YOUTUBE 📚 THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 📚 PATREON

📚Hey, good morning!

So this edition of Five Books Friday is more like “Five Books Early Saturday Morning,” but here we are.

I literally had all day to finish this newsletter and get it out on time, but ironically, I was working on recording my new time management course, Time Mastery :)

Essentially, I didn’t have time to get this newsletter out on time because I spent all my time working on a course to help people better manage their time…

The irony is not lost on me.

Anyway, time flows in but one direction, so let’s get into today’s books!

Today we've got...

• 📚 An introduction to today's "Five Books"

• 🗨 The book quote of the week

• 📢 My personal news, along with 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 my friend’s excellent new book that will teach you how to become a much stronger reader

• 📜 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

• 🧠 How I was able to read (and mostly retain) 1,200+ books in the last ten years

• 📚 My top 5 book recommendations this week

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

1. The Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd

2. Excellent Advice for Living, by Kevin Kelly

3. Super Consciousness, by Colin Wilson

4. No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

5. A Separate Reality, by Carlos Castaneda

In one sentence…

The Pathless Path is an incredibly well-thought-out book about the traditional career path that’s pushed on us by most of society and asks whether there’s a better way to live and work.

Excellent Advice for Living is a wise, practical, kind book written by a wise, practical, kind man who, upon reaching his 68th birthday decided to pass on some of his best wisdom and discovered that he actually had more to say than he thought.

Super Consciousness is a transformative book about the true power of the human mind, the vast reaches of our inner minds that most people leave unexplored, and the fascinating people throughout history who have dared.

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs is a phenomenal time management book that should be read by basically anyone, with some pretty extreme advice about how to protect, recapture, and reclaim life’s most valuable resource.

A Separate Reality is a book about the true, mysterious nature of the world and how we live mostly on the surface of life, written by a man who can’t be trusted at all but who ended up writing a stunningly true book.

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.

Full Breakdown of This Book

1) I’m just going to put another reminder here. My time management course, Time Mastery, comes out on the 24th of this month!

It will be VERY inexpensive - for now - but the price will eventually be going up by at least 50X. Seriously.

This is just because this is the first version of the course and I’ll be making it better and better as more students enroll and go through it over time.

When I send out the sign-up page on the 24th, anyone who buys before 2024 will get the locked-in price (with lifetime free updates) of just $7, which will go up to at least $350 before the end of 2024.

I’ll mention it a few more times until then, but there you have it!

2) The Charity Reading Challenge continues!

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) Ryan Holiday wrote this piece about the 27 things he’s learned from almost 150,000,000 downloads of The Daily Stoic podcast, and I loved it.

4) A few great books that I'm reading right now are Words Are My Matter, by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson, and Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes!

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 .

Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up right here for free!

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 a new friend of mine, Sam LaCrosse, who actually has a new book coming out on November 21st called Toxic Immaturity: Reclaiming the Masculine Identity from Those Who Seek Its Destruction.

I’m really looking forward to reading it, but I haven’t yet. However, I do know that 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 Sam’s words:

I’m here for it! He’s also got a podcast and Substack if you wanna check those out. November 21st though! Save the date!

2) Next up is a somewhat older - but still kinda new - friend, Dan Heiser, who finally started his Bookstagram account like I’ve been pressuring him to do!

Dan is a Historian with a Master's in World History from Norwich University. He graduated in the Fall of 2019 with his thesis on the comparison of the RAF use of Radar to the Royal Navy's, and he focuses his historical fiction on the early to mid-20th century, mostly on World War I and II.

You can follow Dan on Instagram - ahem, I mean Bookstagram - right here, and his published books can be found here. I must warn you: he doesn’t have many followers now, but he has excellent taste in books, so you’ll soon be able to say that you were following him right from the beginning!

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.

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📚 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!

Rise of the Reader, by Nick Hutchison

This book came out not too long ago and I’ve found myself consistently recommending it whenever people ask me (and they do) about the best books on learning and improving their reading skills.

