READING LIST | THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE | PATREON

📚Hey, good evening!

First off, let's welcome all the new people who joined us since last time!

There are 2,097 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 a famous essayist who’s had a major impact on my thinking for a long time

• The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom

• What binary decision-making means for your self-discipline

• The author of this book helped save more than 16,000,000 lives

• This might be the rarest and most difficult psychological achievement

• Anything you devote your full attention to BECOMES interesting

• My top 5 book recommendations this week

• A special gift for reading all the way to the end

1. Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi

2. The 10X Mentor, by Grant Cardone

3. The Circle, by Dave Eggers

4. Unshakeable, by Tony Robbins

5. The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley

In one sentence…

Never Eat Alone is a classic business book about building quality, profitable relationships with good, decent, influential people that last a lifetime.

The 10X Mentor is more of what Grant Cardone does best - inspire you to set goals that are 10X bigger and more intimidating, and then give you the tools and tactics to help you make them real.

The Circle is a well-thought-out fiction book about social media, techno-capitalism, privacy, and everything that could possibly go wrong (turns out, there’s a lot that could go wrong!)

Unshakeable is an excellent book about investing by Tony Robbins and his team, but more specifically, it’s about how to protect yourself in any economic environment and still make moves that will put you ahead.

The Light Brigade is a very cool, fast-paced science fiction novel about armies in the future where the technology exists to break soldiers down into light particles and have them “rematerialize” at the front.

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’ve updated my Patreon book notes with 6 more summaries (to add to the 1,100+ already there). Another update is coming in a few weeks too!

We had a bunch of people join last month and we’re only 3 Patrons away from reaching my May goal of 20! Thanks, everyone!

2) I mentioned last time that I wanted to do a reading challenge with you guys, and I’ve worked out a FEW more of the details.

For one thing, the whole challenge will serve to raise money for First Book, one of my favorite literacy charities. I’m thinking of setting the “entry fee” to just $5, and 100% of that money will go to First Book!

What we’ll probably end up doing is making it like a “set your own pace” challenge where you’ll commit to reading 1 book a week, or 1 per month, or 50 pages a day, etc. It’s whatever you want!

Then you can get other people to donate if you want…lots of cool possibilities! I’ll have even more info later, but that’s what I’m working on now!

3) A few great books that I'm reading right now are Message from the Middle of Nowhere, by Gunnar Andri Thorisson,,  Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, by Wendy Lesser, and  Life Force, by Tony Robbins .

I'm also listening to  You Owe You, by Eric Thomas on Audible. It’s read by him, which makes sense, given that he’s a motivational SPEAKER for a living! His story is also hella inspiring and I’ll pick up basically any book he comes out with.

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 friend Josh Ryan, one of GO-TO experts for social media growth, and someone with a simply incredible wealth of knowledge related to growing a brand and increasing your revenue on social media. He’s the real deal, people!

Josh is the type of creator who’s always pushing to be more helpful, relevant, engaging, etc. than he was the LAST time you saw him, and he’s built a profitable, successful agency around his sincere desire to see people grow.

I pretty much always stop the scroll to watch his videos to the end, and I know that he’s helped me immensely with finally reaching 100,000 followers on Instagram! You can check him out here, here, and especially here if that’s something you’re interested in achieving as well!

2) The second person I want to introduce you to is Chalene Johnson, the mother of a different creator I mentioned a few weeks back, Brock Johnson!

Brock and Chalene are business/social media EXPERTS as well, and Chalene herself has built something ridiculous like 13 different 7-figure businesses. Like, how wild is that!

She’s also been doing it for 30+ years, and you may even remember her from her fitness videos. She’s built quite a decent empire for herself (her husband is damn good at business too, and they’re both millionaires), and so she’s another inspiration of mine for sure.

Chalene is one of the smartest businesspeople I’ve ever seen and she’s probably added hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to my bottom line and every month since I started paying attention to what she had to teach. So yea, I recommend following her as well! You know, if you like money and making lots of sales in your business!

