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Five Books Friday
Matt Karamazov
February 03, 2024 ā¢ Estimated Reading Time: 29 minutes
YOUTUBEĀ šĀ THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGEĀ šĀ PATREON
Read on The Reading Life.com | Read Time: ~16 Minutes (Skimmable)
š Hey, Iām here with more books!
Tonight Iām bringing back Five Books Friday and it just occurred to me:
There are more than 1,000 new people who have signed up for this newsletter who have never experienced one of my Five Books Friday emails before!
If thatās you, welcome!
Believe it or not, I actually shortened it compared to what it used to be.
Before, it was kind of justā¦too much. All these different sections and images and on and on. I may even try to shorten it more for next time.
This February, the āthemeā in my business is one of simplification and consolidation, so Iāve been making a few changes, cuts, etc.
I wonāt bore you with the details though, so letās just get into the books!
Earlier today, I finished reading Leveling Up, by Eric Siu, a gamer-turned-successful-businessperson whose book is about āgamifyingā your life and, well, leveling up!
A recent favorite was Journey of Awakening and Higher Consciousness, by Jane Kim Yu (itās blowing up right now on Instagram), and Iām now diving into The Comfort Zone, by Kristen Butler, as well as a few other great ones!
Iāve got a few new YouTube videos coming this week, but one of my more popular recent ones is 7 Books Iād Sell My Own MOTHER to Read Again for the First Time. If youāre new to channel or the newsletter, check it out! I post plenty of video book reviews there.
There are also some updates coming on my goal setting/accountability/support community that Iām launching on Skool.com very shortly.
I wonāt say much about it now, other than that Iāll probably be moving all my courses onto that platform as well, including Time Mastery, so anyone who has bought that course before now will get free lifetime access to the new group.
That goes for the winners of the recent giveaway I just ran with my friends Kody and Merott too, but just give me a few days to work out exactly how thatās all going to go down!
I know a few people have emailed me about that, and Iāll get back to everyone soon.
Until then, letās read!
Today We've Got...
šĀ The book quote of the week
š²Ā A great book on how to make sales without selling your soul
š The latest book breakdown at The Stairway to Wisdom
š My top 5 book recommendations this week
š A special gift for reading all the way to the end
Here in this email are summaries of each book, along with a sample of my best notes, and if you want my complete set of notes on these books, you can find them on my Ā PatreonĀ .
āNo one has ever achieved anything he or she wasn't capable of. Whatever you have accomplished, you could have accomplished more. What you have done, you could have done it better."
If sales is one of the highest-paying professions in the world, then why are so many salespeople stampeding to the exit and leaving the field entirely?
Yes, sales can be an extremely lucrative profession, but if it costs you your SOUL, then the price is too high.
Fortunately, it doesnāt have to, and if you were taught that you had to be pushy, aggressive, or downright slimy in order to succeed in business, then your sales trainer obviously wasnāt Stacey Hall.
Her book, Selling From Your Comfort Zone, is one of the latest book Iāve finished this year, and now Iām recommending it to you! Simply put:
Add this book to your reading list if you want to make more sales and feel GOOD about yourself while doing it!
See, too often, people view sales as this competition between salesperson and customer. Us versus Them. I win, I get the sale, they lose, they hand over their money.
When the reality is that that model never really worked in the first place.
Sure, you can make a few sales that way, but itās not sustainable in the long term, it wonāt make you feel good about yourself while youāre on the job (or trying to get to sleep at night), and itās not going to carry you through those times when you want to quit.
Honestly, the more people start reading sales books with positive messages like this one, the sooner we can all adopt a healthier approach to sales that will also make all of us a lot more money at the same time.
It wonāt take you long to read, itāll take you a little while to practice and implement, but your customers (and your balance sheet) will thank you for it. Consider adding this book to your reading list!
āI was missing out on the worldās best kept secrets by choosing not to read.ā
It's said that the person who doesn't read books has no advantage over the person who can't read them, and this one's absolutely true.
Almost every single person you look up to, who have led great lives, accomplished magnificent things, and have elevated themselves above their initial circumstances have credited large parts of their success to a habit of lifelong, dedicated reading and a love of the profound ideas found in great books.