Plus, a friend of mine wrote it, so I kind of beam with pride a little bit every time I get to suggest it to someone!

Rise of the Reader is extremely well done, and although it’s more of a “beginners’” guide to reading, I’ve been reading 100+ books a year for the last ten years and I’m still taking a bunch of excellent notes from this one.

Part of its power is that Nick so obviously cares that people see the insane benefits that becoming a dedicated reader can confer on a person. It’s changed my life, it’s changed his life, and it’s changed the lives of so many of the people we all look up to.

Here’s the book description from Amazon to give you even more context:

Nick Hutchison, founder of the popular book review site BookThinkers, read over 400 personal development books, but implementing their valuable lessons was tougher than just finishing the next chapter.

Nick knew self-help books could help him do things like master his social anxiety and fear of public speaking, opening the doors to a successful career in business. Through trial and error, he developed an easy-to-follow framework to retain the knowledge needed to transform his life completely.

Now he’s giving you over 100 habits to implement into your own reading journey and fulfill your dreams.

In this book, you will learn:

• How swapping 15 minutes of social media scrolling for 15 minutes of reading can dramatically impact 20 different areas of your life.

• The power of intention when it comes to choosing the right books for you and how much you retain from their knowledge.

• How to avoid bias and situational advice in the self-help industry.

• Methods for note-taking and information implementation.

• More than 100 new habits to improve your health, wealth, and happiness.

​ You Can Find More About the Book  ​ Here 

 A Brief Summary of The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation:

I haven't been this impressed with a fitness book in a long time, but in no way is this just a fitness book.

For whatever reason, most people think that the gym is just about working out, but training is never just training. The gym is...Life.

The lessons you can learn inside the gym, the person that working out can help you to become, can be taken with you everywhere else that you go in life and they will serve you well in every other thing it is you do.

Once you learn how to control what happens inside the gym, you find out that there's a lot more that you can control outside the gym too.

The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation is a thinking person's fitness book, and somehow...somehow...Mike Matthews finds a way to bring Epictetus, Solzhenitsyn, Teddy Roosevelt, Socrates, and more into a book about health and fitness and still make it accessible, easy to get into, valuable, and fun.

Moreover, fitness should be fun. It should make your life better, and not be seen as a chore, some fearful obligation, or something that's beyond your reach.

This book is for people who want to be better than they are right now, and if there's just one thing you take away from this book I hope it's that being better than you are right now is never beyond your reach.

Now, you won't find specific training or meal plans inside this book. Mike has other books like Bigger Leaner Stronger that offer plans like that. This book is more about the principles and fundamentals.

Once you get those right, and understand the reasoning behind them, you can successfully choose, discard, and even invent methods accordingly. 

The main difference between the people who find this book helpful and the people who let it gather dust on their shelves is that the people who found value in it actually put these ideas into practice on a daily basis.

They actually got up and started to get after it, which is how they avoided the trap of spending too much time thinking and too little time doing and looking.

Keeping an optimistic but realistic mindset as you move forward is something that Matthews emphasizes, and this is something we can all get better at.

Easy answers and false promises have no place in the Mike Matthews playbook though. As he consistently reminds us, working out and eating right takes time, energy, effort, discipline, dedication, and patience, and Life always finds a way to test us and make us prove how badly we want it.

So keep this book close by and hold tightly onto your growing self-belief. Don't ask for an easy life; ask for the strength to endure a difficult one. Don't limit yourself to the light weights; motivate yourself to get stronger.

The 4% Rule:

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):

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 2 Places Where Every Single Person is Welcome 

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)!

[ Watch Time: 4 Minutes ]

4 Must-Read Psychology Books That Most People Have Never Heard Of

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 ]

How I Was Able to Read (and Mostly Retain) 1,200+ Books in the Last 10 Years

Now, for me to read 1,200+ books in the last 10 years, I had to read pretty much constantly too.

I’m not saying that it’s attainable for everybody, and I’d even go so far as to say that it’s not even NECESSARY for everybody.

