Five Books to Feed Your Mind

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

šŸ“šHey, good evening!

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

There are 2,220 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 longĀ emails full of greatĀ 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"

  • The book quote of the week

  • Book news, 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 book written by one of the most popular podcast hosts in the world right now

  • The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom

  • ā€œThe Plane of Potentialityā€ and why your artistic creations are already real

  • How the ā€œ10% Ruleā€ can help you read 37x more books this year

  • Why ā€œachievingā€ failure is the key to success

  • Why budgets are for broke people - and what you should do instead

  • My top 5 book recommendations this week

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

In one sentenceā€¦

The Education of Millionaires is a book that will teach you tons of essential life and business skills that they never bothered to teach you in school.

Tranquility by Tuesday is a thoroughly-researched, immediately applicable book about time, containing 9 rules you can adopt to reduce stress, eliminate overwhelm, and flow with time instead of battling against it.

Personal Development for Smart People examines what it means to live intelligently, consciously, and forthrightly in the magnificent and infinitely complex world of which we are a part.

On Conflict is a back-and-forth discussion between the extraordinarily wise Jiddu Krishnamurti and his listeners about the nature of conflict, how and why we perpetuate it, and how we can make it cease.

Zen and the Beat Way is taken from recordings of Alan Wattsā€™ popular radio series, Way Beyond the West, where he made Eastern philosophical principles accessible and beautiful to Western audiences.

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 Ā PatreonĀ .

Pro Learning Tip:

Ā 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.

ā€œDad never talked too much about his accomplishments. He always wanted to hear about yours.ā€

-From The Good Neighbor, by Maxwell King

1) We just broke the $100 mark in the Charity Reading Challenge!

Thank you to everyone who has made a donation so far to First Book, the childrenā€™s educational charity, including the latest contributor, Gustas! Thanks!

This will be an ongoing challenge and you donā€™t have to donate or anything in order to participate.

Itā€™s open to everyone - and please share this Reading Challenge if you know some people who might like to take part - and if youā€™d like to donate to First Book, theyā€™d appreciate it a lot!

To participate, all you have to do is set a reading goal for the month and try to reach it.

You donā€™t have to share your goal with anyone, but you could reply to this email and tell me, or comment on the fundraising page and let everyone know!

Me, I plan to finish Sapiens this month (I have ~400 pages left), as well as 8 other books (print and digital) and 1 audiobook.

Thatā€™s 10 books this month in total! (If my math serves me correctly haha).

2) Did you hear about the ridiculously fast-growing social media app called Threads?Ā 

Meta just launched it in order to compete with Twitter, and it has something stupid like 50,000,000 users already! Thatā€™s so insane!

Actually, whatā€™s cool is that when Instagram users sign up for Threads they can just re-follow everyone they already follow on IG.

Because of that, 6,700 of my 100k Instagram followers have joined me on Threads too - all in a matter of days!

So yes, Iā€™m posting book recommendations, reviews, motivation, and business advice multiple times a day on Threads, and you can find my profile right here.

3) My Patreon book notes are updated for the month of July!

Iā€™ve posted my book notes from the following books on there, and Patrons get access to my notes from all 1,193 books that Iā€™ve read since 2014:

The Common Path to Uncommon Success, by John Lee Dumas

Tranquility by Tuesday, by Laura Vanderkam

Zen and the Beat Way, by Alan Watts

The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky, by Colin Wilson

I didnā€™t reach my goal of 20 Patreon supporters in the month of June, but Iā€™m at 17 right now, and my goal for July is 25! Can you help? Thereā€™s lots in it for you too! Just check out the list of rewards you can get in the description here.

I'm also listening to Ā Living Untethered, by Michael A. Singer on Audible. Itā€™s read by him, which makes sense, given that heā€™s a motivational SPEAKER for a living! His story is also hella inspiring and Iā€™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 Ā right hereĀ .

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 hereā€™s someone you should know about:

1) First up is my good friend Ve, who is undoubtedly, unequivocally, one of the most genuinely helpful, talented, and growth-oriented people I have ever met or known.

Somehow I went 32 years without knowing this guy, but you donā€™t have to. You can follow him on TwitterĀ today, especially if youā€™re interested in systems thinking, freedom, and personal growth in general.

