Five Books to Feed Your Mind

"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." -Frederick Douglass

Author

Matt Karamazov
October 19, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 39 minutes

📚Hey, good evening!

These newsletters are sometimes called “Five Books,” but you might know by now that I can’t possibly limit myself to just five.

I’ve been on a reading tear recently, and it seems the more I read, the more I want to read. Have you ever experienced something similar?

A lot of the most dedicated readers I know certainly have.

Fortunately for us, it’s a feeling that will never go away, and the world isn’t likely to be stripped of its mysteries and wonders anytime soon.

But hey, my newsletters are long enough as it is.

So let’s get into today’s books, eh?

Today we've got...

  • An introduction to today's "Five Books"

  • The book quote of the week

  • My personal news, and the best of what I'm reading and sharing right now

  • Two online creator friends of mine you need to know about

  • Three of my favorite newsletters that I always open

  • A new book alert: featuring a hugely popular book to help you think clearly and take decisive action

  • The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom

  • “Learned hopefulness,” which is the polar opposite of the more well-known “learned helplessness”

  • A video recap of the 70+ books I’ve read so far this year, and the 14 best ones that won’t leave my mind alone

  • The 3 rules of winning

  • How developing a “Lamborghini Mindset” skyrocketed the profits in my business

  • My top 5 book recommendations this week

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

In one sentence…

Reader, Come Home is a decently heavy but also fascinating science book about the effects of our digital age on the brain, as well as a look at the brains of some readers develop the ability to read fluently, while others do not.

Spent is another somewhat complicated (but again, absolutely fascinating) book about status-seeking behaviors such as conspicuous consumption and the human mating strategies underlying their adoption.

The Gap and the Gain is a book by one of the world's experts in organizational psychology about how it’s better to measure progress backward against where we started, rather than against how much further we still have to go.

The Future of the Mind is a mind-expanding science book I read years ago about all these science-fiction-y technologies that could actually become scientific facts.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There is a famous professional development book aimed at white-collar knowledge workers and executives about developing world-class soft skills.

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.

“You came into this world with more talents and abilities than you could ever use. You could not exhaust your full potential if you lived 100 lifetimes.

Your amazing brain has 100 billion cells, each of which is connected to as many as 20,000 other neurons. The possible combinations and permutations of ideas, thoughts, and insights you can generate are equivalent to the number one followed by eight pages of zeroes. According to brain expert Tony Buzan, the number of thoughts you can think is greater than all the molecules in the known universe.

This means that whatever you have accomplished in your life to this date is only a small fraction of what you are truly capable of achieving.”

-Brian Tracy, Million Dollar Habits

1) I’ve finally done it! I’ve updated my Patreon book notes! If you haven’t heard already, Patreon is where I’m working on uploading my complete notes from the more than 1,200+ books I’ve read in the last 10 years.

Here are the books I’ve updated this month, with my favorites in bold:

The Essential Wooden, by John Wooden and Steve Jamison

Personal Success, by Brian Tracy

Hyperfocus, by Chris Bailey

Excellent Advice for Living, by Kevin Kelly

Super Consciousness, by Colin Wilson

The Ultimate Sales Machine, by Chet Holmes

The Success System That Never Fails, by W. Clement Stone

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin

The Common Path to Uncommon Success, by John Lee Dumas

The Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd 

You can find my Patreon here, but something I’m always upfront about is that a lot of my earlier notes still have to be updated. I’m even behind on my notes from 2023. But I’m working on them!

Years ago, when I first started taking notes on every book I read, they were mostly for my own personal use, and so even though they’re OK, I’ve still got some work to do to make them as valuable as possible for you.

But hey, you can see for yourself right here!

2) I found this TED Talk through one of Ali Abdaal’s latest newsletters, and I want to share it with you too! It’s called “How to Live an Asymmetric Life,” by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor (and investor) Graham Weaver.

I found it so impactful that I immediately watched another, even longer talk of his on YouTube right after!

