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 2,104 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

• An amazing online creator reimagining the future of work that you need to know about

• A new book alert from the author of a previous EPIC biography of Elon Musk

• 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. Wanting, by Luke Burgis

2. Be Your Future Self Now, by Benjamin Hardy

3. The Second Mountain, by David Brooks

4. What’s In It For Them?, by Joe Polish

5. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor Frankl

In one sentence…

Wanting is a classic-in-the-making that looks at the fascinating world of human desire, and by reading the book, you’ll learn how we can transform our relationship with desire in order to step into our full humanity, relate to each other more harmoniously, and intelligently select our desires in such a way that we enlarge ourselves, rather than diminish ourselves.

Be Your Future Self Now is about taking care of yourself like you would a really good friend whom you wanted to see happy and fulfilled, and acting in such a way that your current behaviors are taking you to the future you want to live in.

The Second Mountain is an incredible book about what happens after you climb the first “mountain of success” and realize that there is a steep drop that comes immediately after, where you realize the ladder that you just climbed may have been leaning against the wrong building.

What’s In It For Them? is a book that many call "How to Win Friends and Influence People for the 21st-Century," where serial entrepreneur Joe Polish, "the most connected businessman on the planet," distills his absolute best advice for creating and sustaining win-win relationships that last a lifetime.

Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything was delivered as a series of lectures just 11 months after Viktor Frankl was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp, and contains his stirring conviction that life is the ultimate value and that every moment of life is both meaningful and worthwhile.

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) The Charity Reading Challenge is set to begin on June 1st! Exciting times!

I was originally going to make people pay to register and then donate 100% of the money to First Book, my favorite education and literacy charity.

While I’m still going to dedicate the whole challenge to raising money for them, what I’ll do is make the donation OPTIONAL, so you can participate in the challenge for free if you’d like.

Obviously, I want to see as much money raised for them as possible (and we’re going to keep doing this every month!), but I don’t want to exclude anybody if they don’t want to donate to the cause.

Basically: everyone’s welcome to read!

More details on that coming up shortly, so make sure you start thinking about which book(s) you want to read during the challenge!

2) 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), and so here’s someone you should know about:

I’d like to introduce you to my friend Paul Millerd, whose book, The Pathless Path, is one I absolutely LOVED and will be featuring soon on the Stairway to Wisdom.

Paul is helping to reimagine the entire future of work and what it means for our lives, and I for one think that with people like him thinking about this stuff and creating around these ideas, now is a pretty incredible time to be alive.

The book is his story about leaving the “default path” where he was advancing rapidly up the corporate ladder - sacrificing his health and tranquillity along the way - only to realize that the ladder he was climbing was leaning on the wrong building.

The “Pathless Path” is an alternative vision of creativity and “work,” which I put in quotes because, when you’re pursuing your curiosity and exploring your interests in public alongside other brilliant, kind, energetic people doing the exact same thing, very little of what you do each day is going to feel like work.

So yes, I highly recommend reading The Pathless Path, and you can follow Paul on both Substack and Twitter. I do!

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!

When the Heavens Went on Sale, by Ashlee Vance

I just found out about this book today! Ashlee Vance wrote a really cool biography of Elon Musk that I read a few years ago, but I haven’t heard anything from him since…and then he comes out with THIS!

This one arrived in bookstores on May 9th, and if you know how much I love space, you know how quickly I’ll be running out to grab myself a copy! Here’s what Amazon has to say about it:

A momentous look at the private companies driving a revolutionary new economy in space, from the New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk

With the launch of the Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, Elon Musk's SpaceX became the first private company to build a low-cost rocket that could reach orbit. And that milestone carried major implications: Silicon Valley, not NASA or nation states, was suddenly cemented as the epicenter of the new Space Age. Start-ups and the wealthy investors behind them began to realize that the universe—ungoverned and infinite—was open for business. Welcome to the Wild West of aerospace engineering.