You’ll get much further by reading 10 fantastic books and applying them than you will by reading 1,000 books and doing nothing with them.

That being said, for reasons that will become clear further down in this email, reading gave me my life back.

I owe much of my success and fulfillment in life to reading great books, and most people don’t need to read fewer books. They need to read more.

Nowadays, I read 100+ books a year (with GREAT, but not PERFECT comprehension and retention), and these 3 things help me tremendously. [Read Time: 3 Mins ]

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The chances of a perfect life path being successfully scripted for you by someone else are precisely zero. We exist in a community of others, but individually, we are completely alone and our lives are up to us.

More than that, we have the opportunity - the ability - to curate our own reality every moment, and by definition, no one can do this for us. We think that the meaning of life is "out there" and that we have to find out what it is. When in reality, it is Life that asks us the questions, and how we live is our answer.

In the same way, Paul Millerd doesn't have any answers. There are no hacks or step-by-step formulas in this book, no mandatory reading lists, and no milestones you have to hit in order to live a meaningful life.

Instead, The Pathless Path is about the invisible scripts that shepherd us into prescribed modes of living and being in the world; it's about freedom and creativity; it's about money, meaning, and work; and it's about being fearlessly, unapologetically yourself, in a world that shouts back, "You can't do that!"

It's also about going somewhere, but not following anything. Getting lost, and finding yourself. Leaving, but never arriving.

The default path - doing what everyone is doing, living the same day, week, month, and year that everyone else is living over and over again - used to work for most people. But this future that we're building together is not a default future. We have so many more options and opportunities - possibilities for our lives that we can explore and take to their logical conclusions. The default path is dying away, and we have to come to terms with our own freedom and what we want to do with it.

I mean, here you are, the universe's most spectacular creation, and you're just kinda getting by. Living a "good enough" life, surviving day to day, coasting through a default world you never made.

The Pathless Path is Paul Millerd's answer to the question of what makes meaningful work and what we might aspire to in our lives. But you and I can never be Paul Millerd. His life is taken. You can only be yourself, and I can only be myself. The pathless path is narrow, wide enough for only one person. You.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM THE PATHLESS PATH: 

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Just because you're old doesn't mean that you automatically have much valuable wisdom to share. Some people haven't really lived 10,000 days, they've just lived the same day 10,000 times. Kevin Kelly, however, is an exception, and it turns out that the brilliant and insightful tech innovator gives excellent life advice.

For anyone hearing about Kelly for the first time, he is the co-founder of Wired magazine and a highly-praised futurist and author whose optimistic outlook on the next chapter of human history has inspired a generation to think bigger and to advance confidently into the next stage of human evolution.

As Kelly says in the quote that began this summary, the life advice presented in this book was originally intended for his young adult children to help them navigate the hazardous future we all find ourselves hurtling toward. But the very act of writing them down caused him to realize that he had much more to offer than he thought he did when he began, which resulted in him eventually compiling this wonderful collection of 450 wise, practical, and incredibly valuable aphorisms.

The range of subjects they cover is as wide and deep as life itself, and so you'll find here advice about setting ambitious goals, cultivating peace of mind and equanimity, dealing with loss, organizing your life around adventure and spontaneity, dispelling anger and sadness, minimizing regret, and so much more.

Now, in a book with hundreds and hundreds of wise, practical aphorisms, my choices about which ones to expand on and which ones to ignore likely say more about me than they do about whether they're the "best" aphorisms or the "most useful" ones.

As you read the book and filter this life advice through your particular worldview, situation, and understanding, you're probably going to disagree with at least a few of them, or find them irrelevant or silly, etc. But which ones those are will change depending on who you are. That's part of what makes books so magical!

That being said, if it's true that your quality of life is roughly equal to the quality of the 20-30 people who give you the best advice, then you'd be wise to include Kevin Kelly in that group.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM EXCELLENT ADVICE FOR LIVING: 

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When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Individuals tend to have much greater control over their internal and external circumstances than they believe and, within reason, you can change your moment-by-moment perception of reality by working to strengthen your consciousness.

