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Five Books Friday
"Once you learn to read, you will be forever free." -Frederick Douglass
Matt Karamazov
December 09, 2023 ā¢ Estimated Reading Time: 40 minutes
YOUTUBEĀ šĀ THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEĀ šĀ PATREON
Read on The Reading Life.com | Read Time: ~20 Minutes (Skimmable)
šHey, good evening!
Oh man, what a week.
Recently, I heard someone say that running a business was like chewing on broken glass while getting punched in the face, andā¦
Yea, that just about sums it up!
It was a good week for books (and for business too, actually), but man is this game tough! It will take everything you have and then force you to call upon personal, inner resources you didnāt even KNOW that you had.
But hey, Iām not complaining, and to PREVENT myself from complaining, letās just start talking about booksā¦
Here are the books I finished this week:
Rise of the Reader, by Nick Hutchison (Great reading tips from an extremely passionate reader and business owner! Loved it!
The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson (Collection of brilliant and optimistic ideas about the future of humanity and technology!)
No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits, by Dan S. Kennedy (Tough-minded business book for entrepreneurs more interested in earning profits than being liked.)
Same as Ever, by Morgan Housel (Amazing, amazing, amazing book about the things that will never change!)
The 4 Minute Millionaire, by Niklas GÓ§ke (Very good - but not amazing - book about investing and growing your money.)
I also spent much of the week working on updates for my time management course, Time Mastery, and Iāve got even more new lessons/trainings set to release early next week!
But Iāll you guys about those when theyāre ready. Letās get into todayās Five Books!
Today we've got...
šĀ An introduction to today's "Five Books"
šØ The book quote of the week
š¢Ā My personal news, along with the best of what I'm reading and sharing right now
š©Ā Five of my favorite newsletters that I always open
šĀ A new book alert: featuring an extremely well-researched book about a current cultural crisis
šĀ The latest book breakdown from the Stairway to Wisdom
ā°Ā āTime Auditsā and why you should perform them regularly
š² The BEST productivity app that NOBODY uses
šŖ Arnoldās new book is the most Schwarzenegger thing Iāve ever read
š§ Ā The brutal reality of what āwhatever it takesā ACTUALLY means
š My top 5 book recommendations this week
š A special gift for reading all the way to the end
In one sentenceā¦
Learn, Improve, Master is the most practical, down-to-earth, yet inspiring book about learning and skill acquisition that you're ever likely to find.
Discover the Immeasurable is an uncompromising yet compassionate book by one of my favorite philosophers about unlearning cultural conditioning, escaping the known, and opening yourself up to the unknown.
The Writing Life is one of my favorite books about writing (obviously), and itās so funny, witty, and wise that I find myself recommending it all the time.
Your Next Five Moves is aĀ business classic, written by one of the biggest breakout entrepreneurial success stories of the modern era where he lays out his personal playbook for how you can out-think, out-plan, and out-execute your competition in the fight they never even saw coming.
The Bed of Procrustes is a collection of 500+ aphorisms that are like lightning bolts to your prefrontal cortex, challenging you to reconsider your received opinions about life, love, money, religion, and everything else that we can't stop thinking about.
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 .
āNevertheless we ought to mix up these two things, and to pass our lives alternately in solitude and among throngs of people; for the former will make us long for the society of mankind, the latter for that of ourselves, and the one will counteract the other: solitude will cure us when we are sick of crowds, and crowds will cure us when we are sick of solitude.ā
1) Thereās really NOT a whole lot of news this week, as Iāve basically been fighting back this crashing, towering, tidal wave of work thatās been building up around me. I have a ton of projects on the go at any one time!
Havenāt decided whether thatās a weakness or a strength, an asset or a liability.
But luckily, Iām actually pretty decent at this time management stuff, and Iāve been able to make good progress across the board.
Iāll make it, itās just that I havenāt really led a very interesting week this week!
2) Oh, actually, hereās something! I finally made it to 1,000+ subscribers on YouTube! Thanks, everyone! More book videos coming your way soon!
3) A few great books that I'm reading right now are Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Paul Hendrickson,Ā The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson, and Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes!
I'm also listening to Ā Living Untethered, by Michael A. Singer on Audible. Itās read by him, which is usually what I look for in an audiobook! I donāt 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 Ā right hereĀ .
š 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.
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.
š Habit Examples: Build better habits with sciencey tips and inspiring stories. Read in 5 mins every Tuesday.
š Sahil Bloomās 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.