When the Heavens Went on Sale tells the remarkable, unfolding story of this frenzied intergalactic land grab. Through his trademark immersive reporting, Ashlee Vance follows four pioneering companies—Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab—as they build new space systems and attempt to launch rockets and satellites into orbit by the thousands. While the public fixated on the space tourism being driven by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, these new companies arrived with a different set of goals: to make rocket and satellite launches fast and cheap, thereby opening Earth's lower orbit for business—and setting it up as the next playing field for humankind's technological evolution, where we can connect, analyze, and monitor everything on Earth.

Vance has had a front-row seat and singular access to this peculiar and unprecedented moment in history. When the Heavens Went on Sale travels through private company headquarters, labs, and top-secret launch locations around the world, including California, Texas, Alaska, New Zealand, Ukraine, India, and French Guiana. He chronicles it all in full color: the private jets, communes, gun-toting bodyguards, drugs, espionage investigations, and multimillionaires guzzling booze to dull the pain as their fortunes disappear.

With the most detailed and intimate reporting of Vance's career, When the Heavens Went on Sale reveals the spectacular chaos of the new business of space, and what happens when the idealistic, ambitious minds of Silicon Valley turn their unbridled vision toward the limitless expanse of the stars. This is the most pressing and controversial technology story of our time, a tale of fascinating characters chasing unimaginable stakes as they race to space.

​ 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 ]

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It's surprising how little people know about where their desires actually come from. It's not obvious why we want what we want, and it's the endlessly fascinating "universe of human desire" that is the subject of today's book.

Backed up by the hugely influential French intellectual René Girard, author Luke Burgis shows that humans rarely desire anything independently. Human desire is mimetic - we imitate what other people want.

But in the exact same way that gravity exerts an invisible force on our bodies, the psychological force of mimesis shapes human desire all the time, silently and invisibly, and hardly anyone is aware of it happening at all.

Wanting is about how we arrive at our desires, and about how we can transform our relationship with those desires in order to step into our full humanity, relate to each other more harmoniously, and intelligently select our desires in such a way that we enlarge ourselves, rather than diminish ourselves.

Burgis packs a ton of ideas into a relatively short book, but once you start to see what he's talking about, you can't unsee it. Desire is like the water that the fish are swimming in, and Wanting takes us beyond the fishbowl to view the drama of desire from above.

Among other things, he shows how the epic automotive rivalry between Enzo Ferrari and Ferruccio Lamborghini was driven by mimesis, until one of them put an end to the mimetic crisis; he tells the story of how a brilliant ad executive from the turn of the century was able to tap into mimetic forces and get thousands of women hooked on smoking; he examines why Ivy League students all tend to pick the same majors; why certain goals are attractive to some and not to others; and outlines the horrifying history of mimesis and scapegoating.

There's so much here to get into, but the common theme is not that desire or mimesis is somehow "bad" - or that it can even be overcome - but that we can train ourselves to desire differently, and to attain some measure of control over what we want and why we want it.

It's an extremely liberating book in many ways, and since the future is going to be shaped by our desires, it's crucially important to understand where they came from today.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM WANTING: 

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Dr. Benjamin Hardy is the world's leading expert on the science of prospection and the Future Self concept.

Be Your Future Self Now is one of the absolute best introductions to the field, and inside this book, you're going to learn exactly why having a vision for your own future development is so critically important. But you're also going to receive practical instruction on how to apply the science here and now to make your actual life better. Immediately. Today.

This is a rather long breakdown, so I'll keep this summary short, but basically, who and what you're becoming - and your thoughts about it - directly affect the quality of your experience in the here and now.

Not only that but when your imagined Future Self directs your behavior rather than your behavior being directed by your past, that can be the shift that changes your entire life's trajectory. Instead of running away from something you don't want (pain in your past), you'll be moving toward an exciting future that gives meaning to all of your subsequent days. To this day.

The book is structured in three parts: first, we cover the seven Threats to your Future Self, then seven Truths about reality and your Future Self, and then we move on to the seven Steps you can take to align your thinking and actions with the person you most want to be.

You don't have to wait for some distant day to be the person you love being. In fact, if you're always "trying" to become your Future Self, you'll never get there. You'll always be your current self, trying to become someone else. But if you are your Future Self now, you don't have to wait.

