Five Books Friday

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

Author

Matt Karamazov
November 03, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 43 minutes

📚Hey, good evening!

I recorded a quick thank you message for you tonight, plus a little preview of what I’ve been reading.

I’ll be posting more about these books soon, but I’m going to start giving you guys early looks at some of the new books I buy/have sent to me, etc.

The email schedule has also changed a little bit: I’m going to start calling these editions “Five Books Friday,” and of course, I’ll still be sending you guys new book breakdowns, book notes, etc. on other days of the week.

But okay, enough of that. Let’s get into tonight’s books!

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 creators you need to know about

  • Four of my favorite newsletters that I always open

  • A new book alert: featuring the ideas of an incredibly optimistic, brilliant thinker who believes that the human future is just beginning

  • The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom

  • “The 4% Rule” that will help you plan for a fantastic, wealthy retirement

  • The only two places in the entire WORLD where every single person is welcome

  • 4 must-read psychology books that most people have never heard of

  • 3 of the best “life-changing” books, plus 50 honorable mentions

  • My top 5 book recommendations this week

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

In one sentence…

The Good Neighbor is an unbelievably endearing biography of one of the most positive, uplifting childhood educators ever, Mister Rogers.

The Memory Police is an unreal, unsettling dystopian novel about a society where people are forced to forget things like photographs, books, and even birds, and the Memory Police whose job it is to find people who still remember and eliminate them.

The Long Game is an ambitious business book about creating enough white space in our busy lives to take a step back, take in the full picture, and start taking action on a realistic plan to achieve our long-term career goals.

Wanting is an incredibly insightful book about the nature of human desire, why we want what we want, and what happens when people making up large sections of society all want the same thing.

The Common Path to Uncommon Success is a greatly helpful business book about field-testing your big idea (in the author’s case, a podcast), and what to do to make it real in the world.

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.

“Connecting is a philosophy of life, a worldview. Its guiding principle is that people, all people, every person you meet, is an opportunity to help and be helped.”

-Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone

1) I’ve updated my Patreon book notes for last month. 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 Power of Regret, by Daniel H. Pink

Be Nobody, by Lama Marut

Opt Out, by Dana Robinson

Rigging the Game, by Dan Nicholson

Ignore Everybody, by Hugh MacLeod

The Secret to Success, by Eric Thomas

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!

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.

3) My friend Nick from Bookthinkers just released his first book, called Rise of the Reader. He sent me an early copy and it’s really, REALLY good so far.

I mean, he’s my friend so of course I’d say that, but it’s also, ACTUALLY good.

It’s aimed more at beginner readers to help them read and retain more, but I’ve been reading books for a long time (and professionally now), and I’m still taking great notes from the book. I highly recommend it!

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 the professional Life Enjoyer, Eddy Quan! He and I cross paths every so often on X, and my day always starts to go better whenever they do.

What IS a professional Life Enjoyer, anyway? Hmm?

I’ll just hand you over to Eddy himself, who actually LIVES this stuff:

“My name is Eddy Quan.

Like many people, I had a normal office job working 40-60 hours per week in a fluorescent-lit cubicle.

I sat on a bus for 90 minutes every morning in peak hour traffic so I could sit in a cubicle to look at Excel spreadsheets for 8 hours a day. I then spent another 90 minutes every afternoon commuting in peak-hour traffic to get home.

I found this routine to be highly Unenjoyable.

It was hard to admit at first but the career I had spent my entire life preparing for was making me miserable.

That all changed when I became a Professional Life Enjoyer. 

These days I enjoy simple things like taking royal afternoon naps, eating a few slices of cold watermelon on a hot day and reading books.

I like to keep things simple. I hate complication. I make all of my income by posting on social media and writing daily emails. I enjoy what I do.

My philosophy is simple: Do things you Enjoy and help others get more Enjoyment out of Life.

The goal of this account is to show you how to get more Enjoyment out of life as much as humanly possible…To get you to stop doing the Unenjoyable things everyone tells you to do and start living the life you have always wanted. The life of a Professional Life Enjoyer.”

And that just about sums it up! I’ve been following him on X for a while now, and like I said, my life has just gone better once I had. You can also sign up for his newsletter here. 