Graham’s talk has four pillars, including Do Hard Things, Do Your Thing, Do It for Decades, and Write Your Story, and even though it’s meant for graduating students, I think virtually everyone could benefit from listening to it. 

3) We’ve still got 12 days left in October - how’s your Reading Challenge coming? Have you entered yet?

I’m failing again haha. Well, okay, maybe not failing, but I was aiming to finish Don Quixote by the end of this month’s Challenge, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

But I will be passing 100 books read this year (by a long shot), so I’m definitely making my way through some great books!

If you don’t know already, my Reading Challenge is in support of First Book, a children’s educational charity, but you don’t have to donate in order to take part.

The whole idea is just to set a personal reading goal and try to reach it! And if you feel like donating to help kids gain access to books and educational opportunities, that would be great too! You can join the Reading Challenge here.

4) I’ll make this one fast. I’m at 950 YouTube subscribers. I am DYING to reach the big 1,000. How about it? Wanna subscribe? 

I'm also listening to  Living Untethered, by Michael A. Singer on Audible. It’s read by him, which is usually what I look for in an audiobook! I don’t know, it just adds a little something to have the author narrate his own book.

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 are a few great people you should know about:

1) First up is my friend Vincent Kao, one of the up-and-comers on Twitter I believe in the most, which is actually what he helps other people do:

Establish rock-solid, immovable, unshakeable self-belief and confidence. And he’s damn good at it too. I love reading his posts.

But then I got on a call with the guy and that’s when I was REALLY impressed. This may seem like a small thing, but it’s absolutely not: He asked me genuine questions about me and what I was doing/interested in, and then, wait for it…

He actually listened to the answers! Without spending the whole time I was talking trying to think of what he was going to say next. People like that stand out in conversation - and in life - and he’s definitely a person worth following if you find yourself on Twitter. 

2) Next up is a new friend of mine, Imed Djabi, another creator I got on a call with recently and really enjoyed connecting with. Here’s another guy who’s doing this “being a human” thing RIGHT.

Plus, the guy writes about fascinating topics like the intersection of entrepreneurship and personal development, psychology, personal branding, and more. Dude’s like a Canadian Dan Koe.

Imed is a creator, designer, writer, business owner - he’s a lot of things, but you can’t help but come away from any interaction with him (or one of his posts) without feeling inspired and grateful that there are people like him out there doing great work that lead us all forward.

You can follow him on Twitter here, and his personal website is right here. 

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!

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📚 Start Your Own Newsletter with Beehiiv: This is the email platform I use personally to support my publications, The Reading Life, and The Competitive Advantage. I recently switched to Beehiiv and I will never, ever go back!

The mind is where everything happens. Everything you’ll ever think, experience, witness, or believe takes place within the mind, and so, honestly, your first priority should be to think clearly.

It’s only when you control what you can control (your own mind, albeit to a limited extent) that those positive changes ripple outward and improve the rest of your life.

The mind is where that whole process happens, and that’s what Shane’s book will help you with.

It’s set to be one of the more popular books to come out this year, and as a long-time subscriber to Farnham Street, Shane’s newsletter, I’m really looking forward to this one!

Here’s what Amazon has to say about it:

Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to think clearly. Yet few of us recognize opportunities to think in the first place.

You might believe you’re thinking clearly in the moments that matter most. But in all likelihood, when the pressure is on, you won’t be thinking at all. And your subsequent actions will inevitably move you further from the results you ultimately seek—love, belonging, success, wealth, victory. According to Farnam Street founder Shane Parrish, we must get better at recognizing these opportunities for what they are, and deploying our cognitive ability in order to achieve the life we want.

Clear Thinking gives you the tools to recognize the moments that have the potential to transform your trajectory, and reshape how you navigate the critical space between stimulus and response. As Parrish shows, we may imagine we are the protagonists in the story of our lives. But the sad truth is, most of us run on autopilot. Our behavioral defaults, groomed by biology, evolution, and culture, are primed to run the show for us if we don’t intervene. At our worst, we react to events without reasoning, not even realizing that we’ve missed an opportunity to think at all. At our best, we recognize these moments for what they are, and apply the full capacity of our reasoning and rationality to them.