š The Imperfectionist: Oliver Burkemanās twice-monthly email on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.
š Start Your Own Newsletter with Beehiiv: This is the email platform I use personally to support all my publications: The Reading Life, The Competitive Advantage, and Stairway to Wisdom. I recently switched to Beehiiv and I will never, ever go back!
āI wrote this book with a singular goal - to drag a problem no one wants to talk about kicking and screaming into the light, and force people to look at it. No one gets out unscathed. The clip fully unloads. I pull no punches. I leave no stone unturned. I want all the smoke.ā
My friend Samās book came out today, and it represents an enormous amount of deep thinking, introspection, and concern about the challenges confronting men all over the world in the 21st century.
In the book, he backs up his claims that society has turned its back on men with more than 900 in-text citations showing both the why and the how.
In his words:
Toxic Immaturity is comprised of two ingredients- the cultural influences that have helped shifted against men, and (far more importantly) the complete impotence of men to do anything to stop them. It is men who have brought this problem upon themselves. It is men who must fix themselves.
All other groups throughout history who have faced massive struggle (women, minorities, etc) all got where they are because they grew spines and fought for it. Men are where they are because they have done neither. To change that, Toxic Immaturity must be destroyed, with men leading the charge.
Hereās the book description from Amazon to give you even more context:
Contrary to popular opinion, it is men, not women, who are in a tailspin. Through events in recent history and the inability of men to take responsibility for them, masculinity has been pummeled. Men are struggling to survive and seem to be doing everything possible to destroy themselves in the process. The lack of men rising to their true calling is the genesis of all the ills of the modern male identity.
Toxic Immaturityāthe manifestation of both areas of masculine and societal dysfunctionāhas caused disastrous results for men. Death rates are up, drug abuse is through the roof, and rates of failure across every area of life are getting higher by the day. To get men, and the world, back on track, Toxic Immaturity must be analyzed, detailed, and destroyed at its roots. Taking you on a crusade from ancient history all the way through modern culture, Sam LaCrosse paints a vivid picture of one of societyās greatest threatsāthe lack of masculinity in a world that needs it.
Because it is a world without masculinity that is truly toxic.
āThe multiple demands on an entrepreneurās time are extraordinary. I am here to tell you that you need to take extraordinary measures to match those demands. Measures so radical and extreme that others may question your sanity.
This is no ordinary time management book for the deskbound or the person doing just one job.
This book is expressly for the wearer of many hats, the inventive, opportunistic entrepreneur who canāt resist piling more and more responsibility onto his own shoulders, who has many more great ideas than time and resources to take advantage of them, and who runs (not walks) through each day. Iām you, and this is our book.ā
This book could add years to your life, and that's not an exaggeration in the slightest. It'll certainly save you thousands of hours worth of the most precious natural resource in this universe: time.
Dan Kennedy is the multimillionaire author of an entire series of books for entrepreneurs, but this one can and probably should be read by just about everyone, if for no other reason than that Dan's one of the very few people I've encountered who truly and honestly - viscerally understands the true value of time.
He understands its supreme importance, its utter irreplaceability, and also, in the case of entrepreneurship, how to turn time into wealth. That's what this book is about. It's about more than "just" money though.
Dan's is a radical, obsessive approach to time management that may be your best defense against the relentless onslaughts of what he calls "Time Vampires" and the relentless demands on your time, focus, and attention that come with living in the modern world.
Simply put, he's a phenomenon. For starters, the guy almost exclusively communicates with his business clients via fax. This is because he found that way more thought tends to go into a fax, as opposed to when you hand over your email address and anyone can bother you at any time with the smallest thing that popped into their head. But he's even more extreme than that.
I mean, fax machine...that's pretty extreme, and there are people who misunderstand the true purpose of forcing people to communicate with him that way. But he also surrounds himself with intense, visual reminders of the relentless passing of time, such as the hangman's noose he has facing him at his desk. Not. Subtle.
For out-of-town clients, he also never travels to them, and to eliminate this risk demands that they pay for a private jet(!) if they want him to come to them. Again, this is easy to denounce as "diva" behavior from a man playing power games because he can. But I stress again that this is not the point.
Faced with a choice of taking a cheaper flight to come and see him, or paying for Kennedy to fly private, they just end up coming to him, saving him who-knows-how-many hours of travel. Time he could more profitably put into his business, his writing, and his life.Ā It's all strategy.