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!

Excellent Advice for Living, by Kevin Kelly

Every once in a while, I get REALLY excited for a book to come out (actually it happens a lot haha) and this is definitely one of those times!

Kevin Kelly has influenced my thinking tremendously, especially with his famous essay 1,000 True Fans, where he makes the compelling case that for an artist (or any creative) to support themselves financially just with their art, they don’t need a massive audience.

They just need 1,000 true fans who will buy whatever they put out.

Well, he’s got another book out right now, and I’ll be digging into this one soon myself! Here’s what Amazon has to say about it:

Wise, practical, optimistic life advice from author and leading technology thinker Kevin Kelly.

On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly began to write down for his young adult children some things he had learned about life that he wished he had known earlier. To his surprise, Kelly had more to say than he thought, and kept adding to the advice over the years, compiling a life’s wisdom into these pages.

Kelly’s timeless advice covers an astonishing range, from right living to setting ambitious goals, optimizing generosity, and cultivating compassion. He has wisdom for career, relationships, parenting, and finances, and gives guidance for practical matters ranging from travel to troubleshooting.

Excellent Advice for Living is aimed primarily at young people but speaks to all ages. This is the ideal companion for anyone seeking to navigate life with grace and creativity.

​ You Can Find the Book  ​ Here on Amazon 

 A Brief Summary of The Simple Path to Wealth:

There are approximately eight hundred gazillion books out there about investing, but this is one of the best ones. It also comes with an extremely easy-to-follow formula for building wealth over time:

Spend less than you earn. Invest the surplus. Avoid debt.

And that's pretty much it. The financial world is notoriously murky and opaque, and much of what goes on there appears to be random, but The Simple Path to Wealth cuts through all the noise and deception and gives you the straight facts.

It's also for people who don't want to invest a ton of time learning everything there is to know about money. Everybody wants financial security and freedom, but most people don't have any interest in becoming financial experts. This book bridges that gap beautifully.

Collins himself is a personal finance blogger who has built up an exceptionally loyal audience over the years, and in these pages, he comes across as an agendaless, effortlessly helpful neighbor who just wants you to succeed with money and be happy. The kind of guy who would invite you over for a barbeque and would actually make you want to go.

The Simple Path to Wealth goes a bit deeper into his personal philosophy as well, which is fundamentally about freedom. It's about getting this "money" thing handled, and thus expanding the possibilities for your own life.

Speaking of freedom, it strikes me that many people believe that their personal freedom is much further away than it actually is. JL Collins repeatedly dispels this myth on page after page, and by the end of it, you're left with this confidence, this inner knowing, that you can do this. You can earn your freedom. You can build wealth and reach financial independence, and it's not going to take you until the end of your days to do it.

Of course, freedom is far away if you choose to remain financially illiterate and don’t take time to learn how the stock market works, what the difference is between an index fund and a mutual fund, what an IRA is, and all this basic financial literacy stuff that he covers in this book. But more than that, Collins gives you the confidence that you can figure this stuff out; you can make meaningful changes to your financial strategy that will significantly improve your situation; you can do it, and thinking about money doesn't have to take over your whole life.

This book is extremely practical, and you'll learn what, specifically, to invest in (and to avoid) that will give you the greatest chance of building significant wealth over time. But the overall theme - the main takeaway - is that the stock market is the world's most powerful wealth-building tool, and, over a long-enough time horizon, it always goes up. Always.

The whole process of reaching financial independence involves five simple steps, which are as follows:

1. Save Aggressively: This involves paying off most debt as soon as humanly possible, and, where it makes sense, aiming to save 50% or more of your pre-tax income. I know, I know, 50% is a lot. But we're going to discuss how 50% (or something close to it) is a lot more realistic than you might expect.