You almost literally can't read a biography, memoir, or even an article about someone influential and impressive in some way without hearing about how their parents read to them when they were younger, their teachers inspired a strong love of reading early on, or about how they were lucky enough to stumble upon that one book that "started it all." All three of those things happened to me too.
What I'm saying is that it can't all be a coincidence. There must be something in books, something you can't find anywhere else (at least not delivered in the same way) that propels these powerfully influential people forward in life.
The author of Rise of the Reader, Nick Hutchison, feels the same way, and he's written a wonderful book that captures the magic of what it's like to have the idea hit you that, by holding a book, you're holding decades of wisdom and experience in the palm of your hand.
Every page crackles with Nick's breathless enthusiasm for reading, and his story makes it clear that books and reading are for everyone.
The first part of the book is all about discovering (or rediscovering) what books can really do, optimizing your reading, and building on basic learning and implementation strategies that will help you move the knowledge and wisdom from the page, all the way into your actual life.
This book could have been 10 times as long if Nick had gone more in-depth on all the topics he discusses - the compound effect, note-taking, SMART goals, NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), and on and on - but that was never his intention. It's not meant to be a "complete guide" to any of these things.
Instead, he's making you aware of all the avenues open to you for self-improvement and lifestyle optimization, and for that purpose, Rise of the Reader serves beautifully.
The last half of the book is all about health, wealth, and happiness habits, and he lists more than 100 new habits to improve each, along with his personal experience with them all, further reading, options to explore, etc.
You could read 100 books, one for each habit, but he lays out all these habits in one place, which is nice. You're going to want to keep this book on your shelf within easy reach whenever you want to install a new beneficial, life-enhancing habit.
I won't oversell the book. It's very good, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but the real selling point is Nick's sheer enthusiasm for the reading life, and as he explains in the book, we all need to surround ourselves with people who are dedicated to growth, learning, self-expansion, and fulfillment.
Basically, he's one of us: he's a reader, a passionate developer of human potential, and this book can serve as excellent encouragement for you build and maintain your intention to become a rising reader yourself.
Doing well with money has a little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave.
Exploring exactly how this plays out in real life is Morgan Housel's project here, and in this book, he covers 20 of the most important logical flaws, biases, and causes of bad behavior that do the most to make the world of money such a circus.
One of his greatest observations is that knowing what to do tells you nothing about what happens in your head when you actually try to do it, and he also explains why people make decisions with money that may seem crazy to us but actually make perfect sense to them.
No one is crazy, says Housel, it's just that we've each learned different lessons about money depending on our worldview, how we were brought up, and the individual experiences we've had.
What's more, teaching behavior is hard to do, even to smart people.
You can think of finance and investing and everything technical that comes with it as hard skills, or skills that can be acquired through education, practice, and repetition, and the psychology of money as a soft skill, soft being character traits and interpersonal skills that characterize a person's relationships with other people.
In the book, he explains why gaining control over your time is one of the highest dividends money can pay, and the parts that luck and risk play in the formation of our strategies for life. He investigates the impact of desire on our financial planning, and why you should aim to be "mostly reasonable" as opposed to being coldly rational.
He also works on making you "antifragile" by making sure you eliminate any single points of failure that currently exist in your life, and introduces you to one of the most effective investment strategies ever devised, otherwise called "Shut Up and Wait."
Perhaps most importantly, Housel helps you to understand the financial perspectives of others and what their previous life experiences and current circumstances may have taught them about how money works.
No one is crazy, but the world of money is a giant circus, and The Psychology of Money is your ticket to the show!
āPeople from different generations, raised by different parents who earned different incomes and held different values, in different parts of the world, born into different economies, experiencing different job markets with different incentives and different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons."
***
āThe hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.ā
***
āNone of the 2,000 books picking apart Buffet's success are titled This Guy Has Been Investing Consistently for Three-Quarters of a Century. But we know that's the key to the majority of his success. It's just hard to wrap your head around that math because it's not intuitive.
There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book should be called Shut Up and Wait. It's just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth."