If you have more ideas than time, you'll find exactly what you're looking for in this book. Still, I would encourage you to look beyond his specific implementation and find what will work for you. He's not suggesting that everyone demand to be flown around in private jets and only use fax machines; he's just trying to get you to realize that your time has to be protected at all costs against its thoughtless and/or malicious waste.
The supreme importance of remaining hyper-conscious of the passing of time is also stressed in this book. Too many people seem to be okay with trading their lives for likes on social media, wasting infinitely valuable hours on apps whose very business model depends on getting you addicted. Like a casino! More on that in Key Idea #1.
All told, this is definitely a book you may want to keep close by as you start taking back your calendar, dodging pointless meetings, and driving stakes into the hearts of Time Vampires. I came away with 15 full pages of notes, and Dan's strategies and outlook made a profound difference in how I live my life and how I spend my time - which is pretty much the same thing.
The best way to start managing your time is to figure out where youāre spending it now.
I'm always surprised (and a little horrified) when I run into people who know EXACTLY where their money has gone but can't remember ANYTHING about how they spent their time.
This is exactly backward.
But by tracking your time (performing regular ātime auditsā), you can begin to spot inefficiencies right away and make better plans in the future to help you avoid common errors.
Most people will never do this, which is why most people will never have enough time.
I made a (very) short video about it for my new time management course, Time Mastery, which isnāt free, but which you can preview here.Ā
You can get as detailed as you want, but I recommend tracking your time in half-hour blocks and, at the end of each half-hour, simply recording what you did during that time.
Then, using this information, you can guard against similar inefficiencies in the future. Repeat regularly.
Further Reading: Time Mastery
Note: This is a sample from my other newsletter, Stairway to Wisdom. Along with the in-depth book breakdowns, youāll receive a premium weekly newsletter packed with insights and ideas like this one. Get your 14-day free trial right hereĀ .
Alright, so it's not technically an "app" - it's a phone setting - but it's DAMN useful, and I use it literally every single day when I'm reading or otherwise engaged in deep work.
Here in this video, I explain what it is, break down why itās so powerful, and lay out a few reasons why this one simple change could make a BIG impact on your time management and effectiveness.
As youāll see, this is not a hit piece on Arnold Schwarzenegger. His new book, Be Useful, is actually phenomenal (I took 5+ pages of notes), but thereās something up with Arnoldās brain, and we should probably talk about it. I also share 10+ other book recommendations in this post too.Ā [Ā Read Time: 14 MinsĀ ]
It took me longer than it should have to realize that my friends werenāt calling me as often as they used to.
Some of them even completely disappeared from view, and I was too deep into āMonk Modeā to notice.
Working 12ā to 16-hour days, hammering and chiseling away at my Vision, some days recording a dozen YouTube videos and Instagram reels in a row, other days spending an hour nearly crushed under a heavy bar, refusing to leave until I had given everything.
People everywhere seem to want extreme success, really fast, but this is what it takes. And most people simply arenāt willing to pay the price that extreme success demands. Are you? Am I? [Read Time: 6 MinsĀ ]
The athletic, artistic, and intellectual achievements of the great masters have always seemed so...magical. So...unattainable. Beyond anything we could ever hope to replicate. Until now.
In Learn, Improve, Master, Nick Velasquez pulls back the curtain on skill acquisition and mastery and shows that high proficiency and expertise isn't something reserved for a chosen few, but something that's attainable for all of us.
Attainable, that is, if we follow the proven principles of practice and learning as laid out in this book. Attainable does not, of course, mean easy. In choosing to become more than "just okay" at something, we are choosing to commit to a level of discipline and focus uncommon in the eyes of many.
If you've ever seen someone excel at the highest level of athletics; if you've ever seen someone perfectly execute a spectacular dance move, put together a phenomenal meal, or spellbound an audience with a stirring speech and wanted to do that too, this book will work with you to make that a reality.
āLearning is the greatest power of the human mind. Everything we've built, everything we've created, everything we've become has been the result of our ability to learn. And this great power is inherent in all of us. We are made to learn."
***
āThe principles we've covered - neuroplasticity, specialization, association, chunking, and automation - are the foundation of all learning.
Our brain rewires itself through practice, creating clusters of neural connections composed of associations between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that specialize in what we repeatedly do. When reinforced, these connections move from our conscious awareness to our subconscious, becoming almost automatic.
Then, our conscious mind is free again to process new tasks and add complexity to our growing abilities. Whether we go into French cooking, sculpting, or golf, these are the processes taking place behind the scenes as we learn. And they change the way we think as much as they change the physical structures of our brain."