Through stories, mental models, and more, Parrish offers the missing link between behavioral science and real-life outcomes. The result is a must-have manual for optimizing decision-making, gaining competitive advantage, and living a more intentional life.

“Whatever the arena in contemporary life – health care, education, work, travel and leisure – on the right side of the rope is a friction-free existence where, for a price, needs are anticipated and catered to. Red tape is cut, lines are jumped, appointments are secured, and doors are opened.

On the other side of the Velvet Rope, friction is practically the defining characteristic, with middle- and working-class Americans facing an increasingly Darwinian fight for a decent seat on the plane, a place in line with their kids at the amusement park, a college scholarship, or a doctor’s appointment.”

-Nelson D. Schwartz, The Velvet Rope Economy

In the near future, society will be divided between the have-nots and the have-yachts. Between the people who have just enough, and the people who have more than they could ever need or spend.

Even though we are lifting people out of extreme poverty at an unprecedented rate, the very wealthiest people in the world are also adding to their riches at an unprecedented rate, and the reigning theory is that this is going to continue to cause big, potentially harmful changes in the economic landscape going forward.

With that background in mind, Nelson D. Schwartz’s book is about the increasing split between the segment of consumers that are willing and able to pay for extra privileges and accommodations, and those who will have to take what they can get in this two-tier system.

Schwartz is an economics reporter for The New York Times, and The Velvet Rope Economy is his sometimes intriguing, sometimes infuriating, but always illuminating investigation into the invisible rift that divides how poor Americans and rich Americans live.

In numerous areas, from health care, schooling, travel, leisure, and more, there is something akin to a velvet rope separating those have-nots and the have-yachts, yielding outrageously skewed, unfair outcomes in a country that claims to offer unlimited freedom and opportunity.

This is a challenging book; not for its difficulty level, style, or language, but simply because it forces you to think deeply about what this trend could mean for our public spaces and how we relate to each other as individuals.

Schwartz’s contention is that as the better-off contribute less and less to the public good, the quality of our public spaces – and even our public discourse – will steadily depreciate and degrade, and the entire fabric of society will be worse off than it was before.

This is one of the better nonfiction books I’ve read in recent memory, and open-minded thinkers of all political persuasions would benefit mightily from reading it. While engaging with Schwartz's arguments, I didn’t feel as though I was being pressured to accept a political agenda; instead, I just felt as though someone who cared deeply about the less fortunate was trying to get me to pay attention to something incredibly important and real.

Nelson D. Schwartz plays the part of the lookout on the Titanic which is the ship of American inequality. We have time to veer away from the iceberg we've built with the unfairness of our current system. But the 1st Class passengers need to start talking to the Coach passengers, and the ideas put forth in this book represent an excellent first meeting place.

Learned hopefulness is the ability to learn from past experiences and use that knowledge to maintain hope for the future.

In contrast to learned helplessness, where, through negative experience, we "learn" that we have less control over what happens to us than we thought, learned hopefulness is the process of changing what we believe we can control for the better. When you have learned hopefulness, you realize that you have the power to shape your own future. It's where we successfully climb one mountain and then ask ourselves, "What other mountains can I climb?"

Both terms represent mental reappraisals where we shift the level of control we believe we have over our own future either negatively or positively. The truly astonishing part of all this is that not only is hope essential, but it's also teachable. We can learn to exert more control over the direction of our own lives. We can learn hopefulness.

Further Reading: The Stairway to Wisdom

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 right here .

This has been a FANTASTIC reading year so far! I've finished about 70+ books as of the making of this video, and these 13 books are the ones that I can't stop thinking about.

There are some GREAT business books in here, some surprise favorites, an awesome horror novel (which I don't usually read), and a STUNNING memoir that I listened to on Audible.

Any one of these books could become your new favorite.

THIS right here is the attitude you need to have if you want to win. No matter what game you’re playing.