***
āMoneyās greatest intrinsic value - and this can't be overstated - is its ability to give you control over your time. To obtain, bit by bit, a level of independence and autonomy that comes from unspent assets that give you greater control over what you can do and when you can do it."
Although this was one of the better business books Iāve read in 2024, its fate is to remain severely underrated due to the lack of easy answers it offers.
Itāll never be popular, simply because itās too grounded in reality, too connected to the actual, day-to-day truth of building a great business. Not many people want to read business books like that, but they absolutely should.Ā
Rigging the Game doesnāt waste many words, either. Itās not particularly long, but I spent more time reading this one than other books of similar size because the material itself demands greater space for clear, critical thought.
I also found it incredibly helpful in thinking differently about my business and the vision I have for it, so if you run a business yourself, I highly recommend it.
I especially liked the discussion concerning ācloser over more,ā meaning that we so often think that we need more of something - time, money, other resources - when in reality, a more helpful way of approaching building a business is to ask how our strategic decisions get us closer to how we want our business to look and operate.Ā
You might need to hire more employees, but not if doing so takes you further away from the personal involvement youād like to have with certain aspects of the day-to-day operation. You might just need better systems, or even a day or two to clarify what you actually want from your business.Ā
Infinite tradeoffs are another big theme in the book (and everyoneās lives, if theyāre paying attention), which is really just a way of saying that every single decision we make has opportunity costs.
By doing one thing, we close off a multitude of other possibilities that used to be open to us, and itās not always obvious what our next move should be. Again, closer over more was something I found especially helpful in this regard.
The whole approach of the book was refreshing, in that itās more about taking a few steps back, so you can make big strides forward. The author offers simple frameworks (but not simpler than they have to be) that business owners can use to construct a business - and a life - that serves them, rather than the other way around.
āThereās no single blueprint to run a successful business. The problem is that most of us donāt take time to define what success looks like to us in the first place.ā
***
āHow can you expect to be extraordinary while conforming to the strategies of the average?ā
***
The Four Commandments of Financial Certainty:
Closer Over More: Every action we take needs to get us closer to what actually matters to us.
Preference versus Binary: We must be able to discern when there is and is not a right or wrong.
Every Decision Has Infinite Trade-Offs: We must be aware that when we make one decision, we remove an infinite number of other possibilities.
Business Decisions Should Have Asymmetric Upside: We must understand that resources are scarce. All bets must have significant upside with little to no downside.
***
āNo one wins a race they donāt want to be in.ā
I was originally put off by the title of this one, even though it was blowing up on Instagram and it seemed like every Bookstagrammer I follow was recommending it heartily. My initial thoughts were, āBut I donāt feel bad! Why do I need to read this? It soundsā¦whiny andā¦weak.ā However, after blazing through it myself, Iāve found itās pretty much the opposite. And now I recommend it heartily!
The ideal reader here is the high-achiever, or wannabe high-achiever, who is already doing relatively well, but who endeavors to go further. The book starts off with some fairly simple ā but important ā foundational stuff that many successful people seem to struggle with, like breathing properly and getting enough sleep, and then it moves on into mindset, career success, and money, before finishing on a high note with respect to relationships and love.
A recurring theme here is the large impact over time of small choices that we are in control of. Simple, obvious stuff like breathing from the diaphragm and prioritizing sleep is well within our loci of control, and once we do regain control of these elemental life processes, a whole lot of other things are going to start falling into place as well.
Also important ā and Iām so glad he references them repeatedly ā is the raising of our standards. We donāt rise to the level of our goals, but rather fall to the level of our standards, and in my own life, raising them has been a huge part of my success.
You get what you tolerate in life, and if you tolerate getting 4 hours of sleep and working 70 hours a week for a salary thatās barely enough to live on, thatās exactly what youāre going to keep on getting. Ed Mylett calls this your inner thermostat, and if the temperature of your thermostat is set to some ācomfortableā level, youāre never going to achieve what youāre truly capable of achieving. You have to turn up the heat.Ā
āThe problem is that we genuinely have no idea of what lies outside of the mediocrity. We donāt even question the possibilities because we are ignorant of them. Our measuring scale is inadequate. We compare our lives to those of sick people, not to the people that are thriving.