The way Colin Wilson conceptualizes it in this book is that life is like a vast museum just full of beautiful artwork that we could perceive, but it's as if we're trying to see in the dark.

We don't bring our full mental faculties to the task, and although the brilliant artwork is still there in the dark, we have to “turn on the lights,” so to speak, to be able to see how beautiful life really is or can be.

Every once in a while, however, we are reminded of the literally stunning beauty and wonder of life, and it shakes us out of our accustomed habits of seeing the world as a rather dull, dreary, miserable place.

It is within our power to shake ourselves out of this suboptimal, habitual way of seeing, and the investigation of how certain people have done that throughout history is Colin Wilson's project here in this book.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM SUPER CONSCIOUSNESS: 

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This book is a phenomenon. Dan’s is a radical approach to time management that I strongly resonated with because of his deep, visceral knowledge of how valuable time actually is. He gets it, and what do you know? I ended up with fifteen pages of notes from this one. 

Okay, so for one thing, Dan refuses to communicate either by phone or email. He insists that anyone who wants to get in touch with him do so by fax. It’s one of his “rules of engagement” and it stems from his (correct) observation that way more thought gets put into faxes than emails. You actually have to think ahead when you send a fax, whereas with email, any pinhead can just ping you whenever a new thought pops into their head. But that’s not even the half of it… 

Dan Kennedy also refuses to take any unscheduled incoming calls, and he will only fly by private jet when going out to meet clients. 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. 

Because that’s what this book is really about, by the way. Yes, you’ll pick up tons of valuable business lessons throughout that are only tangentially related to time, but you’ll also come away with a deep understanding of the infinite value of time, the infinite value of your own life, and you’ll start to get right and proper angry at the Time Vampires who would rob you of pieces of your one and only life. 

Oh yeah, Dan also surrounds himself with clocks and other visible reminders of the passing of time, up to and including a hangman’s noose that he keeps in front of his writing desk, and a clock that looks like a ticking bomb, complete with flashing lights on the front for a timer. 

This is all a conscious, concerted effort to continually remind himself of the infinite, unbelievable importance of time, and of not carelessly tossing away a single moment of your limited human life. 

No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs is aggressive, it’s smart, it’s extreme, it’s unimaginably helpful, and it’s also sincere. Dan Kennedy lives his philosophy and he’s a convincing advocate for it. This will likely always be one of my most highly recommended time management books of all time, and I do not exaggerate one bit when I say that your life depends on reading it.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM NO B.S. TIME MANAGEMENT FOR ENTREPRENEURS: 

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Reading Carlos Castaneda feels like gaining access to secret knowledge.

I realize that this is likely intentional on his part, and there are the super-weird cult-ish aspects of his personal life to be aware of (I read this wild Salon piece about it), but I’m an unabashed Castaneda fan and likely always will be. His books reveal a mystical undercurrent to daily reality that I find incredibly exciting.

This is the second book in the series, after The Teachings of Don Juan, and it follows Carlos’ intensely personal journey of self-discovery through his mentorship with Don Juan and his experimentation with psychedelics and various other practices.

It’s not meant to be read literally - despite what Castaneda might have you believe - but there’s so much great stuff in here. Read my notes below. 

Why I love Castaneda is that his work inspires you to think deeply about the fundamental nature of reality, the magic of everyday life, and your personal place within the order of the cosmos.

His books are about experiencing life, deeply, intensely, and vividly, and seeing everything as infinitely more miraculous than it may first appear. It doesn’t matter whether the stories are “true” or not. They’re still True.

A SAMPLE OF MY BOOK NOTES FROM A SEPARATE REALITY:

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Today’s Five Books on Amazon:

1. The Pathless Path, by Paul Millerd

2. Excellent Advice for Living, by Kevin Kelly

3. Super Consciousness, by Colin Wilson

4. No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, by Dan S. Kennedy

5. A Separate Reality, by Carlos Castaneda

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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, 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.