The time is going to pass anyway, and you may as well use it to become the best version of yourself. The future will always be uncertain, but one thing will always remain true, and that is that regret for a life only partially lived is the ultimate pain.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM BE YOUR FUTURE SELF NOW: 

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What if you spent your whole life climbing the ladder to success, only to find that it was leaning against the wrong building?

In this spectacular and damn-near urgent book, political and cultural commentator David Brooks uses a different vertical metaphor - two mountains and a valley - to explore the devastating effects of our culture's unrestrained individualism, the dark night of the soul that's waiting for us when we discover that we've been sold a bill of goods, and what a full life of what he calls "moral joy" might look like.

The Second Mountain borders on urgent because right now we face an epidemic of hopelessness, addiction, and despair. The numbers bear this out.

For example:

*Chronic loneliness eats away at 35 percent of Americans over the age of 45.

*From 2012 to 2015, the percentage of young Americans with severe depression rose from 5.9 to 8.2 percent.

*From 2006 to 2016, the suicide rate rose by 70 percent among Americans aged 10 to 17.

Millions and millions of anxiety pill prescriptions are unable to stop any of this. If we ever really believed that we don't need each other, that belief has been absolutely shattered by David Brooks's argument in The Second Mountain.

As I discuss in the full breakdown, the "first mountain" represents the relentless pursuit of success and achievement that's possessed the mind of the Western world for so long.

When you climb the first mountain, what you're really cultivating are the "résumé virtues" - the skills and talents you bring to the marketplace. On the second mountain, it's all about the "eulogy virtues" - what they talk about at your funeral.

The Second Mountain is an intensely personal book, and one that will stop you cold in dozens of places as you pause to ponder the profundity of what others have discovered about the true aims of life. It can't just be about the self; that's what has led to the current rash of suicides and the epidemic of despair.

A real human life - a committed, relational life - is lived on the second mountain, with others. For others. Brooks explains how we got this all mixed up, and he also offers numerous practical and lofty ideas about how we can restore balance to our inner lives.

Nowhere does he say that the first mountain isn't an important part of life. It absolutely is. But it's not the whole of life, even though it seems as though the entire culture believes that it is.

There's more to life than anything that's dreamt of on the first mountain, and through personal stories, cold hard facts, and even an entire "Relationalist Manifesto," Brooks gives us a clear picture of what that might look like.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM THE SECOND MOUNTAIN: 

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If you've ever played "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon," you could probably play "3 Degrees of Joe Polish," and it can seem as though there's no one in the online entrepreneurship space who hasn't been helped by him in some way and eventually come to call him a friend.

His story is a pattern interrupt that diverges from the expected script. Joe succeeded in business by rejecting self-interest - or at least putting it to the side - so he could ask a very simple, yet very powerful question:

“What’s in it for them?”

It's a useful question that changes the conversation and can change your life in the same way that it's changed Joe's life and damn near everyone with whom he's shared it.

Thinking in this way has profoundly changed - and improved - my own life, and I have no problem repeating myself over and over again to spread the message that you can get virtually anything you want in life, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want.

That's the name of the game. That's how you win: by helping others win too.

But Joe's ideas are even more radical than that, since, for him, it's not even about the "getting" itself. Rather, it's about a completely different, better, more human way of moving through the world that will ensure that you're welcome wherever you go.

Taking the wrong advice here can result in your building superficial connections, and transactional relationships, and engaging in unsatisfying interactions with others that never lead to any real rapport or personal growth. Instead, take advice from people who actually have the kind of relationships that you want to have with people.

Joe Polish went from dead-broke carpet cleaner to being dubbed “the most connected person on the planet” for his work with Genius Network, one of the world’s most impactful networking groups for high-achieving entrepreneurs. This didn't happen by accident, and he didn't do it alone.

In this breakdown, I cover some of his main ideas, such as the three keys to connecting with others, the five major assets you need to invest in your relationships, the importance of becoming a "pain detective" to figure out how you can best help the people you encounter in life and business, and how you can become a "first domino" in the lives of others, spurring them on to greater growth and self-actualization.