As he says, a vision without a system is just a wish, and Ve is the man who can help you put the proper systems in place to get you closer to that vision, faster than you ever could have without him.

On top of that, heā€™s just a good person, which is the highest aim that any of us can aspire to. You can follow him on Twitter here, and get his personal help to scale your business here.

2) Next up is another one of the most inspiring, thoughtful, and genuinely helpful people Iā€™ve met this year, Sam Ocean.

Actually, it was through Ve that Sam and I actually started talking, and Iā€™m so glad to be in the front row, learning from Sam himself about the meteoric growth of his business!

What Sam is doing is pretty damn cool: heā€™s building a portfolio of personal brands to $100k/month, and heā€™s doing this in public, which means that by following him on Twitter, we can learn exactly what heā€™s doing to grow his business, which mistakes heā€™s mistaking that we should avoid, and more.

Heā€™s already generated more than $10,000,000 for his clients, and now heā€™s spilling all the details on Twitter. For free. For all of us. Damn.

Anyway, if that sounds like your kind of party, then you need to follow Sam on Twitter here and sign up for his newsletter, Creator Decoded, right here.

Do you know someone I should know?

Iā€™m always looking to connect with accomplished, inspirational, and good-hearted people who share the same interests that I doā€¦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!

šŸ“š Alex and Books Newsletter: Become smarter, happier, and wiser with 5-minute book summaries. Plus advice on how to develop a reading habit, become a better reader, & more.

šŸ“š Sahil Bloomā€™s Curiosity Chronicle: Join 400,000+ others who receive the 2x weekly newsletter, where Sahil provides actionable ideas to help you build a high-performing, healthy, wealthy life.

šŸ“š The Imperfectionist: Oliver Burkemanā€™s twice-monthly email on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.

Iā€™m one of the last people in the world to hear about Steven Bartlettā€™s incredible podcast (of the same name), but now that Iā€™m a regular listener, I am beyond excited for his book to come out.

We donā€™t have too long to wait, either - itā€™s coming on August 29th!

Hereā€™s what Amazon has to say about it:

From one of the worldā€™s most exciting entrepreneurs and the host of the chart-topping podcast The Diary of a CEO, this is a galvanizing playbook about building great things thatā€™s sure to be an instant classic.

Steven Bartlett has never been one to follow conventional rules. Heā€™s achieved extraordinary success and emerged as one of the greatest marketing minds of our time by doing things differently. But there is a method to his maverick style.

Between founding and running a global digital marketing agency, investing in over forty companies, creating a hit podcast, and launching a venture fund for minority businesses, Bartlett has learned valuable lessons about success and failure, discovering a set of principles that he uses to guide him on his journey from strength to strength.

In The Diary of a CEO, he presents these thirty-three fundamental laws for the first time. Inspired by his own experience, rooted in psychology and behavioral science, and drawn from the conversations heā€™s had on his podcast with the worldā€™s most successful entrepreneurs, entertainers, artists, writers, and athletes, these laws will ensure excellence and help you take real steps toward achieving your most daring goals.

From the power of ā€œleaning into bizarre behaviorā€ to learning to ā€œout-fail the competitionā€ to ā€œnever asking for consensus on creativityā€ to ā€œmaking pressure your privilegeā€ to understanding why ā€œyou must be an inconsistent leader,ā€ Bartlett provides counterintuitive and fresh insights to lead you on the path to success.

These laws will stand the test of time and can be used by anyone who wants to master their life and unleash their potential, no matter the industry.

ā€œCoach Wooden was more upset if we won butĀ didn'tĀ work up to our potential than if we lost playing at our best."

-Eddie Powell, former player

It's hard to do your best, much harder than most people realize. By definition, "your best" is the absolute greatest effort you are capable of giving, and sadly, most people just never even come close to that.

Legendary basketball coach John Wooden was a master when it came to seeing potential greatness and infinite self-worth lying dormant inside the players on his teams, and his leadership style - that you can learn to adapt for yourself - was perfectly suited to drawing excellence from the teammates entrusted to his care.

