Five Books to Feed Your Mind

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

Author

Matt Karamazov
June 09, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 35 minutes

đź“šHey, good evening!

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

There are 2,119 of us in total now.

Thank you (yes, you!) for trusting me to bring you the absolute best book recommendations I can each and every week!

As always, these are long emails full of great books and tons of cool surprises.

But I never expect that everyone will be interested in every single thing I publish.

So, feel free to jump around and dive into whatever does interest you!

Today we've got...

  • An introduction to today's "5 Books"

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

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

  • A new book alert: featuring a masterful biography of Elon Musk that’s only available on pre-order

  • The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom

  • Pearson’s Law and what it means for superior performance

  • My Monthly Reading Recap, featuring the one book I can’t stop recommending to everyone who will listen

  • “Adopt the religion of the country that you’re in” to get everything you ever wanted

  • Learning this about FREEDOM and DISCIPLINE changed my life

  • My top 5 book recommendations this week

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

In one sentence…

The Reading Life is one of the best books “about reading” that I’ve ever encountered, written by the author of the wildly popular Narnia series, C.S. Lewis.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a great film but an even better book - a science fiction classic in every respect - that tells the story of the development of humankind, the placement of mysterious obelisks all over the galaxy by an elusive alien race, and the attempt to find out why.

Make It Stick represents the gold standard when it comes to books about learning, and it dispels widespread myths about the effectiveness of cramming and other techniques and shows how learning really happens in the brain.

Think and Grow Rich is a controversial book (but also one of the highest-selling books ever), and it’s about, well, getting rich!

Your Erroneous Zones is another hugely successful book by personal development legend Wayne Dyer, about mindfulness, psychology, and living a life of peace.

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 has begun! We’ve raised $90 so far for First Book (the education charity) and this month is just the beginning!

This will be an ongoing challenge where we’ll come together in our fight against our To Be Read lists and raise money for an excellent cause at the same time.

As part of the Challenge, I’ll be finishing Sapiens this month, along with 8 other print/digital books, and one audiobook, which is You Owe You, by Eric Thomas.

Join the Challenge here and tell us what you’re reading this month!

2) I’ll be updating my Patreon book notes very soon, and those should be ready by Monday’s email.

On Monday, you’ll also be getting my breakdown of Learn, Improve, Master, by Nick Velasquez and I’ll update you on the progress of my book notes then!

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:

1) First up is my friend Jamie Northrup, who writes a newsletter you might like called The Minimalist Hustler. 

It’s a daily email that goes out to 2,500 online hustlers and each issue includes 3 quick and valuable resources that will help you make more money online.

On Jamie’s Twitter, he’s also got a great thread called “30 Platforms That Pay” where he writes daily threads about platforms like Medium, Gumroad, and WordPress and how you can use each of them to increase your online income.

There are so many ways to earn a respectable living creating stuff on the internet (I’m living proof of this!) but that whole world can be murky and less-than-reputable, so it’s nice to have people like Jamie around who belong to the “Good Guys.”

You can sign up for The Minimalist Hustler for free right here. 

2) Next is Jonathan Edward Durham, a writer I don’t know personally, but who always cracks me up with hilarious book-related memes like this one and this one. 

Real readers recognize real readers, and Jonathan is definitely “one of us.” He’s got Instagram and Twitter, and he’s the author of Winterset Hollow, which you can find on his website. 

I think I speak for all of us book lovers though when I say, Keep those memes coming, Jonathan!

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!

There’s another epic biography of Elon Musk coming out on September 12th! This time from the incredible Walter Isaacson! I’ve already read a biography of him that was quite good but…but…but Walter Isaacson!

Here’s what Amazon has to say about it:

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

“Real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s maintaining a clear head to be able to make the appropriate decision.

Toughness is navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can. And research shows that this model of toughness is more effective at getting results than the old one.”

-Steve Magness, Do Hard Things

We've never really understood the true nature of mental toughness until now.

Before Steve Magness and the pioneering scientists whose research he presents in this book came along, we've seen only one side of it, and this book will show you that there's more to toughness than we usually realize and more inside you than you've ever known.

The old model of mental toughness was based on fear and ridicule, shame and doubt. It was based on hiding all evidence of weakness, and the old style of coaching and leadership involved yelling and screaming at people until they get closer to what we wanted them to be - not for the purpose of allowing them to reach their full potential.

That changes today, and it changes with this book, Do Hard Things.

Steve Magness is a high-performance coach and scientist who works with Olympic athletes and people of comparable ability and prowess, and his book is a compelling and useful attempt to "fix" our old definition of mental toughness and replace it with something more flexible, more insightful, and ultimately, more useful.

