- The Reading Life
- Posts
- Five Books to Feed Your Mind
Five Books to Feed Your Mind
"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." -Frederick Douglass
Matt Karamazov
April 28, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 37 minutes
📚Hey, good evening!
First off, let's welcome all the new people who joined us since last time!
There are 2,081 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 for one of the best children’s books that I’ve heard of in recent memory - and it’s coming out very soon!
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
STOP letting other people set the frame of your own existence
Choosing your friends is literally a matter of life and death
My top 5 book recommendations this week
A special gift for reading all the way to the end
In one sentence…
Will is Will Smith’s autobiography, but it was ghostwritten by one of my favorite authors, Mark Manson, who spent years hanging out with him and who did a spectacular job bringing everything together for this book.
Your Next Five Moves is one of the best business books I’ve ever read, containing priceless lessons on leadership and personal strategy, and it took me completely by surprise with how good it was when I first read it.
Too Loud a Solitude is the perfect book for book lovers, and the ending - oh man, I won’t say anything else but wow, the ending!
The Simulation Hypothesis is written by this video game designer who argues - not without precedent - that many of the features of reality are eerily similar to video games, and that we may, in fact, be living in a computer simulation.
Zen in the Art of Archery is a short book about Zen and, well, archery, but it’s not really about archery, as you’ll soon come to find out.
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 passed 7,000 followers on Twitter! Isn’t that insane? I mean, it’s nothing compared to some other people, but I’m just comparing my growth to where I was last year! It’s wild.
Anyway, thanks very much to everyone who followed me there in the past week, and, you know, ever! I really appreciate it. Join the fun!
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 friend Steve Kamb over at Nerd Fitness. I think so highly of him and what he’s doing, and he started Nerd Fitness because he wanted to provide a fun place for nerds to learn about health and fitness, chat about gaming and comics, and live better lives - something that I can definitely support!
I love his emphasis on enjoying fitness, rather than suffering through workouts because you hate yourself or how you look, or because someone else says you should work out.
He accepts everyone, saying, “We don’t care where you came from, only where you’re going.”
Steve also wrote a really, really good book called Level Up Your Life, which is about gamifying aspects of your life, kind of like a video game, and turning your life into a grand adventure. I featured the book on IG a while back, and I highly recommend it!
2) The second person I want to introduce you to is René Rodriguez, someone I don’t know personally, but who I’ve been really impressed with recently.
He’s an expert on body language, public speaking, and more, and he helps leaders amplify their influence. Which is also the title of his book, which I’m looking forward to reading!
Again, I’ve just been really impressed with what I’ve seen with him so far, and you’ll probably be able to learn a lot from him as well!
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!
In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Prisons uses children's fourth-grade reading statistics to predict how many prison beds they'll need in the future.
If that hit you as hard as it hit me, you'll see why I feel so intensely that children EVERYWHERE deserve the opportunity to receive an education, and a chance to discover the magic of reading.
It's also why I'm proud to present @jarrett_lerner’s latest book, A Work in Progress, which is available for pre-order now, and will be released on May 2nd, 2023! That’s so soon!
For everyone who pre-orders the book, Jarrett will donate $1 to @firstbookorg, one of the most incredible children's charities around, and I’ll donate $2 for everyone who pre-orders the book through this link here (for a total of $3 for each pre-order!)
If you're looking for children's book ideas, check out Jarrett's book!
Here are a few words about A Work in Progress:
"A young boy struggles with body image in this poignant middle-grade journey to self-acceptance told through prose, verse, and illustration.
Will is the only round kid in a school full of string beans. So he hides…in baggy jeans and oversized hoodies, in the back row during class, and anywhere but the cafeteria during lunch. But shame isn’t the only feeling that dominates Will’s life. He’s also got a crush on a girl named Jules who knows he doesn’t have a chance with—string beans only date string beans—but he can’t help wondering what if?
