Sure. Emulate? We'd do well to. Read about with fascination? Not happening."
***
“There are connections everywhere because everything is connected.”
This is a modern update of the classic work by Epictetus called the Enchiridion. Pigliucci has become well known for popularizing and making accessible the principles of Stoic philosophy, which is basically the discipline of learning how to live better and more happily by distinguishing what is under your control versus what is not.
You can read this book in just a few hours, but you’ll get the most out of it by referring back constantly to what you learn within its pages as you go about your day.
Every day comes with challenges to your peace of mind and your character, and Stoicism is about meeting those challenges with your virtue and self-respect intact. I’m not thrilled about the title itself, but the book was such a great refresher on all the best of what Stoicism has to offer!
“Train yourself to desire only things that are up to you.”
***
“Don’t try to impress them with your knowledge, since you truly have little of it.”
***
“If you were just to provide your country, or society at large, with another virtuous citizen, that would be enough.”
***
“Your freedom is in your hands.”
Walter Kaufman was one of the leading Nietzsche scholars, as well as being responsible for translating some of the most important books of all time from German to English. Man, I’m serious, like every time I pick up a philosophy book or some German classic, it says at the bottom, “Translated and with an introduction by Walter Kaufman.” He’s everywhere, and for good reason.
This is an anthology of some of the most famous and influential writings from the existentialism “movement” (for lack of a better word), including people like Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Jaspers, Camus, and several more.
It’s often tough reading, but incredibly rewarding reading as well. The existentialists changed my life – no joke – and this is an impressive overview of some of their major thought. I highly, HIGHLY recommend this one, especially to readers of philosophy!
“The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life – that is the heart of existentialism.”
***
“Is it possible that, in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and wisdom, one has remained at the surface of life?”
***
“The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him: ‘Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that is not really you.’”
***
“All man’s alibis are unacceptable: no gods are responsible for his condition; no original sin; no heredity and no environment; no race, no caste, no father, and no mother; no wrong-headed education, no governess, no teacher; not even an impulse or a disposition, a complex or a childhood trauma.
Man is free; but his freedom does not look like the glorious liberty of the Enlightenment; it is no longer the gift of God. Once again, man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.”
A friend of mine whom I trust does not trust Dave Asprey, but I still feel as though reading this book was worth it. If you make some of the changes he recommends, you’ll have a healthier brain, more energy during the day, higher levels of focus, etc.
What my friend found, however, is that former interns of Asprey’s have said that they were told to cherry-pick the research studies they cited so as to reinforce some of Asprey’s health claims and ignore some of the studies that went against his narrative. So…
I guess what I’ll say here is that I think Asprey is right about most of what he says in this book, and it’s worth checking out for sure, but don’t take everything he says at face value. Think for yourself and ask questions. Which is basically what you should do with every book!
“High-performance brains are our birthright as human beings.”
***
“Stop doing the things that make you weak.”
***
If you make your brain energy a priority, you’ll be able to make better decisions for longer. This is where it starts, because if your brain is sluggish and your thinking is fuzzy, you’re going to be at a disadvantage right out of the gate.
***
The simple things you do or don’t do every single day have an enormous effect on your health and well-being over time. It’s so easy to take care of yourself, and so easy to let yourself go, and you’ll really only feel the effects of one or the other over time. The day to day changes tend to go unseen.
This is the follow-up to one of my favorite books of all time, The Outsider. Here we’re going over many of the same themes – existential anxiety and the urge to more intense life and being – with a special focus on, well, religion and rebels.
Outsiders and rebels want more life, not less, and we feel horribly constricted by a society of self-assured and ignorant Insiders who have never wondered at the miracle of their own existence or felt horrified by their own inevitable death.
This book is for people who actually enjoy being alive, and who don’t want to shrink from it any longer.
Colin Wilson also explains how the religious attitude is the one appropriate to those who love life – in fact, it’s probably the only “reasonable” response when faced with all this beauty and grandeur and mystery.
This doesn’t mean accepting some God “out there” who’s going to come and save everyone, but rather an overwhelming acceptance of life as it is, regardless and in spite of the harsh necessities and bitter tragedies that necessarily come with it.
There are 7 books in the “Outsider Cycle” (I’ve read all 7 haha), and even though they kind of get worse as you go along, I LOVED The Outsider, and I LOVED this book too!
“If a civilization is spiritually sick, the individual suffers from the same sickness. If he is healthy enough to put up a fight, he becomes an Outsider."
***
“The more one has to fight against, the more alive one can be. That was why, for me, the problem of living resolved itself into the question of choosing obstacles to stimulate my will.
Instantly, I came to realize that our civilization is flowing in the opposite direction; all our culture and science is directed towards enabling us to exercise as little will as possible."
***
“In that moment, I was suddenly supremely aware that what I wanted was not less life, but more.”
***
“It’s the sort of day that brought back to me what I've had so rarely for the last two years - that tearing hunger to do and do and do things.
I want to walk 1,000 miles, and write 1,000 plays, and sing 1,000 poems, and drink 1,000 pots of beer, and kiss 1,000 girls...
The spring makes me almost ill with excitement. I go round corners on the roads shivering and nearly crying with suspense."
Today’s Five Books on Amazon:
You made it to the end! Congratulations!
You're now among the rarest of the rare.
I mean, that was a lot of books!
But I hope you found something here that looked interesting!
Personally, I’m obsessed with sharing the magic of books and reading, and so I love it when one or more of my book recommendations “hits.”
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I also want to thank you for reading this newsletter all the way through to the end and to thank you for real, I’m going to give you a 1-month free trial to the Stairway to Wisdom.
That’s twice the free trial period that most people get, because people who finish what they start - and have the patience to do a lot of reading - are usually the ones who love the Stairway to Wisdom the most.
Enjoy!
And remember, you can just hit "reply" to this email to ask me a question or offer a book recommendation of your own. I may take a while to respond, but I read every one!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you apply the wisdom found in the greatest books ever written to your life:
I’m going to be leaving some casual spots open for personal coaching, alongside what I do for my monthly clients, and the first choice always goes to the people on my email list.
Simply reply to this email or click here if this is something you're interested in working with me on, and I'll let you know more about it, answer all your questions, etc.
Areas I can help you with include reading more books and remembering more of what you read, growing your business, getting into better shape, and building mental toughness and resilience.
You’ll work 1-1 with me, and together we’ll be lining up big breakthroughs for you every single month.I've released 50 complete, in-depth book breakdowns on the Stairway to Wisdom that respects both your time AND your intelligence and will help you become the person you've always known you were capable of being. Read them for free here.
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