2. Invest Strategically: You're going to have to decide for yourself how much risk you'd like to take on (which will determine your specific investment allocation, re: stocks vs. bonds, etc.), and then you're going to buy low-cost index funds such as Vanguard...and then hold them for decades. Do not pull your money out of the market when stocks start to tank, as they almost inevitably will at least some of the time that you're invested in the stock market. Trying to time the market and pulling out when things get rough (and before the market inevitably recovers) is how people go broke.

3. Be Prepared: You're also going to want to keep some cash on hand for emergencies and to pay for various life events such as home renovations, car repairs, etc. Don't get caught off guard! When you prepare for them beforehand, big emergencies often turn into small inconveniences.

4. Be Tax-Efficient: This is where the book is most valuable to U.S.-based readers and mind-numbingly boring to non-U.S. readers. But if you live in the United States, you're going to want to fill up all of your tax-advantaged accounts first, and this section will show you exactly how to do that. In the View from the Opposition section below, I link to similar resources for international readers.

5. Don't Stop: That is until you can afford to live off 4% of your investment portfolio each year. It may take a while, but your wealth accumulation will speed up over time, especially if you're reinvesting the dividends from your investments along the way.

There are plenty of other topics discussed in the book, such as where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works; the inner workings of the stock market and how to avoid being taken for a ride; how to change your investment strategy depending on which season of life you're currently in, how the market is faring, etc.; how fund managers are costing you literally thousands of dollars in extra fees; what financial independence actually looks like, and how to protect it, and so much more.

Most importantly, there's nothing in this book that's beyond your comprehension. You can learn everything you need to know to set yourself up for freedom and independence for life, and it doesn't have to consume your life.

You can spend just a few hours learning the basics of investing, money management, and finance, and then you can begin to apply them immediately to make your entire life better from this day forward. Very few investing books come with that kind of ROI.

See? ROI! We're starting to think like investors already!

Investing legend Warren Buffet once said that unless you figure out how to make money in your sleep, you're going to have to work until you die. The Simple Path to Wealth will help you do precisely that so that going forward, your finances don't limit your possibilities.

Financial independence means that you'll no longer be forced to make decisions based on how little money you have. Instead, the money you accumulate will support the life decisions you're able to make because of the freedom you have.

Binary Decision-Making:

One of the best productivity tips I've ever read about is the idea of doing this one thing - or nothing.

It's a very simple idea (as the most profound ones usually are), and how you put it into action is that you sit down at your desk - or wherever it is that you get your work done - and commit to working on one specific task or staring at the blank wall. You're only allowed to do one of those two things.

Interestingly enough, this is an excellent strategy to use when cultivating self-discipline as well. Don't give yourself any other options. Burn the ships. Cut off all the escape routes. Throw out Plan B and get back to Plan A.

Because it's true: people who have a Plan B always lose. All that Plan B does is distract you from Plan A.

In the context of Jocko Willink's quote here, we know what we have to do. We know that in order to lose weight, we need to eat less and move more. We know that in order to have more energy we need to drink more water and get more sleep. And we know that in order to build a successful business, we need to turn off Instagram notifications and sit down at our desks for some Deep Work.

Since we know what to do, the next step is easy.

We do it. We don't give ourselves any other option but to do it, and we continue to impose martial law on our own minds. We move forward with what we said we were going to do, because we know that it needs to be done, and because we know that doing it will lead us to the kinds of lives we've always imagined for ourselves.

The decision is easy. It's binary. It's "Yes" or "No."

Further Reading: Discipline Equals Freedom, by Jocko Willink

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 .

Thirst, by Scott Harrison 

This is a YouTube Short about one of THE BEST books I read back in 2020. It’s called Thirst (I’ll spare you the suspense this time haha), and it’s about the charity that former nightclub promoter Scott Harrison started after he was shaken by what he saw on a trip to Africa.

He saw people drinking water that he didn’t even want to TOUCH, but people were drinking it because they had to in order to survive. More about this amazing book in the short video above!