Sports, Business, Life…

I talk all the time about the similarities between each, what you can learn from each, and the skills that transfer over between each.

THIS is how winners think…

I’m about to make a bold move here, and some people will be turned off by it. Most people won’t care, a few will be envious, but the people I’m talking to — and hopefully, I’m talking to YOU — will be inspired by it.

You see, I’ve never earned more than $100k in a single year, but in just 8 short months from now I am going to be selling my Porsche Boxster and buying a Lamborghini Aventador. Now, why should you care at all?

Well in this article I’m going to (briefly) explain how I got to where I am, what set me up to be able to buy the Lambo, and how you can replicate my results.

Let’s start in the middle, right in the center of the action, where I was at my lowest point all year. I didn’t stay there for long…[Read Time: 5 Mins ]

Humans were never meant to read. No child is ever born with a gene that directly leads to literacy; the reading circuit has to be intentionally, rigorously cultivated, especially in the early years, and nothing about that process is guaranteed.

The ability to read these words is nothing short of a miracle, and you're witnessing it right now in this very moment.

The human brain - this amazingly, vastly complex thing, this technology that you carry around in your head all day - somehow finds a way to connect the functions that already exist, like vision, language, pattern recognition, and more, and combines them in such a way that you're able to follow this sentence and decode its meaning.

Because the ability to read doesn't develop unless it's actively and effectively taught, the brain of a reader has completely different wiring from that of a non-literate person, with implications that follow a person throughout their entire lifespan.

In this book, Reader, Come Home, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf traces the development - or lack thereof - of the reading circuit and extends her research into questions of what will happen to us as we shift from a literacy-based culture to a more digital one.

“For more than four decades, one of the single most important predictors of later reading achievement has been how much parents read to their child.”

***

“The Bureau of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.”

***

“What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different?”

***

“From start to finish, the basic neurological principle – ‘Use it or lose it’ – is true for each deep-reading process. More important still, this principle holds for the whole plastic reading-brain circuit. Only if we continuously work to develop and use our complex analogical and inferential skills will the neural networks underlying them sustain our capacity to be thoughtful, critical analysts of knowledge, rather than passive consumers of information.”

Modern consumer capitalism is all about making us believe that we need something else - something that, by definition, we don't already have - to display our underlying traits and signal to others that we would make attractive mates and relationship partners.

In the book, Spent, Geoffrey Miller breaks down this whole dynamic and shows how and why we use the goods and services we buy to advertise ourselves, what's dangerous and pernicious about this arrangement, and how we can aim towards something better.

“The standard self-display strategy in most developed societies is to seek the highest-paying full-time employment permitted by one’s intelligence and personality, and to use the resulting income to buy branded goods and services at full retail price. Weekdays are spent working; evenings and weekends are spent shopping.”

***

“Animals, including humans, often show off the most expensive signals they can afford, whether those signals are peacock tails or Hummer H1s. In each case, reliable signaling demands some sort of ‘conspicuous waste’ - a highly visible expenditure of resources that brings no material benefit, but that simply signals the expender’s ability and willingness to waste those resources.”

***

“This is a core message from evolutionary psychology: the most precious, complex, intricate, and wonderful things in life are the biological adaptations common across all humans – especially the adaptations that signal our individual differences so conspicuously.

We already have everything we could possibly need to impress our fellow humans, yet every major human ideology conspires to make us forget this fact – because every ideology seeks power by convincing us that we need something beyond our naked bodies and minds to be socially acceptable and sexually attractive.

Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it so contemptuously dismisses our natural human modes of trait display, and it keeps us too busy – working, shopping, and product displaying – to remember what we can signal without all the products.”

***

“We take wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display – language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty – and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates, and gaining prestige.

Instead, we rely on goods and services acquired through education, work, and consumption to advertise our personal traits to others. These costly signals are mostly redundant or misleading, so others usually ignore them. They prefer to judge us through natural face-to-face interaction.