***
āOur focus must be on the fundamentals of our craft: the moves, knowledge, and techniques that are most frequently used and that make the strongest impact. These parts form the base for everything else and are essential for mastering the skill."
***
"Meta-learning (learning how to learn) should be the skill that precedes all others. Knowing the principles and strategies of effective learning will maximize the time and energy we put into anything else, as well as optimize our work in improving and mastering our chosen craft."
When he was a young man, Krishnamurti was "discovered" by one of the leading members of the Theosophical Society and groomed to become a new World Teacher, someone who would guide the evolution of mankind through his teachings and lead humanity into a new era.
An organization was even founded to support this aim - The Order of the Star - but in August of 1929, Krishnamurti suddenly stepped down from his position and dissolved the entire organization. He did this after a short but epic speech titled, "Truth is a Pathless Land," where he asserted that no organization can ever lead a person to discover truth; there is no authority that can ever replace the need for an honest, searching inquiry into the fundamental nature of reality.
For the next 60 years, he traveled all over the world giving public talks and speaking with individuals about the vital importance of deep, personal meditation, and the radical transformation of the human psyche.
Discover the Immeasurable contains a series of six lectures given by J. Krishnamurti in the Fall of 1956, where he speaks about the inherently evil nature of authority, the constant flow of existence, and how the structure of our current society and even our own minds perpetuates needless conflict, misery, and tragedy.
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.
"I maintain that no organization can lead man to spirituality. If an organization be created for this purpose, it becomes a crutch, a weakness, a bondage, and must cripple the individual, and prevent him from growing, from establishing his uniqueness, which lies in the discovery for himself of that absolute, unconditioned Truth."
***
āThe individual problem is the world problem. It is what we are as individuals that create society, society being the relationship between ourselves and others. I am speaking ā and please believe it ā as one individual to another, so that together we may understand the many problems that confront us.
I am not establishing myself as an authority to tell you what to do because I do not believe in authority in spiritual matters. All authority is evil, and all sense of authority must cease, especially if we would find out what is God, what is truth, whether there is something beyond the mere measure of the mind. That is why it is very important for the individual to understand himself.ā
***
āTo understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still; but if I think I am going to achieve stillness at some future date, I have destroyed the possibility of stillness. It is now or never. That is a very difficult thing to understand because we are all thinking of heaven in terms of time.ā
***
āThere is no āgoodā conditioning or ābadā conditioning ā there is only freedom from all conditioning.ā
You can finish this book in just a few hours (itās only about 90 pages long) and if youāre a writer, or you think you might want to be one, it will stay with you for a very long time. That was the case for me, as I kept coming back to my notes on this book for weeks after I finished it.
The Writing Life is one of the top āadvice for writersā books, right alongside Bird by Bird, On Writing (Stephen King and Charles Bukowski - different books, same title), Draft No 4, and Consider This, among others. Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for another book of hers, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and sheās been writing up a storm for decades. Novels, narrative nonfiction, essays, etc. In this book, she shares her absolute best tips and tricks.
Sheās been described as a āgregarious recluse,ā as sheās far more comfortable out in her cabin on the West Coast of the US than in the city, but she welcomes you right in as a fellow writer, artist, and creative, and lets you in on everything sheās been thinking about when it comes to crafting the perfect sentence, connecting to readers, seeing as a writer, dealing with the monotony of the writing life, and everything else that comes with dedicating oneself to words.
I really donāt see how, if you want to be a writer, you canāt just devote like, a couple of hours to reading one of the best books out there on how to be a better writer. Sheāll explain the real purpose of setting a schedule and sticking to it, the differences between and advantages of several competing writing styles, how to dig deeper in your writing and come up with insights and lessons that are unavailable to those unable to sit still and wait, and how to deal with the vicissitudes of the writing life.
Even if youāre not a writer, you should still read it, if for no other reason than to see how a master craftswoman does it.
āHow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.ā
***
āA schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.ā
***
āThe impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."
***
āI was working hard, although of course it did not seem hard enough at the time - a finished chapter every few weeks. I castigated myself daily for writing too slowly. Even when passages seemed to come easily, as though I were copying from a folio held open by smiling angels, the manuscript revealed the usual signs of struggle - bloodstains, teeth marks, gashes, and burns."
Your Next Five Moves completely overwhelmed my expectations going into it and provided me with a wealth of business and leadership knowledge in just a few hours that I'll be able to use and profit from for the rest of my natural life.