I have another full-length YouTube video coming along very soon, but I hope you love this book as much as I did!

Enjoy the Video! 

[ Watch Time: 40 Seconds ]

This Might Be the Rarest and Most Difficult Psychological Achievement

What are the chances that your average 18-year-old — just heading off to university for the first time — is going to be able to make the correct decision about what they want to do for the rest of their natural lives?

And yet, this is exactly what we expect them to do when we ask them to declare their major at university.

Hell, what are the chances that your average forty-year-old is going to know what they want to be when they grow up?

The brilliant psychologist Abraham Maslow thought that personal clarity on this issue was not to be taken for granted. Whatever our age, it’s not a given that we’re sure to find out exactly what we want to do with our one infinitely unlikely, finite existence. [ Read Time: 4 Mins ]

Anything You Devote Your Full Attention to BECOMES Interesting

Most people just don’t have what it takes to stay focused on their goals for more than like…a few seconds. That’s a big problem — for them, but not for you.

No, this is YOUR advantage.

THIS is how you get ahead by capitalizing on your unfair advantages, and being able to deeply immerse yourself in what you find meaningful when other people are drowning in distraction is a KEY SKILL.

The attention crisis is only getting worse, which means that other people are going to find it more and more difficult to focus on what’s important — what will help them compete with you — and your opportunities are only going to expand. [Read Time: 4 Mins ]

Enjoying This Newsletter? Forward It to a Friend!

No one is self-made anymore, if they ever were at all. Total self-reliance doesn't exist either, which is actually great news for all of us, because we rise or fall together.

Connection and relationship are the law of the universe, and this book will help you put that law into action to build a powerful network that will help you realize your greatest ambitions.

In order to achieve what's possible for you in life and business, you need a strong, healthy network full of other altruistic individuals who want to see you succeed, and...more good news...it's never been easier - and more necessary - to do that as it is today.

Keith Ferrazzi became the Chief Marketing Offer at Deloitte & Touche Consulting, the youngest-ever CMO at Starwood Hotel & Resorts, then the CEO of Yaya Media, before starting his own company. He's built up a personal network of more than 10,000+ people that he can rely on to take his calls, and whom he can assist in helping to get what they want in life.

Never Eat Alone is one of the greatest networking books ever written - a certified classic - but it's not literally all about who you have dinner with. Not completely. It's so much more than that, and Keith uses both his own story and the stories of influential power connectors like Katherine Graham, Bill Clinton, and Dale Carnegie to illustrate his best tactics for gaining influence by being valuable to others and cultivating your network.

It's about becoming valuable to the people you're connected to and being a resource for them, someone your whole network can rely on to help them get things done. It's about winning yourself, while making sure that, at the same time, your friends are winning too.

Now is the most exciting time to be alive in the history of the planet, and more opportunities exist today to both get everything you ever wanted and to help other people do the same.

Goodwill isn't finite, and Ferrazzi demonstrates the truth of this statement throughout the entire book. As we assist others and accept their assistance in turn, we expand our total possibilities and begin to access our full potential - together.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM NEVER EAT ALONE: 

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Grant Cardone is a fairly divisive figure, but his business advice has made millionaires. There’s no denying that much.

He’s open to the criticism that he’s just “selling the dream” to people who never had a chance of getting rich anyway, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair either. This was an audiobook listen for me, one I particularly enjoyed, and I put aside my personal feelings about Cardone in order to soak up some of his millionaire mentorship advice.

I first came across Cardone via his earlier book, The 10X Rule, which is all about taking consistent, over-the-top, massive action to accomplish your hugest goals. It was a message I desperately needed at the time, even though, yes, there’s much more to life than “success” and “making it.” With anything Cardone writes, you need to filter it through your own unique goals, aspirations, living situation, and philosophy of life.

The 10X Mentor is highly motivational, of course, but it’s also quite practical once you strip away any fluff. He hammers the idea that you should always be looking for wins, victories, sales - in a word, momentum! Every day!