Do Hard Things draws from the very latest in science and psychology to teach us how we can work with our body, emotions, and feelings, and how we can shift the very meaning of discomfort in our minds by leaning in, paying attention, and allowing ourselves the mental freedom to perform at the highest level of which we are capable.

The new model of toughness is all about embracing reality, listening to what our body is trying to tell us, responding instead of reacting, and transcending discomfort by tapping into the deeper meaning behind it all. The old model made everything look like a nail, so the only tool it could offer us was a hammer.

There's everything in this book from mindfulness, military case studies, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and more, and it all comes together in a wonderful book that ends up being more growth-focused, intent on building you up, rather than tearing you down. Focusing on what's right with you, what you can accomplish, rather than what you lack or what is temporarily out of reach.

You already have everything you need within you in order to become more resilient, stronger, tougher, more flexible, and more adaptable. To paraphrase the great psychologist, Abraham Maslow, toughness isn't about adding something to you that isn't there already, it's about acting, striving, and competing as the person you are...with nothing taken away.

"When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates."

As they say, what gets measured gets managed. That's why, if there's an area of your life in which you'd like to improve or experience different results, you need to pay attention to it.

That's where Pearson's Law comes in. For example, if you want your financial situation to improve, you can't hide from your current situation or ignore it. You have to face it head-on.

What I did personally was make a commitment to look at my bank balance every single day. I also printed off a list of revenue-generating activities in my business and made sure I attacked that list each and every day as well, focusing on the activities that get me paid.

This simple practice worked wonders for my financial life, and I also brought the same approach to bear on my sleep habits. I began using an app on my phone to track my sleep quality, and I'd try to beat my sleep score from month to month. And hey, what do you know? I started to sleep better! I started to wake up refreshed, instead of still tired from a lack of high-quality sleep.

An important aspect of Pearson's Law is also reporting on your progress, ideally to a peer group that is emotionally invested in your success. That describes the community I'm building over at The Competitive Advantage, my free Substack publication for winners and high-achievers.

You're welcome to join, of course, but even if it's "just" a close friend of yours whom you update on your progress, this will help you immensely. We usually travel further together, and Pearson's Law is always operating in our lives.

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 here .

Here is my Monthly Reading Recap, where I talk about the 5 books I read in June of 2023, including one classic-in-the-making called The Pathless Path, which questions the very meaning of work and its place in our lives.

I also talk about Message from the Middle of Nowhere, an incredible book about sales, business, character development, and more...it's even somewhat of a TRAVEL book, and shortly after reading it I made plans to head to Iceland!

You'll get the full story in the video above.

There's also an AMAZING leadership book in here (Book #5) and it's one that I think EVERY SINGLE PERSON should read.

Have you read any of these books before? Let me know! I read every comment.

Conquerors like Napoleon knew how to get people to like them, even while he was preparing to take everything away from them.

He knew how to get on people’s good sides, to ingratiate himself with them, and he did this not by ridiculing their beliefs or trying to impose his own, but by making people think that he shared them.

There’s genius in this approach, and it can help us get everything we ever wanted. [ Read Time: 6 Mins ]

If I could shake everyone on Earth by the shoulders and deliver one essential message, it might be this.

Understanding this puts you ahead of literally 98% of people on this planet who will ALWAYS take the easy way out, believing that it saves them from experiencing pain and frustration, and who don’t realize that that pain and frustration is GATHERING STRENGTH and will hit them harder and faster later on.

Discipline yourself now or become a slave later. Discipline yourself while it’s still under your control, or wait until it’s NOT your choice later on. [Read Time: 8 Mins ]

Here we have an excellent selection of passages and quotes from C.S. Lewis about the love of books and reading.

Having read the Narnia series growing up, Lewis is one of those people – among whom I include my parents – primarily responsible for my own love of reading, and if you’re a reader as well, you’re going to recognize one of our own kind in these pages.

One of the many, many interesting things about Lewis is his grown-up appreciation of children’s tales, and his recognition of their supreme value, not only to young and promising readers, but to everyone who has grown up surrounded by words.

Far from being a stage one grows out of, the rest of the world seems more magical after having read of dragons and enchanted woods.

All that being said, Lewis is also a champion of the general reader, and (rightfully) believes that classical texts are not so difficult as to preclude normal people like you and me from reading them and enjoying them.

Plato and Seneca aren’t difficult; it’s the people who write about them today that make everything so needlessly complicated and forbidding!

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.”

***

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed had I been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

***

“He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

***

“The quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying, and ecstatic reality in which we all live.”

I always say, “Never judge a book by its movie,” but the movie version of this one is arguably even more well-known than this absolute classic science fiction book!

