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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 20, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 38 minutes
📚Hey, good evening!
First off, let's welcome all the new people who joined us since last time!
There are 2,004 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 about a book that will help you learn from other books that you disagree with
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…
Awareness began as a series of lectures by spiritual teacher Anthony de Mello, about waking up to the gorgeousness of everyday reality and becoming as fully alive as it’s possible to be.
Evicted is an award-winning nonfiction account of the scourge of homelessness in the USA by Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, in which he takes to the field and follows eight families in Milwaukee as they battle the indignities and hardships of being poor in 21st-century America.
Proust and the Squid is a fascinating book about the development of reading in the brain, how it happens for most of us, and how the process is tragically curtailed in others.
Four Thousand Weeks is one of the best time management books ever written (I’m not the only one who thinks so!), where Oliver Burkeman makes the case that one of the most liberating things we can do is to dispel the notion that one day we’ll eventually be caught up on everything.
The Bed of Procrustes is a book of brilliant philosophical aphorisms by the equally brilliant Nassim Taleb, having to do with love, life, money, religion, and everything else we can’t stop thinking about.
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 hardly released any original work this week, although I’ve been making progress on some behind-the-scenes stuff that makes the rest of my work possible.
That being said, I’m starting to realize that my current pace won’t be sustainable - especially since I started working with 3 new clients this week - and I’ll need to hire some help very soon!
I can’t complain too much, because things are going well! I’m spreading the magic of books and reading to more and more people every week, but I feel as though I’m at the point where a book like this would be extremely helpful!
2) I rediscovered one of my favorite books from long ago, called Level Up Your Life, by Steve Kamb, which is all about gamifying certain parts of your life and using the natural features of video games to improve your life.
I posted about it today on Instagram and more than a few people told me they were excited to check it out!
3) A few great books that I'm reading right now are The Greatness Mindset, by Lewis Howes,, 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 Rob at Nothing Barred Fitness on Twitter, who helps dads become the inspiring leaders their families need with time-saving workouts & a simple approach to nutrition that takes less than 60 mins per week.
I saw one of his ads randomly on my feed and stopped to check him out, even though I wasn’t looking for a new trainer or anything. I kept scrolling through his tweets because here was a guy who had fitness and life figured out!
Maybe none of us have everything figured out, but I was extremely impressed with his fitness advice, his business sense, his commitment to his family, and his overall approach to life. Maybe you’ll check him out too!
2) The second person I want to introduce you to is Keval Shah, someone I don’t know personally, but who I was really impressed with recently as an example of someone who’s doing business right. And for the right reasons!
This interview here between him and my mentor JK Molina contains some absolutely brilliant business advice that will help you make a positive impact on people’s lives, in a way that’s sustainable for you personally, and also in a way that will make you feel good about what you do.
Keval’s niche is SEO (snore), which is something I have a basic grasp of but will probably hire someone to do it for me at a later date. Having been enlightened as to his way of doing business, though, who do you think I’m most likely to hire when the time comes?
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!
My friend Blake on Instagram has a new ebook out! Here’s what it’s about:
Looking to expand your horizons and challenge your beliefs?
Look no further than Disagree to Learn.
This essential guidebook is your key to unlocking the power of disagreement, learning from differing perspectives, and fostering empathy in the process.
With step-by-step strategies and practical tips, this book will show you how to actively engage with the material you're reading, identify and understand opposing viewpoints, and approach disagreement with empathy and understanding.
Whether you're a student, a professional, or just someone looking to broaden your horizons, Disagree to Learn is the perfect tool for taking your learning and growth to the next level.
Download your copy today and start your journey to becoming a more open-minded, empathetic, and well-rounded individual.
“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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What does it feel like to imagine oneself as intimately connected with Reality - with everything that exists - and to live with your eyes, and your heart, wide open?
Anthony de Mello points the way to an understanding - and awareness - of what such a fully realized life feels like, and just like life, this book is full of surprises. Awareness began as a series of lectures that were later combined into a book, so it helps to imagine him speaking to an audience while you read it, and that you are in that audience.
De Mello was a Jesuit priest and spiritual teacher and he uses stories, parables, jokes, and striking insights - which he combines with his deep humanity and infinite care and affection - to wake people up to the life that's been sitting right in front of them the whole time they've been alive.
De Mello taught that you don't have to "add" anything to your life to make it - or yourself, for that matter - into everything it could be; rather, it's a process of subtraction, of dropping your attachments, your labels, your concepts, and all the other obstructions to your happiness, which is, after all, your natural state.
“Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear."
***
“The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don't want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in the communist system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don't want to look, because if we do, we may change.
We don't want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.
The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take? How much of everything you've held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away?"
***
“The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable. There is far too much God talk; the world is sick of it. There is too little awareness, too little love, too little happiness, but let's not use those words either. There's too little dropping of illusions, dropping of errors, dropping of attachments and cruelty, too little awareness. That's what the world is suffering from, not from a lack of religion."