For Wooden, there was a standard that ranked above winning, and he believed that if you give every single thing you have within you to be your very best, then you're already a success no matter what.

Doing your best is all that can ever be asked of you; it's literally everything, and although winning may be a natural byproduct of that supreme effort, it could never be the sole reason for a team's or a person's existence.

I won't pretend that winning isn't important to me. Indeed, John Wooden and his elite basketball players loved to win, but it was the way they played and behaved that was ultimately more impressive than any of the records or the championships themselves.

Disciplined, intensely focused on executing the fundamentals, self-controlled, team-focused, and unselfish, they would have been winners no matter what, and this is because of Wooden's exceptional leadership style.

John Wooden also possessed an immense moral strength that was given expression in many of the actions he took as a coach and leader. For one thing, when racism was still a significant presence in collegiate sports, he refused to enter basketball tournaments that his black players weren't allowed to participate in.

They were a team, and if they couldn't all play, then none of them were going to be there. It was this strict, incredibly demanding coaching style, combined with this gentleness, and a strong, enduring belief in human potential and infinite human worth that made John Wooden such a spectacular role model. One that we would all do well to emulate in our own lives.

There's so much that we can all learn from John Wooden's example, and we're going to examine several of his most fundamentally important lessons here in this book breakdown.

ā€œYou too have a body of work. It exists inside you, on the Plane of Potentiality.

Are you a writer? This body of work exists, like books on a bookshelf. Close your eyes. You can see them. Are you a musician? These works exist like albums, like concerts, like performances. Listen with your inner ear. You can hear them.

These bodies of work exist as alternative futures. They are that whichĀ can beā€¦and should beā€¦and want to be. But they areĀ not that which is guaranteed to be.ā€

Steven Pressfield is in touch with the metaphysical. He exudes the kind of force that can only be perceived surrounding people who have actually spoken to and communed with the Muse. It's almost like he possesses secret knowledge, and that secret knowledge is being communicated in this book.

Whether or not you believe in the physical, material reality of this other plane of existence - this Plane of Potentiality - you can see that as yet, our highest artistic achievements remain unrealized. They don't exist yet.

Indeed, they won't exist, unless we make them real; if we bring them down to earth. This is our calling as artists and creatives.

Your best work already exists somewhere, and the world - this world - would be unquestionably better off if it existed here, but this will never happen by accident.

You have to make it happen, you have to will it to happen, you have to give everything you have for it, and you are the only one in the whole universe who can do it. Because that creative work is yours alone, and literally no one else is capable of producing anything like it.

These works exist in the adjacent possible, which is located just beyond what exists in the here and now. As you move forward, you create the path by walking, and your next step makes future steps possible.

This is the most exciting thing!

Crucially, however, where others shy away from their freedom and responsibility to create, you and I need to lean into it. We can never escape the responsibility to exercise our freedom, as the existentialists might say, but we can create our own reality.

Maybe we can't bend external circumstances completely to our will, but we have a great deal more power and influence than we think we do, and we can tap into this power by acting as if; by envisioning our highest artistic contribution as a vivid reality, and by acting in accordance with the belief that we will eventually make it real through our work and our actions.

We can use the uniquely human power of the imagination to help will our creative work into existence, and this is what Steven Pressfield says we must do as artists:

ā€œWhat fascinates me about the character of Alexander the Great is that he seemed to see the future with such clarity and such intensity as to make it virtually impossible that it would not come true ā€“ and that he would be the one to make it so.

Thatā€™s you and me at the inception of any creative project. The book/screenplay/non-profit/startup already exists in the Other World. Your job and mine is to bring it forth in this one.ā€

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 hereĀ .

The 10% Rule is VERY simple and VERY easy to implement, and it's going to help you TREMENDOUSLY when it comes to both discovering new books to read AND finishing them faster.

There are actually two different VERSIONS of the 10% Rule, and I discuss both of them in this video.

I also share my thoughts about a few popular book summary platforms and tell you which ones I think are the best.

Have you ever used either version of the 10% Rule? Did it help?

Let me know! I read every comment.

Even though I had just achieved muscular failure performing the squat (thatā€™s when you physically, LITERALLY CANNOT perform another rep, not when ā€œyouā€ want to stop), I still had to do the same thing with the linear leg press, leg extensions, leg curls, and seated calf raises, before moving on to decline sit-ups and a final half-hour of walking cardio.