Will’s best shot at attracting Jules’s attention is by slaying the Will Monster inside him by changing his eating habits and getting more exercise. But the results are either frustratingly slow or infuriatingly unsuccessful, and Will’s shame begins to morph into self-loathing.
As he resorts to increasingly drastic measures to transform his appearance, Will meets skateboarder Markus, who helps him see his body and all it contains as an ever-evolving work in progress."
Thank you to Jarrett and First Book for doing AMAZING work, and also to all of you who pre-order and support this wonderful cause.
A child who reads will become an adult who thinks, and it's the responsibility of all of us to make this possible for them.
“There is no end point to this process. There’s no mountaintop. You’ll never ‘arrive.’ Life promises you an adventure and nothing more.”
This book isn't going to rescue you. For better or for worse, that's something you'll have to do for yourself.
The truth, however, is that facing the fact that no one is going to come save you is what's actually going to save you. And I can't think of too many people better qualified to deliver this critically important message than Ayodeji Awosika.
Awosika is one of the most popular writers on Medium.com ever, with nearly 100,000 followers, a TEDx speaker, a self-taught 3-time author, and a world-renowned personal development expert who reaches millions of readers per year with his message of radical personal responsibility and radical self-determination.
This is a book that tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. This is a book that tells you how the world actually works, not how you think it should work.
Not everyone will resonate with his somewhat harsher, more realistic style, but one thing that no one can ever say about his writing is that he's being inauthentic or dishonest. There may not be Absolute Truth in this world, but this book represents his hard-won truth, which is damn near close enough, as far as I can tell.
Read this book if you want to learn from the valuable experiences of someone who has actually achieved the kinds of results that most of us want in our own lives:
*The freedom to do work that excites you and stretches you creatively.
*The opportunity to make a great living doing what you love and what you're good at.
*The mental toughness necessary to thrive in an unfair world.
*The ability to build life-changing habits and execute them on auto-pilot (even if you’ve tried and failed before).
All of the advice in this book has been battle-tested in the real world. You and I live in the real world too, and if we want to succeed there, we have to learn how to be both optimistic and realistic at the exact same time.
We need to learn how to hold two different, contradictory, opposing viewpoints in our minds at the same time without retreating to the false comfort and safety of either one of them.
There are very few guarantees in life, and you know this already. But one of them is that your existence can become an incredible adventure, once you choose to see it that way. And, crucially, once you decide once and for all to take action to shape your own future.
The real world has broken untold masses of people before our time, but it doesn't have to break us. You can break the pattern and break free. You have personal power and agency, and now you also have this book.
"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.
We need to control the frame of our own existence if we want to be free.
And by “frame” I mean the boundaries or paradigm within which we operate. The “rules of our game,” so to speak. The rules and standards that we set for ourselves that guide our behaviors and shape our lives.
Stop letting other people set the limits of your own life. [ Read Time: 5 Mins ]
Pick your friends as though you’re going to be a passenger in their car…because you kind of will be!
You’ve worked too hard — you’ve come too far — to throw it all away like this. '
We attach ourselves to the fortunes of our friends, and the right ones can raise us to levels we’d never dreamed possible, while the wrong choice of friends could be quite literally disastrous. [Read Time: 3 Mins ]
Enjoying This Newsletter? Forward It to a Friend!
My only regret about reading this one is that I didn’t realize that Will Smith recorded the audiobook version himself until after I finished it! I would totally have listened to that version instead!
This is still a fantastic memoir though, and it was an awesome collaboration between Will Smith and Mark Manson, author of the multimillion-copy-selling The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which I also enjoyed.
A standout lesson from the book – and one that I’ll probably think of first for years to come whenever I think of Will – is the fundamental importance of breaking down big goals into smaller, identifiable “bricks” in your wall.
Will Smith has cultivated fanatical, sickening self-discipline and the breakthrough success he’s achieved in his life is a testament to that.
Such a great role model.
Also important I think was how he characterized the supportive relationships in his life and related how, no matter where he was in his life, he can always remember looking to his left and his right and seeing amazing friends and family members backing him up.