2) Next up is someone I don’t know personally, but I’ve been subscribed to his AI newsletter for the last few months (along with hundreds of thousands of other people) and wanted to pass his name along to you.

His name is Zain Kahn, and he writes Superhuman, which is read by more than 500,000 people, including me. What’s really insane is that this all happened within just the last few years.

I’m not sure EXACTLY when he started the newsletter, but I DON’T think it was before 2022, and to have THAT kind of growth in such a short time…man.

Obviously, AI is a complicated, fascinating subject, and so the market was there.

But he saw the need, created an amazing newsletter with all the best coverage (today I’m reading about how AI agents could be the future of work), and then blew up the newsletter within a super fast timeframe.

This isn’t a sponsored placement or anything, either - Zain might not even know who I am. I’m just enjoying Superhuman and thought you might too!

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!

📚 The Nous, by Jon Brooks: A practical philosophy newsletter full of tools, tips, and anecdotes to help you live better. Trusted by 6,500+ readers.

📚 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.

📚 Sahil Bloom’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.

📚 The Imperfectionist: Oliver Burkeman’s twice-monthly email on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.

📚 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!

I mentioned this book a few weeks ago and told you how excited I was to read it, but I'm mentioning it again because now I've actually started reading it, and it's every bit as good as I thought it was going to be!

Eric Jorgenson is an author who, when he comes out with a new book, I just buy it, no questions asked.

I’ve written a complete breakdown of one of his earlier books, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (highly recommend), and I’ve even read his super-short but super-valuable Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People.

As for Balaji Srinivasan, he's an angel investor and author of The Network State, and here’s what Eric’s Anthology is all about:

"Want to sit with Balaji and spend a few hours deep in conversation to absorb all of his biggest ideas?

That’s exactly what this book feels like. It has all of the most useful and timeless ideas from tweets, podcasts, and essays across his entire career.

Balaji is a brilliant entrepreneur, investor, and futurist. Applying his unique perspective will help you see opportunities, identify breakthrough technologies, and build something tremendous.

This book is a guide to thinking for yourself, seeing possible futures, and learning how to build a piece of the future. By reading this book, you might pick the next great investment, start a billion-dollar company, or start an entirely new country."

"Regret is not dangerous or abnormal, a deviation from the steady path to happiness. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Regret is also valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn't drag us down; it can lift us up."

-Daniel H. Pink, The Power of Regret

It's more or less a universal human experience to look back on the path we never followed and feel a nagging, painful, sometimes sinking, sickening feeling that we've somehow missed our chance, that we've traded our many unlived lives for this one, real life, and that it could have been so much better had we simply acted differently.

Virtually everyone has experienced something to the same effect, ranging from the "that might have been nice," to the "damn, I really should have done that," all the way to the "I've thrown it all away and I'll never, ever recover from this."

Anyone who says that they have no regrets is also usually viewed with suspicion by most people who have taken the time to reflect on their own personal history.

In this book, The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink refers to regret as our most misunderstood emotion and shows how it can potentially be transformed, transmuted into something extraordinarily valuable. We can reflect on our regret, reorganize it in our minds, reconceptualize it, and then use it to live better with all the time we have left.

What's more, navigating regret (and life) is always an ongoing process of closing certain opportunities while at the same time opening new ones. Every action we take determines the possibilities that are available to us in the next moment, and we are always choosing, even when we do nothing.

But we are not helpless against regret, as Daniel Pink argues in this book. We can enlist this misunderstood, potentially painful emotion in service of living a larger life, gaining redemption, and reclaiming at least a portion of our remaining unlived lives.

“Once 4% of your assets can cover your expenses, consider yourself financially independent. Put another way, financial independence = 25x your annual expenses.

That is, if you are living on $20,000, you have reached financial independence with $500,000 invested. If, like our friend Mike Tyson, you are living on $400,000 a month/$4.8 million a year, you’re going to need $120 million.”

-JL Collins, The Simple Path to Wealth

If you make more than you spend, you'll always be rich. The 4% Rule has to do with calculating how much you need to have invested in order to stop working and to live off the interest that your investments generate.