Yea, Wednesdays suck.

But Iā€™m standing there with my legs on fire and Iā€™m thinking:

ā€œNo one else is doing this.

Not only is there no one else here (I mean, it WAS midnight after all), but virtually no one else in the entire world is willing to put in THIS MUCH EFFORT to win; theyā€™re not willing to go through THIS MUCH PAIN; and theyā€™re not willing to do this for as many DECADES as Iā€™M willing to do this for.

This is f***ing NORMAL for me, and thatā€™s why I win.ā€

This mindset wasnā€™t an accident, and Iā€™m also not just referring to what it does for me in the gym.

This is my daily, 16-hours-a-day attitude, and itā€™s a major reason why Iā€™ve moved so far ahead in life and why most people will never catch up to me.

Adopting it will set YOU apart as well if thatā€™s something you want for yourself.

After going through years of checking your credit card balance before buying $25 worth of groceries, you never forget the first time youā€™re able to toss over your card without even looking at the register.

Or footing the bill for a $400 dinner and not even thinking twice.

Or [Insert your own definition of ā€œRich Lifeā€ here].

This is my reality today, and budgeting helped me get here, but the day I decided to stop using a budget was the first day of my journey to real wealth. [Read Time: 5 MinsĀ ]

Just because some of the smartest and most successful individuals in the world dropped out of college or skipped college altogether, does that mean that you should too?

Not necessarily; but in this book, author Michael Ellsberg makes the case that most of what you'll need to learn in order to become successful - by anyone's standards - are skills that you'll never see taught in school.

Teaching any of those success skills would require dozens of books for each one, and Ellsberg doesn't claim to teach you everything you need to know on these pages. But he tells you where to start looking, and what's important to look for.

He doesn't just give you a fish, or even go too deep in teaching you how to fish; he simply explains why you absolutely have toĀ learn to fish, and where to go in order to learn most effectively.

Not only that but if you're missing any of these critical success skills, you're handicapping yourself horribly and holding yourself back from all that you could achieve and become.

ā€œI am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. Weā€™ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture.ā€

***

ā€œThe key to making money, and therefore living a life of less stress, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you.ā€

***

ā€œIf you invest in being better at marketing, sales, and leadership, then the skyā€™s the limit to your success. There is knowledge in the world about how to do these three things well. They may be a mystery to you, or they may not be, but theyā€™re not a mystery at large.

There are actually simple things that every one of us can do to be quite good at these things. In fact, the bar is so low, for marketers, salespeople, and leaders ā€“ the bar is so laughably low ā€“ that you have to get like a D in these things to be extraordinary. Itā€™s the easiest class youā€™ll ever take.ā€

***

ā€œYou are a reflection of the 20 or 30 people that give you the best advice.ā€

I first read Lauraā€™s other book, 168 Hours, years ago and have been following her work ever since. One idea that I keep coming back to from that book is that the best way to manage your time is to figure out how youā€™re spending it now.Ā 

At this point, Iā€™ll read pretty much anything she publishes, and I actually listened to her read the audio version of this one instead of reading the print version. But yes, I highly recommend reading this book in any format, because Vanderkam not only has some essential things to share about the nature of time itself, but she also gets extremely practical about how we can deploy ours better.

Time is one of the most fascinating subjects ever, as far as Iā€™m concerned, because itā€™s so elusive, so difficult to pin down into ā€œwhat it isā€ and ā€œwhat it means.ā€

Itā€™s eternal, but itā€™s also constantly slipping away; itā€™s endless, but we never have enough of it; and when we receive a gift of unexpected time, we struggle with how to use it most effectively.

Our perception of time also changes based on what we value and what weā€™re doing with it, and as books like Carlo Rovelliā€™s The Order of Time suggest, we donā€™t even know what time actually is. For all weā€™ve studied it and measured it and tried to expand it and use it better, we still have very little idea about even the fundamental nature of time itself.

All of this is to say that Iā€™ll also read pretty much anything (anything thoughtful, that is), about time and how to use it, and Laura Vanderkam is one of the better writers on this subject.