Such is the power of reading!
Bet-David himself is a huge proponent of reading, gathering knowledge from wherever he can find it, and learning from people he disagrees with. That's one of his strongest competitive advantages, in fact, and this book is just laced with competitive advantages you can adopt for yourself too.
What's more, he earned the wisdom he's dispensing in these pages, having literally escaped from Iran as a child, joined the U.S. army as a young man, and launched a stratospherically successful company (several of them, in fact) as an adult. I came into this book cold, and now I usually stop my scroll immediately and listen whenever I see Bet-David show up on my screen.
Your Next Fives Moves is a high-level, high-impact playbook for how you can maximize your effectiveness in five areas: gaining self-knowledge, mastering the ability to reason, developing and building the right team, learning strategy to scale, and deploying power plays that will help you negotiate more effectively and take down some of the biggest competitors in your industry. This book will show you how to do it all.
The overarching theme of this book is the absolute necessity of thinking several moves ahead if you want to succeed in business, especially if you want to make a bigger impact than just earning a comfortable living. Thereās nothing wrong with having a goal like that ā something I love Patrick for emphasizing ā but if you do decide to set bigger goals for yourself, you need to develop a work ethic to match.
Your discipline has to be as unshakable as your dreams are large, or youāre just not going to get there.
Moreover, we all need to understand that the most important person youāll ever study will be yourself. Yet, most people are so concerned with other people and what theyāre doing that they never take the time and make the effort to gain invaluable self-knowledge. In this book, Patrick Bet-David clearly and lucidly lays out why this is a tragic misstep that you need to avoid at all costs.
He also argues - again, rightly - that what separates average business owners from exceptional leaders and entrepreneurial visionaries is the ability to anticipate future events and plan effectively well before they actually happen. By thinking, planning, and strategizing at least five moves ahead.
Your competition isn't doing this.
Your meager competition isn't doing this, I should say. The competitors you should be worried about absolutely are thinking several moves ahead, and if you want to play at the same level as them you need to elevate the quality and substance of everything that you're doing in your business.
You need to combine devastatingĀ offense with awesome defense and then you have to move forward with sickening consistency and unrelenting passion.
This is how you separate yourself. This is how you enter the highest echelons of business and show the world that you deserve to be there.
When the rest of the people you're competing against are mired in today's problems and dealing with the challenges threatening their existence right now, you'll be living, thinking, planning, and acting in a larger, brighter, more distant future that they will just never be able to get to.
This book will help you outwork, out-improve, out-strategize, and outlast your competition, and itās written by someone whoās actually done the work himself; heās done exactly what heās telling his readers to do, and that kind of accountability and authenticity is something you hold onto for dear life once youāve found it in a person.
None of this is going to happen by accident, just like Patrick Bet-David didn't just "stumble" into his massive success. It was intentional, it was planned, and by utilizing the strategies he lays out in this book, it became damn near inevitable.
āYour vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.ā
***
āA visionary is someone who is not living in the here and now. He or she has already seen at least five moves ahead and is living in that reality.ā
***
āYou must act like a great entrepreneur long before you ever become one.ā
***
āThe pain of owning a business is too great to tolerate just for money.ā
You thought you knew exactly how the world works. You thought you had the major answers all figured out, and that your personal picture of reality was fully updated. But then, you happen to read just one perfectly-crafted aphorism, quote, or sentence, and then you realized that "Yes! Actually, the world is like that!"
Now imagine an entire book that's like that, containing more than 500 such lightning bolts to the prefrontal cortex, and you'd get something like The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Taleb.
It's a collection of aphorisms (memorable expressions of a general truth or principle), that investigate opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we donāt understand. It's also extremely thought-provoking and wise, with valuable insights concerning every vital part of life that we deal with each day.
āThey will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom."
***
āNever say no twice if you mean it.ā
***
āYou are free in inverse proportion to the number of people to whom you can't say 'f**k you.' But you are honorable in proportion to the number of people to whom you can say 'f**k you' with impunity but don't."
***
āāWealthyā is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the substractive measure 'unwealth,' that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have."
Todayās Five Books:
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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, Iām obsessed with sharing the magic of books and reading, and so I love it when one or more of my book recommendations āhits.ā
I also want to thank you for reading this newsletter all the way through to the end and to thank you for real, Iām going to give you a 1-month free trial to the Stairway to Wisdom.
Thatās 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!
Until next timeā¦happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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