It was turned into a Stanley Kubrick movie – which Clark was heavily involved with – and it basically inspired a generation of moviegoers, space fanatics, and science fiction fans. I loved this book too, and different plot points have a wide variety of interpretations, which makes discussing the book all the more interesting.

The basic plot centers around an obelisk that an advanced race deposited on Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, influencing mankind’s development and spurring humans to develop complex intelligence, and eventually take to the stars.

I don’t want to ruin anything! Man, it’s so good. Okay, so, the first part is all about how prehistoric man accidentally stumbles upon these strange obelisks from another race, basically causing them to become more intelligent and then take over the Earth.

Fast forward a few thousand years and astronauts find another one of the obelisks buried on the Moon, which inspires another voyage of exploration and discovery, where we meet HAL-9000, the creepy, artificially intelligent computer that you remember from the movie!

Anyway, like I said, I don’t want to ruin it for you. If you like classic science fiction and space exploration, you’ll probably love this one. Hell, I mean if you like those things you’ve probably already read it and seen the movie!

But yea, I loved this one, I’m a huge, huge fan of Arthur C. Clarke (seriously, read more about him!), and I highly recommend this adventure to the stars and beyond to the limits of our universe and of consciousness itself.

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.

Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star."

***

“And somewhere in the shadowy centuries that had gone before they had invented the most essential tool of all, though it could be neither seen nor touched. They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time.

Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before. Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.”

***

“He had made, utterly without incident and in little more than one day, the incredible journey of which men had dreamed for two thousand years. After a normal routine flight, he had landed on the Moon.”

***

“When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers.

But their tools would not be ax and gun and canoe and wagon; they would be nuclear power plant and plasma drive and hydroponic farm. The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.”

Everything you want in life is on the other side of effort and sacrifice. In life, we appreciate what we worked hardest for, and in education, we remember what we struggled to learn.

That's one of the core messages in Make It Stick, which represents the gold standard when it comes to books about effective study strategies and efficient learning.

Basically, we remember the information that we recall to mind most frequently, and the more effortful it is to do so, the more entrenched it becomes in our minds and the less likely we are to forget it when we need to use it.

At the end of the day, the universe rewards effort, exertion, and striving. We need to go beyond what we think we can do if we want to find out how far we can really go.

This same theme - the hardest path usually being the best - shows up again and again in life, and Make It Stick will show you how applying that wisdom to your studying and your practicing will allow you to reach levels of mastery that are simply unavailable to people who aren't familiar with the science of successful learning.

“It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability.

This single fact - that our intellectual abilities are not fixed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape - is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us, 'Why bother?'

We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we're capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do."

***

“Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they're also among the least productive.”

***

“Learning is at least a three-step process: initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge in long-term memory.

Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it."

***

“There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know.

In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning. Our retrieval capacity, though, is severely limited.

Most of what we've learned is not accessible to us at any given moment. This limitation on retrieval is helpful to us: if every memory were always readily to hand, you would have a hard time sorting through the sheer volume of material to put your finger on the knowledge you need at the moment."

“Set your mind on a definite goal and observe how quickly the world stands aside to let you pass.”

***

“The way of success is the way of continuous pursuit of knowledge.”

***

“Before success comes in any man’s life, he is sure to meet with much temporary defeat, and, perhaps, some failure. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and most logical thing to do is to quit. That is exactly what the majority of men do.

More than five hundred of the most successful men this country has ever known told the author their greatest success came just one step beyond the point at which defeat had overtaken them.”

***

“I will eliminate hatred, envy, jealousy, selfishness, and cynicism, by developing love for all humanity, because I know that a negative attitude toward others can never bring me success. I will cause others to believe in me, because I will believe in them, and in myself.”

As you can see from my list of Finished Books, I went on quite a Wayne Dyer kick and ended up reading five of his books over a period of just a few months. This is a man who has done so much for me even though he’ll never know it.

Sure, some of it is a little too “New-Age-y” for my current tastes, and I haven’t read anything by him in years, but he’s responsible for a great deal of the peace, happiness, fulfillment, and joy that I experience daily.

Put this man’s advice into action. Live with it. Try it out for yourself, and really commit yourself to understanding his words and applying his message. I think you’ll like the person he can guide you to become.

Your Erroneous Zones, I was surprised and not surprised to learn, has sold over 35 million copies, deals with destructive emotions like guilt and anger, and can help you draw on inner resources you may have left dormant for far too long.

Again, this man and his work absolutely changed my life – he’s made me calmer and happier, more grateful and alive – and you can do a lot worse than reading this book.

“Have you really lived 10,000 days? Or have you just lived one day 10,000 times?”

***

“You are treated the way that you teach others to treat you.”

***

“When earth is populated with an entirely new crew, none of your worrying will have made any difference.”

***

“From this moment on is the only life you have.”

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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