I was one of the healthiest and happiest people I knew, but only because I measured myself within the median range of sick, unhappy, stressed, depressed, angry, broke, bored, unfulfilled folks. I am now functioning as an anomaly, several standard deviations away from the mean.ā
***
āI am not such a dreamer as to think that this material is for every person who picks it up. Itās not. This is a manual for proven doers. Itās for those people who sincerely hunger for growth and donāt require extra external motivation every day to do demanding work.
Most people have goals, but the majority donāt attain those goals. What most people do get is their standards. The three-word, simple takeaway from this book may be: raise your standards.ā
***
āDo we even care what type of fuel we are burning in the only body that we have?ā
***
āWho do you want to be? The answer to that question determines what comes next, and what intensity you need to bring with you. There is only one person who can answer the question and only one person with the agency to bring it to fruition.ā
This is such a rewarding book, and Iām glad I powered through, even though itās long and fairly dry in some places. Itās the story of Frederick Douglass, a former slave and one of the greatest American heroes ever to have lived ā in the 19th century, or pretty much at any other time either.
His future was shaped by books, too.
Douglass grew up never knowing his father ā and being separated, tragically, from his mother ā and his prospects didnāt look good. As they didnāt for many people of color in racist America at that time. No one was going to go out of their way to teach Fred to read, so he did it himself.
He taught himself to read, and he did so to such a great extent that he became one of the best American writers ever, and he went on to live a sensationally productive and powerful life.Ā
I really donāt care much about the history of slavery, but Frederick Douglass is such an inspiration to me ā and just a really cool, super strong dude ā that I absolutely had to read this, and thereās so much great stuff in here.
His lifeās story is wild, the book itself is wonderfully written, and if youāre into American history at all, you may as well start here!
āFreedom had aroused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.ā
***
āDouglass āspoke with great power,ā wrote one witness. āFlinty hearts were pierced, and cold ones melted by his eloquence. Our best pleaders for the slave held their breath for fear of interrupting him.ā
***
āMy joys have far exceeded my sorrows and my friends have brought me far more than my enemies have taken from me.ā
***
āYou may say that Frederick Douglass considers himself a member of the one race that exists.ā
This is the book where Neal Stephenson coined the term āmetaverseā!
As far as I know, thereās no Snow Crash movie, but there easily could be. Itās a wild reimagining of American life and society (with some truly messed up twists), but itās also instantly recognizable as America, if that makes sense?
I mean, in the America of Snow Crash, the Mafia runs this nationwide pizza chain; people live mostly in gated communities called āburbclavesā with their own police forces; thereās this giant floating raft (I guess all rafts float) filled with gangster refugees waiting to land on the West Coast; underground concerts that escalate rather quickly; not to mention this crazy computer-simulation-world where people buy land that doesnāt really exist and move around on vehicles that could never exist. Sound familiar?Ā
Anyway, in the book, āSnow Crashā is this virus that fries the brain of any hacker that looks directly at its source code, even though if you donāt know what youāre looking at it doesnāt harm you. Insert ancient Sumerian linguistics storyline, etc.
Thereās a whole bunch of other wild shit that happens and that I wonāt be able to accurately convey in just a few short sentences, but this is a tremendously unique book that you wonāt probably wonāt soon forget.
Itās tough reading sometimes because of all the neologisms and stuff, but itās worth reading just so you get the references when they appear all over the place today!
āThe world is full of power and energy and a person can go far by just skimming off a tiny bit of it.ā
***
āHiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the Street. It is a very old neighborhood by Street standards.
About ten years ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses, created a little neighborhood of hackers.
At the time, it was just a little patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space.
Since then, the neighborhood hasnāt changed much, but the Street has. By getting in on it early, Hiroās buddies got a head start on the whole business. Some of them even got very rich off of it.
Thatās why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by-30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes.ā
***
āAll information looks like noise until you break the code.ā
***
āSwords donāt run out of ammo.ā
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 aĀ lotĀ 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.
Stairway features longer, more in-depth book summaries for people who actually like to read, with new book breakdowns added almost every week.
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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