It’s an aggressive, proactive, effortful approach to life that can serve some people quite well. Especially if you take enough time in the beginning to work out an effective strategy. 10Xing a losing strategy isn’t going to help you, but if you have a good game plan, the only thing stopping you is your unwillingness to go all-out in implementing it. In this book, Grant Cardone motivates you to go all out and provides some exceptionally helpful mindsets and tactics that you can use in the process.

Ultimately, Cardone’s philosophy is a philosophy of “more,” and yet, what many people don’t seem to realize is that “more” will never be “enough.” I love Cardone’s books, his approach to business, and his energy, but you’ll have to work out for yourself what you want his ideas to help you accomplish, and you need to know when enough is enough.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM THE 10X MENTOR: 

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I would probably never have picked up this book had it not been written by the author of one of my favorite books of all time, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. And although I didn’t enjoy The Circle nearly as much, it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in things like techno-capitalism, privacy, social media, and such.

The novel revolves around a social media company called The Circle, which you can think of as kind of like Facebook or TikTok. It’s this cool, young, “modern” company that offers its employees all these wild perks and wonderful experiences (Eggers parodies these types of companies in a really neat way), but the main character, Mae, begins to have doubts about some of the company’s long-range plans, as well as the “forced community” aspect of the workplace and the pressure to be always “on” and available.

This is Mae’s dream job, but she quickly finds herself resisting all these raised expectations having to do with mandatory “optional” attendance at company events and the like. Like I said, the whole thing is a giant parody and Eggers gives it a kind of Umberto Eco feel with the lists and the descriptions and the worldbuilding. Very cool, if a little over-long.

Some of the main themes, though – privacy and self-determination, futurism, the limits and overreaches of techno-capitalism and new media – it’s all very fascinating and disturbing to think about. It’s almost a dystopia, except more along the lines of Brave New World than 1984. I’d definitely recommend it, but I can absolutely see why some people wouldn’t be able to finish it.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM THE CIRCLE: 

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Regrettably, there’s no personal finance book that contains every single thing you need to know about money. Everyone’s situation is unique, not everyone has the same goals and motivations and fears, etc. But this is the second of Tony Robbins’s finance books I’ve read – both of them about investing – and this is one that is very well worth checking out.

It deals mainly with market downturns, and how to protect yourself when corrections inevitably occur. Worth keeping in mind though is that bear markets never last (and vice versa) and if you protect yourself with the right strategy, you’re probably going to be fine. That’s what this book is about mainly.

The stock market is such an amazing tool for helping you create your own future – as long as you know a little bit about what you’re doing, and you don’t let yourself get carried away by greed and fear. Which is, of course, what most people do.

Don’t be like most people. Arm yourself with some knowledge about finance, the stock market, and the economy, and then get in the game. One of the biggest dangers to your potential future is spending your life on the sidelines.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM UNSHAKEABLE: 

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Okay, so the premise here is that in the future, soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines faster, where they rematerialize (or not) in almost literally no time at all. I, for one, thought that was a pretty sweet premise.

What I like about the book is that almost right from the beginning, it just opens up this giant question mark and not only does that first question mark not get answered until the very end, but there are lots of little question marks popping into existence throughout the whole story, which turned out to be a rewarding reading experience.

The main character, Dietz (we don’t find out Dietz’s first name until the last few pages), starts experiencing the “jumps” differently than the other soldiers and begins to suspect that the war is being fought on false premises and that Dietz’s side may not be the good guys.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM THE LIGHT BRIGADE:

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Today’s Five Books on Amazon:

1. Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi

2. The 10X Mentor, by Grant Cardone

3. The Circle, by Dave Eggers

4. Unshakeable, by Tony Robbins

5. The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley

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!

Or click here to share via Twitter. Thanks!

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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:

1. 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.
   

2. 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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3. 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.