We think our gilding dazzles them, though we ignore their own gilding when choosing our own friends and mates. This is an absurd way to live, but it’s never too late to come away from it.”

This book was responsible for several huge breakthroughs in my own life and work, and it's been the same for many others who have read it as well.

Here you'll find small, easy-to-underestimate strategies that pack a big productivity punch, as well as many other breakthrough ideas about happiness and overall success that could make a big difference for you too.

The core idea of the book, the importance of measuring progress against how far you've come, rather than focusing on how much further you have left to go is one of those breakthrough ideas.

Most people, especially highly ambitious people, are unhappy because of how they measure their progress. They don't give themselves enough credit for what they've already been able to achieve and instead push on in the direction of the moving target of their ideals.

As the authors point out, when we measure ourselves against that ideal, we're in "the GAP." However, when we measure ourselves against our previous selves, we're in "the GAIN."

When you spend less time in the GAP and more time in the GAIN, you're going to unleash a positive compound effect of productivity, success, and happiness in your life that many people have experienced as nothing short of astonishing. I am absolutely one of those people!

The GAP and the GAIN contains essential lessons about living intentionally, measuring what matters, and playing on your own side by appreciating how far you've come, rather than trying to live up to some impossible ideal that's always receding further into the distance.

I love Dan and Ben's work because it's an intelligent, nuanced approach to personal development that takes several different aspects of success into account at once for maximum effectiveness.

Their ideas will help you reshape the past in a way that serves you. They give you tools with which to expand your present possibilities. They show you how to create a compelling future vision for yourself, and they give you the motivation to keep moving toward it. All three work together, and The GAP and the GAIN is a wonderful introduction to these profound ideas.

“Ideals are meant to provide direction, motivation, and meaning to our lives. They are not the measuring stick. Our society has trained us to measure ourselves against our ideals, which by definition are unreachable. Goals, conversely, are reachable.”

***

“The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.”

***

“Your happiness as a person is dependent on what you measure yourself against.”

***

“When you end your day poorly and without a committed plan, you compromise the next 24 hours. Without a clear and committed plan, you become reactive to what’s around you and reactive to your own lack of energy.”

Michio Kaku is an extremely well-known science popularizer, and author of many books on physics, humanity, and the universe. They’re all fairly accessible too, as he’s really good at simplifying complex concepts, even though, if he wanted to, he’s brilliant enough that he could have made this book about the structure and capabilities of the mind ridiculously complex.

He discusses – in all seriousness – some really far-out stuff in this book, much of which could actually become a common, everyday reality before too long.

It would have seemed like science fiction before, but in this book, he talks about recording memories, telepathy, etc. That’s along with more “common wonders” as well, like how our brains construct our vision of the world, what they’re really capable of, and everything that that implies.

“The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object in the solar system.”

***

“It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.”

***

“You might one day be able to send the experience of dancing the tango, bungee jumping, or skydiving to the people on your e-mail list. Not just physical activity, but emotions and feelings as well might be sent via brain-to-brain communication.”

***

“What we see with our eyes is only a crude approximation of reality.”

This was shocking to learn, but not all that surprising once I thought about: apparently executives pay as much as $250,000 to have Marshall Goldsmith come and tutor them personally in how to succeed in the corporate world.

This is yet another reason why I love books, because you can get most of what he teaches those executives here in this book for much, much less money.

Goldsmith breaks down twenty essential interpersonal skills that, somewhere along the way, many executives have left undeveloped, which works to their detriment.

Many of these are relatively simple fixes, but they can make all the difference between a life-changing promotion and grinding out years of your life in corporate obscurity.

“Successful people are sometimes successful in spite of their behaviors and not because of them.”

***

“Successful people become great leaders when they learn to shift the focus from themselves to others.”

***

“People will do something—including changing their behavior—only if it can be demonstrated that doing so is in their own best interests as defined by their own values.”

***

“But the higher up you go in the organization, the more you need to make other people winners and not make it about winning yourself.”

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:

  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.
    ​

  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.

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