Depending on who you are, your financial habits, and the basic structure of your life, your number will be different than other people's numbers. This is as it should be. Your situation will differ from mine (and from virtually everybody else's), and we all need to arrive at our own version of "enough."

In the quote above, there are a few things I'll have to expand on in order to give you more context surrounding this. First, the number 4% is based on the conservative assumption that your investments will grow at a rate of about 8% per year.

Obviously, some years in the stock market will be better or worse than others, but it's been a reliable, reproducible finding over time that withdrawing at 4% per year works for most people.

The "rule" was first developed in 1988 (and updated in 2009) by three professors who ran computer simulations to test the impact of different percentage withdrawal rates on various portfolios over a 30-year period. Over that 30-year period, the researchers found that a portfolio split 50-50 between stocks and bonds, with a 4% withdrawal rate adjusted for inflation, remained stable 96% of the time.

To make the rule more concrete, you can imagine that you've calculated your yearly living expenses to be about $100,000. That's a lot of money to some people in some places, and not very much at all to other people with different lifestyles and in different countries.

But if you multiply that number by 25, you get $2,500,000, and if you assume a 4% yearly gain, you reach $2,600,00, meaning that you can withdraw $100,000 for your living expenses without even touching the principal. That's the 4% Rule.

You can do all the calculations yourself (and I highly recommend that you do!) and you'll see that there is an actual number that you can shoot for that, once reached, will allow you to live in relative freedom and security for the rest of your natural life. This is powerful information to know!

One of the traps lying in wait for you, however, is that of lifestyle inflation, whereby your living expenses keep going up and up to match your increased income. If you fall prey to lifestyle inflation, it will never matter how much money you make, because it will never be enough.

So now you have a concrete goal, and the task ahead of you is to organize your entire financial life so that you're moving inexorably towards that goal with everything you do. As Charlie Munger said, that first $100,000 is a bitch, but you'll also have the power of compounding working in your favor too, as long as you remain focused on the goal and keep contributing to your investment account.

Obviously, nothing in life is guaranteed, and once you do reach financial independence, it's not like all your troubles will be over and you'll live in perfect bliss and total satisfaction for the rest of your life. Life is change, uncertainty, movement, and transformation. But as JL Collins says (and even he's being more careful here):

“Withdrawing 3% or less annually is as near a sure bet as anything in this life can be.”

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 .

The only two places in the entire WORLD where every single person is welcome are the gym and the library. If you're new to either one of those places, or maybe you don't feel like you really belong there, this video is for you. You DO belong there, and in this video, I'm going to prove it to you. So enjoy the video, share it with someone you think needs to see it, and hey...happy reading (and lifting)!

I experience mixed feelings whenever someone recommends a book or a song that came out years ago and which I’m just discovering now. One part of me is grateful for the recommendation, but another part of me says, “This came out years ago and I’m only discovering it now?!” These are 4 books that might do the same thing to do. Sorry, not sorry. [ Read Time: 6 Mins ]

My life has been changed by a book a thousand times, and it always seems like a fresh fireworks display being set off between my ears. That’s really the only way — or the best way — I can explain the impact of a book that hits you just right. It’s nearly as hard as trying to explain a rainbow to someone who’s never seen one. But that’s kinda what you’re in for here. [Read Time: 6 Mins ]

Children can sense when they're being devalued; they can sense when an adult truly and honestly cares for them and when they don't, and they can always, always spot a fraud.

Fred Rogers, or Mister Rogers to all of his television friends, was one of the most inspiring early childhood educators ever, and he brought his message of care, affection, and unconditional love to millions of children over the course of his 50-year career in broadcasting. He was the real deal, and children could feel it.

The Good Neighbor is a biography of Fred Rogers, one with astonishing personal stories on nearly every page.

Like the time when Oprah lost control of her own television show during a taping because every child in the audience was so powerfully drawn to Mister Rogers; or when the TV station held an event where children could come and meet Mister Rogers, and thousands of kids showed up, lining up for miles and blocking the street like it was a college football game or something.

However, no matter how long the line was, he would always, always get down on one knee, look each kid in the eye, and make sure they knew that they mattered. He took kids and their questions seriously, and he saw the best in them, which made it possible for them to bring out the best in themselves.