That’s something I’ve felt the power of over and over again in my own life: how much easier it is and more fun to go out adventuring with people who have your back!
“‘Stop thinking about the damn wall!’ he said. ‘There is no wall. There are only bricks. Your job is to lay this brick perfectly. Then move on to the next brick. Then lay that brick perfectly. Then the next one. Don’t be worrying about no wall. Your only concern is one brick.’”
***
“Never argue with a fool, because from a distance, people can’t tell who’s who.”
***
“We all have to contend with the natural processes of destruction. Everything is impermanent – your body’s going to get old; your best friend is going to graduate and move to another city; that tree you used to climb in front of Stacey Brooks’s house is going to crash down in a storm. Your parents are going to die. Everything changes; it rises, and it falls. Nothing and no one is immune to the entropy of the universe. That is why self-destruction is such a terrible crime. It’s hard enough as it is.”
***
“If quitting is an option, you’ll never finish anything hard.”
Here’s another book that completely overwhelmed my expectations and provided me with a wealth of knowledge in just a few hours that I’ll now be able to use and profit from for the rest of my life.
That’s the power of reading!
I think of Bet-David as kind of like the Iranian Jordan Peterson – just an incredibly motivating, well-put-together guy with a big important message who is impassioned about delivering it and who has positively impacted millions of lives.
He’s a wildly successful entrepreneur, businessperson, and mentor, and he runs the YouTube channel Valuetainment, which has more than 4 million subscribers.
The overarching theme of this book is the necessity of thinking several moves ahead if you want to succeed in business, especially if you want to make a bigger impact than just earning a comfortable living. There’s nothing wrong with having a goal like that – something I love Patrick for emphasizing – but if you do decide to set bigger goals, you need to develop a work ethic to match.
Your discipline has to be as unshakable as your dreams are large, or you’re just not going to get there.
Here’s a guy who developed himself into an extremely capable and well-connected entrepreneur (he literally escaped from Iran as a child and spent two years living in a refugee camp) and now uses the knowledge that he’s earned to help empower others in a big way.
This book will help you outwork, out-improve, out-strategize, and outlast your competition, and it’s written by someone who’s actually done the work himself; he’s done exactly what he’s telling his readers to do, and that kind of accountability and authenticity is something you hold onto for dear life once you’ve found it in a person.
“A visionary is someone who is not living in the here and now. He or she has already seen at least five moves ahead and is living in that reality.”
***
“The pain of owning a business is too great to tolerate just for money.”
***
“You’ll know you’re succeeding in life when others are winning simply because of their association with you.”
***
“The world today is counting on us to solve big problems that will never stop coming.”
This is a very short book but it’s packed with literary allusions and very heartfelt. The ending raised my opinion of it – I’m talking like the last few sentences, which came out of nowhere – and I think it’s one of the best “books about books.”
You can think of it almost like Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. In this one, we have the first-person narrative of a man whose job it is to compact wastepaper and books in the police state that was Czechoslovakia in the 20th century.
Over the years, he’s saved thousands of books from destruction and they invade nearly every part of his consciousness.
The story’s really about finding beauty in ugly places, about censorship, and the impossibility of ever completely suppressing books and the people who live and die for them.
The ending – I know I mentioned it before, but the ending really does come out of nowhere to reinforce the whole meaning of the book.
“When I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth.
Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase.
Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don’t know.”
***
“Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder - the starry firmament me and the moral law within me.”
***
“I always loved twilight: it was the only time I had the feeling that something important could happen.”
***
“Instead of compacting clean paper in the Melantrich cellar I will follow Seneca, I will follow Socrates, and here, in my press, in my cellar, choose my own fall, which is ascension, and even as the walls press my legs up to my chin and beyond, I refuse to be driven from my Paradise, I am in my cellar and no one can turn me out, no one can dismiss me.
A corner of the book is lodged under a rib, I groan, fated to leave the ultimate truth on a rack of my own making, folded in upon myself like a child’s pocket knife, and at the moment of truth I see my tiny Gypsy girl, whose name I never knew, we are flying the kite through the autumn sky.