Tranquility by Tuesday is based on her own study of 150 people who learned time management rules over a period of nine weeks. Each week, participants put one rule into action and then were asked to reflect upon the results. For reference, here are the nine rules:

1. Give yourself a bedtime. Go to sleep at about the same time every night unless you have a good reason not to.

2. Plan on Fridays. Think through your weeks, holistically, before youā€™re in them.

3. Move by 3 p.m. Do some form of physical activity for ten minutes in the first half of every day.

4. Three times a week is a habit. Things donā€™t have to happen daily to become part of your identity, and ā€œoftenā€ can be more doable than ā€œalways.ā€

5. Create a backup slot. Make a resilient schedule where your priorities still happen, even when life doesnā€™t go as planned.

6. One big adventure, one little adventure. Each week, do at least two things that will be worth remembering.

7. Take one night for yourself. Commit to an activity you love that is separate from work and household responsibilities.

8. Batch the little things. Keep most of your schedule clear of unimportant tasks.

9. Effortful before effortless. Do active leisure activities before passive ones whenever time opens up.

I donā€™t tend to take as many notes when Iā€™m listening to audiobooks, but more than a few thoughts stuck out, and I made sure to record them here.

My favorite thought while listening to the book was that people spend all this money to be happier, but happiness is mostly free! I guess I knew that, as you probably do too, but it never hurts to be reminded of the blindingly obvious sometimes. The obvious is what we tend most easily to forget.

Something else that I kept returning to was the idea that instead of asking what could go wrong, itā€™s much more conducive to sanity to start asking what could go right! At least something goes right in our lives every single day, and when we start looking for it, weā€™ll start noticing it more often. It seems to me that itā€™s a much better use of time to go around looking for the good in life than fixating on the negative and what could be better.

ā€œGoing to bed early is how grownups sleep in.ā€

***

ā€œWe need to think about any stretch of time before we are hurtling through it.ā€

***

ā€œPlans are worthless. But planning is everything.ā€

***

ā€œLife changes when you know that hundreds, if not thousands, of future adventures are waiting for you.ā€

What does it mean to live intelligently, consciously, and forthrightly in the magnificent and infinitely complex world of which we are a part?

This question and all of its astounding implications was Steve Pavlina's overarching obsession, and after years and years of patient and sometimes restless searching, he now believes that the answer lies in the intersection between three core principles: Truth, Love, and Power.

In Personal Development for Smart People, Pavlina also builds on this foundation by explaining that there are also four secondary principles that follow from the first three. They are Oneness, Authority, Courage, and Intelligence, all of which represent some combination of the first three.

Oneness emerges from truth and love; Authority arises from truth and power; Courage comes from the combination of love and power. All of them together lead to the seventh core principle, which is Intelligence.

Virtually every problem can be thought of as a misalignment between your current mode of thinking and these universal laws of life and the universe.

"Working on your personal growth may seem like a completely selfish undertaking, but in fact, it's the most selfless thing you can possibly do. As you improve your alignment with truth, love, and power, you increase your capacity to serve others. The more intelligent you become, the more good you can do.

If you haven't already discovered this, you'll eventually realize that when you improve yourself, you inspire others to do the same. Those people then inspire even more people, and your positive ripples of growth ultimately impact everyone. As you improve yourself, you improve all of us. As the cells improve, the whole body improves.

If you forget everything else from this book and remember only one piece of advice, it is simply this: The most intelligent thing you can possibly do with your life is to grow."

***

ā€œNever close your eyes to the truth.ā€

***

ā€œYou canā€™t avoid the responsibility for what happens on Earth, because you're a part of it. If you think the planet needs saving, you're responsible for saving it. If you think our leaders have gotten off track, you're responsible for getting us back on track. If you see problems in the world that aren't adequately being addressed, you're responsible for addressing those problems."

***

"A commitment to growth was the solution to all of my worst problems."

Violence is like a stone dropped into the middle of a lake. At the center is the perpetrator of the violence or conflict, or the "ego," the "me," and once set into motion, the waves spread and spread, with ripple effects across time that affect all of us.