***
“The moment you put things into a concept, they stop flowing; they become static, dead. A frozen wave is not a wave. A wave is essentially movement, action; when you freeze it, it is not a wave. Concepts are always frozen. Reality flows."
This nonfiction account of the nationwide scourge of homelessness in America has won pretty much every book award that I could name off the top of my head and dozens that I couldn't.
To name just a few, it's won The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, The Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, and many, many more.
So yes, it's good.
In the book, 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.
Economic exploitation is nothing new, but here, Desmond actually leaves the protected enclosure of academia and spends a significant amount of time experiencing first-hand what millions of Americans live with each and every day.
"Then there is the toll eviction takes on a person’s spirit. The violence of displacement can drive people to depression and, in extreme cases, even suicide. One study I published found that two years after their eviction, mothers still reported higher rates of depression than their peers.
When you add all this up, the evidence is overwhelming. The lack of affordable housing - the gap between the need and the amount of housing aid offered, and the resulting common occurrence of eviction in struggling communities - these are main causes of poverty in America. We can’t fix poverty without fixing housing."
***
“These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday."
***
“If she told someone how damaged she was, and how she coped, would she be allowed to keep her children? This mother didn't know and wasn't going to find out."
***
"This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering - by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become."
There is a "before" and "after" point of learning to read that is often the defining moment in a person's life - and especially a child's. Every book is a door to an alternate future, and tragically, for anyone who never learns to read, those doors remain forever closed.
Magically, books are also windows into the hearts and minds of others, not to mention that the best books also represent paths back to ourselves.
Books are so many things to so many people, but how does the miracle of reading actually occur? What happens inside the brain of people just learning to read?
This exact process is the focus of Proust and the Squid, world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf's investigation into the development and functioning of the reading brain.
Stunningly, human beings were never meant to read. There are no genes that code for the development of reading skills, and so each human brain has to rearrange itself in the process of learning how to read, moving beyond its original state to learn how to make sense of these strange, squiggly markings on the page.
Sometimes I think that the most amazing thing about the whole process of reading is that we can learn to do it at all. Many people all over the world - even adults - still can't, and this is always and everywhere a tragedy; a failure of education, support, and love.
Another source of endless astonishment is that even though it took humans around 2,000 years to develop the kind of written language we have now, we expect children to learn it in about 2,000 days.
Considering the length of time the human species has existed, it's only in the most recent portion of our history that reading and writing actually came to be, and yet it's crucial to every single possible future we may end up creating for ourselves.
Proust and the Squid does a wonderful job of taking you through a tour of that history, analyzing what we're doing right - and wrong - right now, and even daring to express optimism for that future.
“Reading can be learned only because of the brain's plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually."
***
“Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading."
***
“In some environments, the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five."
***
“Few more heartwarming or exhilarating moments exist than watching children learn that they can actually read, that they can decode the words on a page, and that the words tell a story."
Adam Grant said that this is the most important book ever written about time management, and I’m certainly inclined to agree. This is partly because Burkeman’s approach has always been the “negative” way, by which I mean operating by negation – eliminating rather than adding.
For example, his “negative” approach to happiness outlined in his earlier book, The Antidote, meant embracing suffering and doing things that are challenging, instead of running from them, which would have, paradoxically, led to more suffering over time. That book basically dealt with the famous question: Do you want an easy life? Or the strength to endure a difficult one?”
If you’re wise, you’ll take the strength every time! And here, in Four Thousand Weeks, where time management is concerned, Burkeman counsels giving up the idea of ever getting everything done.
He says that you’re never going to get to a point where you feel like you’re totally on top of everything; and the very effort is wearing us out, stressing us out, and leading us to waste our absurdly, terrifyingly short lives on trivia and nonsense.
“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short...But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”
***
“The world is bursting with wonder, and yet it’s the rare productivity guru who seems to have considered the possibility that the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
***
“Most of us spend a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves.”
***
“The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time.”
You thought you knew exactly how the world works. You thought you had the major answers all figured out, and that your personal picture of reality was fully updated.
But then, you happen to read just one perfectly-crafted aphorism, quote, or sentence, and then you realized that "Yes! Actually, the world is like that!"
Now imagine an entire book that's like that, containing more than 500 such lightning bolts to the prefrontal cortex, and you'd get something like The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Taleb.
It's a collection of aphorisms (memorable expressions of a general truth or principle), that investigate opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. It's also extremely thought-provoking and wise, with valuable insights concerning every vital part of life that we deal with each day.
“They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom."
***
“The only objective definition of aging is when a person starts to talk about aging.”
***
“You are free in inverse proportion to the number of people to whom you can't say 'fuck you.' But you are honorable in proportion to the number of people to whom you can say 'fuck you' with impunity but don't."
***
“‘Wealthy’ is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the substractive measure 'unwealth,' that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have."
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.”
Also, if you know someone who might love this newsletter, you can just send them this link!
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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.
Join my free Substack publication, The Competitive Advantage, where I teach high-level, high-impact self-discipline tactics and strategies to help you progress toward your goals.
You'll also join a supportive community of other winners all moving forward together in the direction of where we want to be in life. Join here.
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