“For Fred Rogers, it was always this way when he was with children, in person, or on his hugely influential program.

Every weekday, this soft-spoken man talked directly into the camera to address his television ‘neighbors’ in the audience as he changed from his street clothes into his iconic cardigan and sneakers.

Children responded so powerfully, so completely, to Rogers that everything else in their world seemed to fall away as he sang, ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.’

Then his preschool-age fans knew that he was fully engaged as Mister Rogers, their adult friend who valued his viewers ‘just the way you are.’”

***

“Millions of his viewers grew up to be adults who hold on to those values and maintain a loyalty to Fred and his work.

He exemplified a life lived by the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ found in some form in almost every religion and philosophy throughout history.

His lesson is as simple and direct as Fred was: Human kindness will always make life better.”

***

“The first week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood saw Mister Rogers enjoying a home visit from Mrs. Saunders, an African American teacher, and a small interracial group of her students.

It was a simple visit with a hard-hitting message: whites and blacks live, study, and play together in the Neighborhood.”

***

“He spoke to us as the people we were, not as the people others wished we were.”

Another random bookstore find. This is a sparse, dystopian novel that will stay with me for quite a while. The “book hangover” from this one lasted a long time! 

Actually, the more you think about the book, and consider the structure – the hidden meanings, the references – the more you come to appreciate the craft and the care that went into writing it.

Not surprisingly, it was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, it and the author have received a crazy number of other literary awards, and it has been favorably compared to 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and others. 

The basic plot is that, on an unnamed island, the unnamed narrator tells of the “disappearances” from the island of things like photographs, novels, and even birds, and she explains how it’s the job of the Memory Police to find people who still remember - and eliminate them. 

Or at least “disappear” them as well since it’s never really clear what happens to them once the Memory Police take them away. 

That’s what’s so eerie and cool about this book: hardly any of the main characters are named (there’s “R”, her editor, “the old man,” her closest friend, etc.) – nothing is fixed in time or place, and that gives this novel a disorienting, uncomfortable feel that meshes perfectly with its exploration of memory, loss, and significance.  

The ending, too is just…phenomenal. I’m so glad I picked up this book in a bookstore I forget the name of, on an island I rarely go to, during a time in my life I’ll never forget.

“The room had changed completely. The traces of my father’s presence, which I had done my best to preserve, had vanished, replaced by an emptiness that would not be filled. I stood in the middle of that emptiness, feeling myself on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth.”

***

“The moon and the stars were nowhere to be seen, as though they had been scattered by the brilliance of the flames, and only the corpses of burned books lit the sky.”

***

“‘No one can erase the stories!’ The last words she said as they dragged her away were the only ones I was able to understand clearly.”

***

“’Do you really have to go?’ he asked, gathering to his chest the air he held in his hands. ‘Good-bye…’ The last traces of my voice were frail and hoarse. ‘Good-bye.’ For a very long time, he sat staring at the void in his palms.

When at last he had convinced himself that there was nothing left, he let his arms drop wearily. Then he climbed the ladder one rung at a time, lifted the trapdoor, and went out into the world.

Sunlight came streaming in for one moment but vanished again as the door creaked shut. The faint sound of the rug being rolled out on the floor came to me from above. Closed in the hidden room, I continued to disappear.”

While the rest of the world thinks we're playing checkers, readers of this book will know that we're actually playing chess instead. The greatest Grand Masters in chess plan many, many moves ahead, and the best players in the game of life tend to do the same thing. That's what The Long Game is all about.

Creating the white space in our lives necessary in order to step back and take in the whole picture is one of the goals of this book, and here Dorie Clark presents a ton of high-level concepts to help you make this kind of thinking more common in your daily life.

Your personal goals need a long-term strategy, and this book will help you craft one for yourself. It will encourage you to "think in decades" and help you to think bigger. In this breakdown, we're also going to cover several extremely important ideas such as strategic patience, raindrops of success, and more. We're going to uncover the truth about ridiculous goals and how to tell if what you're doing right now is working.

We're going to see how we can create opportunities for ourselves that give us "two ways to win, and no way to lose." We're also going to internalize the power of compound interest, and clear the chessboard with devastating long-term moves that the other players never saw coming.