We're also going to explore why you should become a "brain extender" for others, and how you can recognize the infinite human value that others possess simply by being alive and conscious.

Think of Joe's book as Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People for the 21st Century. While Carnegie's book is still absolutely worth reading, Joe's book represents the future of networking, while at the same time, the underlying themes and success strategies are as old as humanity itself.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM?: 

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A new Viktor Frankl book? Is this for real? Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes!

Published for the first time in English, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, which was delivered as a series of lectures just 11 months after Frankl was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp, contains his stirring conviction that life is the ultimate value and that every moment of life is both meaningful and worthwhile.

His most well-known book, Man’s Search for Meaning, has sold something like 12 million copies so far, and tells the story of Frankl’s experience surviving the Nazi concentration camps during World War II – it also changed my life forever from the very day I read it.

In 1942, just months after getting married, Viktor Frankl was rounded up, arrested, and brought to the concentration camp, Theresienstadt, along with his entire family.

Six months after that, his father died in the camps. And eventually, his whole family would perish there. Frankl, however, wouldn't find this out until after he was released in 1946. Wife, children, parents - all gone. Victims of the Nazi death machine that was to terminate the lives of more than 6 million Jews in just a few short years.

Logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that Frankl founded that describes a search for a life's meaning as the central human motivational force, was already quite well-developed in Frankl's mind, and he even had a full manuscript version of Man's Search for Meaning completed at the time of his arrest, though it was burned by the Nazis immediately after he entered the camp.

Upon his release, however, logotherapy now had a solid empirical justification - Frankl's own life and his personal victory over the combined forces of fear, hatred, and inhuman suffering.

Now a free man, but an individual who had lost everything, he stood up in front of a capacity crowd in Vienna and affirmed once and for all that life was ultimately good and meaningful, and that limitless personal freedom was available to all of us if we would only stand up and claim it.

I hesitate to say things like “Everyone needs to read this book,” but in this case, that’s probably right. You need to read this book. Or, at least, Man's Search for Meaning, which is perhaps a little more reader-friendly. If only I could have been at that lecture hall in Vienna in 1946!

Throughout the book, you'll notice the emphasis on a certain intensification of consciousness. In most video clips of Frankl, you see him almost wildly animated, alive to life's possibilities, and verbally shaking his viewers by the shoulders with an awareness of the vividness of reality. Given his personal history, this just shouldn't have been the case.

Despite four years of being beaten and starved and hounded by the Nazis, despite never knowing whether he'd see his family again, and despite the constant threat of instant, violent death, Frankl endured. He transmogrified his greatest suffering into his greatest strength. Along with Friedrich Nietzsche, he might have been able to say:

Given the choice between more and less consciousness - between Eternal Yes and Eternal No - Frankl snatched the meaning of his own life out of the hands of the Nazis and gave it back to himself. Even more importantly, he shows in this book that the same thing is possible for each and every one of us, at all times, and in any situation, no matter what.

In this book breakdown, we're going to travel along the tracks of Viktor Frankl's mind as he discriminates between meaningful and meaningless suffering; we're going to explore the nature of real human problems, rather than dehumanizing pseudo-problems; and we're going to see why each human being deserves to be treated as an end in themselves, and never simply as a means.

We're also going to see why the "meaning of life" is a misleading question, and whether there's a better one that we can answer instead. Through it all, Frankl himself is going to shake us by the shoulders and show us that there are no ordinary moments and that each person's fate and responsibility are completely and totally unique - unrepeatable in the infinity of space and time.

These thoughts were formed in the crucible of the concentration camp, tempered by suffering and hope, and kept hidden on scraps of paper that he hid inside his threadbare uniform, from the time of his forced enslavement, through his release and rehabilitation, right up until the moment that he was able to stand up and say to a packed Viennese crowd who he had shocked into speechlessness:

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM YES TO LIFE: IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING:

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Today’s Five Books on Amazon:

1. Wanting, by Luke Burgis

2. Be Your Future Self Now, by Benjamin Hardy

3. The Second Mountain, by David Brooks

4. What’s In It For Them?, by Joe Polish

5. Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, by Viktor Frankl

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:

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.