She holds the cord, I look up, the kite has taken the shape of my sad face, and the Gypsy girl sends me a message from the ground, I see it making its way up the cord, I can almost reach it now, I stretch out my hand, I read the large, childlike letters: ILONKA. Yes, that was her name.”
If you’ve ever wondered how “real” your life actually is, or whether you’re living inside a virtual reality, this is the book for you.
Ever since philosopher Nick Bostrom published his original paper, this has been a hot topic. Not only that, but some very, very intelligent people have given some incredibly thoughtful answers to the question of whether our universe is actually real, or whether it only exists inside a computer simulation.
I find the prospect of living inside a simulation to be insanely cool, and Virk’s book is really good, but I could have used less discussion about video games and more about the implications if this theory were true.
That being said, it was probably unavoidable that he spent fair portions of the book talking about video games, since games, quests, and multiple lives are a really interesting way of connecting various religious traditions to the simulation hypothesis.
Let’s just rewind the simulation to before he wrote this book and ask him to go in a slightly different direction with his discussion!
“The goal of what we call science is to understand the nature of reality. If we are in fact inside a video game, then science becomes a matter of ‘discovering’ the rules of this video game.
I found that many renowned physicists believe a computer-generated simulated world would explain some of the strangest findings of quantum physics.
It turns out that, before science, this search for truth was the domain of religions and philosophers. The more I delved into their cosmological models of how the universe works, particularly the Eastern mystics, the more clearly I saw how the simulation hypothesis explains the ancient teachings in a scientific way.”
***
“One of the most famous and troubling aspects of quantum physics is that we may not be living in a physical universe after all, but in a universe of probabilities.
The idea is that a subatomic particle exists as a wave of probabilities – what’s called the quantum probability wave – until the probability wave collapses into a single reality.”
***
“To a video game designer like myself, the twin concepts of karma and reincarnation sound a lot like video games in which a player has multiple lives and an ongoing list of ‘quests’ and ‘achievements.’ The accomplishment of one task (or quest) unlocks new quests that get added to the list.”
***
“Birth and death are doors through which you pass from one dream to another.”
This is a short, classic book on Zen, written by a German professor of philosophy who was living in Tokyo and decided to take up archery as a way of studying Zen and the way of “no way.”
You can finish it in just a few hours, and it’s almost like a Zen koan, in that you either “get it” or you don’t. Don’t think about it, just let it affect you.
Zen is all about…well that’s actually a huge topic that I couldn’t even begin to cover, and certainly not with mere words.
Zen transcends everything that could possibly be said about it, and that’s what makes it so elusive, so hard to pin down, so much like an arrow strike to the heart of understanding.
Archery is a fantastic pursuit through which to learn about Zen, as you’ll discover by reading this book, but almost anything can be.
Bodybuilding is totally Zen, the same as dishwashing, bricklaying, and pretty much anything else.
All those pursuits will show you how to become who you are, and how to get to where you already are. If I’m having a difficult time explaining all this in words, that’s because everyone does.
Zen isn’t an experience to pin down with the oversized gloves of language, but a reality to live through and an instant satori, an enlightenment to have thrust upon you without warning.
I am warning you, though: this book is a great introduction to Zen, and a glimpse into the effortless, beautiful life available to all who eternally renew their personal definitions of life and its infinite possibilities.
“The man, the art, the work - it is all one.”
***
“He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon ninety as half the journey.”
***
“Bow, arrow, goal and ego, all melt into one another, so that I can no longer separate them. And even the need to separate has gone. For as soon as I take the bow and shoot, everything becomes so clear and straightforward and so ridiculously simple.”
***
“Even the thought of emptiness is no longer there. From this absolute emptiness comes the most wondrous unfoldment of doing.”
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!
Or click here to share via Twitter. Thanks!
And if someone forwarded you this email, you can sign up on this page right here.
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.
Join the conversation