“The whole point of playing the long game is understanding that ridiculous goals are ridiculous right now – not forever.

When we force ourselves to take our goals to extremes – What would ultimate success look like? – we can create an honest road map for ourselves. It might take five years, or ten, or twenty. But that time will pass anyway.

If a goal is worth pursuing, it’s worth pursuing the version of it we actually want – not one that’s watered down to protect our ego.”

***

“In the moment, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s not working or whether it’s not working yet.”

***

“What I’ve come to love about patience is that, ultimately, it’s the truest test of merit: Are you willing to do the work, despite no guaranteed outcome? 

We earn our success by toiling without recognition, accolades, or even any certainty that it’s going to come to fruition. We have to take it on faith and do it anyway. That’s strategic patience.”

***

“The rate of payoff for persevering during those dark days isn’t linear. It’s exponential.”

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

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

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

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

“Each of us spends every moment of our life, from the moment we’re born to the moment we die, wanting something. We even want in our sleep. Yet few people ever take the time to understand how they come to want things in the first place. Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn.”

***

“Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy. It passes from person to person like the energy between people at a concert or political rally.

This energy can lead to a cycle of positive desire, in which healthy desires gain momentum and lead to other healthy desires, uniting people in positive ways; or it can become a cycle of negative desire, in which mimetic rivalries lead to conflict and discord.”

***

“There are always models of desire. If you don’t know yours, they are probably wreaking havoc in your life.”

***

“The danger is not that we have a slot machine in our pockets. The danger is that we have a dream machine in our pockets. Smartphones project the desires of billions of people to us through social media, Google searches, and restaurant and hotel reviews.

The neurological addictiveness of smartphones is real; but our addiction to the desires of others, which smartphones give us unfettered access to, is the metaphysical threat.

Mimetic desire is the real engine of social media. Social media is social mediation – and it now brings nearly all of our models inside our personal world. We live in Freshmanistan. Each of us has to examine what this means in our life – how mimetic desire manifests itself in the circumstances we’re in, and how we should live.

This new world represents a threat but also an opportunity. Which new pathways of desire will emerge? Which new opportunities can we seize? How can we infect and be infected by desires that will ultimately lead to fulfillment and not to destruction?

These are the questions that we’ll finally have to ask and answer as individuals, and as a society.”

I confess to never having listened to John Lee Dumas’s podcast, Entrepreneur on Fire, but man, what a book!

This business book is currently flying safely under the radar, but you can learn so much from this one, especially if you’re closer to being a beginner. If you have a “crazy idea” that you want to make real, this is a book you may want to read with a notebook handy.

It’s a practical, step-by-step guide to starting anything, but it follows his entrepreneurial journey specifically to build his ultra-popular podcast from the ground up.

That is to say, from idea, to vetting that idea, to structuring what it would even look like and sound like, how he’d promote it and grow it, how he’d overcome challenges along the way -  he even solves problems and answers questions most of us wouldn’t even think to ask about. 

The whole book has this authentic, “I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing-but-let’s-figure-it-out” energy that comes with extreme credibility because of the results he’s achieved for himself by following the same process from nothing, to small flicker of an idea, to a thriving business.

Ideally, you want to learn from entrepreneurs who have actually started successful businesses, and John Lee Dumas easily passes this test.

It’s also not just for podcasts, either. You can substitute pretty much any other business you might want to start for “podcast” in the book, and the advice still works. That’s because it’s about in-the-trenches stuff like sending cold emails, gathering customer feedback, conducting market research, enlisting support, building out your business systems, etc. 

The focus throughout the book is on building a real business, one that gets you paid, that allows you the space to create something you’re proud of, and that allows you to serve the people who end up finding you along the way.

“If you provide the best solution to a real problem, you will find uncommon success.”

***

“What is something I wish existed in the world but doesn’t?”

***

“We did not tolerate skipping meetings and kept in touch to make sure we were on track with our weekly goals. Projects I would have procrastinated on got finished because I was not willing to face my mastermind and admit failure.

That special blend of friendly yet serious accountability is key to achieving consistent success. It pushed all of us to greater heights than we would have attained alone.”

***

“If you’re too busy to build good systems, then you’ll always be too busy.”

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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