As long as the "me" survives, says Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is the logical extension of this fact that there must be violence. It is an inevitability, and the only peaceful path forward is to dissolve the ego, with all of its pointless strivings, useless antagonisms, and petty hatreds.

We are the world, and what we are, the world is. If we are hostile and greedy and violent and all the rest of it, then that's exactly the kind of world we will all create together.

Thus, at the core, each of us must hold ourselves completely responsible for the state of the world and the violence occurring within it and committed in our names. This is a radical claim, obviously, but as you'll see, Krishnamurti never really does anything halfway!

He says that change, radical change, must be immediate and total, and not experienced in terms of time. We either change now, or we never will.

We either find a way to see conflict clearly for what it is, what it's doing to our psyches and our homes and our world, and resolve it now, or it will always be with us.

We have created our society through our relationships with others and our habitual patterns of thinking, and if we want to change the world, it is impossible to leave ourselves unchanged.

ā€œIs it possible to live a life without conflict in the modern world, with all the strain, struggle, pressures and influences in the social structure? That is really living, the essence of a mind that is inquiring seriously. The question whether there is God, whether there is truth, whether there is beauty can come only when this is established, when the mind is no longer in conflict.ā€

***

ā€œEach one of us has built up this civilization, has contributed towards its misery, is responsible for its actions. We are the outcome of each otherā€™s actions and reactions; this civilization is a collective result.ā€

***

ā€œSo can you observe your conflict and see that it is not separate from you, that you are that conflict?ā€

***

ā€œSo we human beings have problems. As I said, one of these problems is conflict, conflict between ā€˜what isā€™ and ā€˜what should be.ā€™ That is a conflict. And belief in any form, which gives a certain kind of psychological security, is detrimental to man. If you see conflict is a danger, look at it, see all the consequences of it, see it as a fact, and donā€™t move away from that fact, then the very perception of it is the ending of it.ā€

Alan Watts is one of my biggest intellectual influences, and itā€™s not an exaggeration at all to say that I think about him, something heā€™s said, or some idea of his every single day that Iā€™m alive.Ā 

Indeed, he helps me become even more alive, even though heā€™s been dead for decades. Heā€™s my constant, daily reminder to drink deeply of life, and that the universe is on our side and wants us to be at peace and to thrive.

Needless to say, Iā€™ve read many other books either by or about him, and I highly recommend books like The Wisdom of Insecurity, his Collected Letters, and, naturally, The Book, which is one of my favorite books of all time, and one that I recommend heartily.

All that being said, this maybe isnā€™t the best book to feature the thoughts and ideas of Alan Watts, but I donā€™t regret reading it one bit. Iā€™ll take all the Alan Watts I can get!Ā 

Zen and the Beat Way is taken from recordings of his popular radio series, Way Beyond the West, where he made Eastern philosophical principles accessible and beautiful to Western audiences. It was compiled by his oldest son, Mark, and itā€™s certainly well done, but I just like the aforementioned books better.

In my notes below, I hope youā€™ll find some reasons to seek out even more of Alan Wattsā€™ books and ideas, and itā€™s my sincere hope that they sustain and strengthen you - and enliven you - as much as they have for me.

ā€œWe make a very, very destructive distinction between work and play.ā€

***

ā€œThe truth of the matter is that we have, in fact, an enormous present in which we live and that the purely abstract borders of this present are the past and the future.

A coin has two faces, but they are merely surfaces; they are Euclidian and abstract; they have no thickness. The reality of the coin is the metal between the two surfaces.

So, in somewhat the same way, the reality of time is the present lying between the past and the future, and the past and future are merely abstractions.ā€

***

ā€œNobody really does anything well unless they can put their whole heart into it.ā€

***

ā€œIf you set out to do what you really want to do, you may lose a lot of friends but you will not lose a single friend who is worth having.ā€

Todayā€™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, Iā€™m obsessed with sharing the magic of books and reading, and so I love it when one or more of my book recommendations ā€œhits.ā€

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.Ā 

I also want to thank you for reading this newsletter all the way through to the end and to thank you for real, Iā€™m going to give you a 1-month free trial to the Stairway to Wisdom.

Thatā€™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. Iā€™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.

    Youā€™ll work 1-1 with me, and together weā€™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.

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