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Five Books to Help You Learn Faster, Sell More, and Lead the Field
Matt Karamazov
August 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 28 minutes
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Happy Friday!
My five main selections for tonight have all made a hugely positive impact on my life, and with the case of Book #3, not in the way you’d expect.
The Greatest Salesman in the World is not like any other sales book you’re likely to encounter, and I’d even go so far as to say it’s a personal development book disguised as a sales book.
You’ll see what I mean when you read the summary below, and my complete notes for all of these books are here in this email as well, as always.
But I’d also just like to mention my friend Byron Morrison’s new book, The Effective CEO 2.0, which just came out this month.
Byron’s a wonderful mentor who helps first-time CEOs take control and become more effective in their role, and he actually (generously) donated his first book, Maybe You Should Give Up, to anyone who becomes a Premium Member of The Reading Life, and/or refers at least 10 people to this newsletter.
More details on the referral program a little further down in this email.
But Byron’s been a good friend and supporter of mine, and I wanted to share his wonderful book(s) with you tonight!
And now, let’s get into tonight’s book recommendations!
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
🧠Who I’m Learning From Right Now
đź“ś The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 The Easiest Way to Read 30+ More Books This Year
âś… New Book Releases Coming Soon
📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations
🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
There’s a lot to get to, so let’s hit the books!
Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson: Yeah, I’m still working my way through this one. It’s excellent, though! I’m just taking my time in it, getting caught up in Elon’s story. Highly recommend this one, and I’ll definitely have to read more of Isaacson’s biographies - he’s a pro.
Fury on Sunday, Richard Matheson: I know, not what you’d expect to see me reading! Matheson’s the author of I Am Legend (which is amazing, by the way), and one of Stephen King’s biggest influences. Fury on Sunday’s about a brilliant, escaped mental patient who goes on a revenge-killing spree. I don’t know, I was just in the mood :)
The Black Count, by Tom Reiss: Okay, so The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite books of all-time, and this book is the Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the “real” Count of Monte Cristo, who was actually based on Alexandre Dumas’s father! I’ve been reading this one for a while, but I’m enjoying it too much to finish it!
Lucas O’Keefe: Instagram is my full-time job (or at least a large part of it), but I look to a variety of experts who know way more than I do about the platform to help me grow my account, reach more people, and keep up with all the platform changes, the algorithm changes, changes in trends - so many damn changes!
Lucas is one of the very few people I consistently rely on to keep me up to date, and he never lets me down! He’s the Instagram par excellence, and many times I’d be lost without him. Follow him if you want to grow your Instagram to 100K like I did with his help!
Alex Finn: Okay, so basically take everything I just said about Lucas and transfer it to Alex too, except for X! Twitter, whatever.
Point being, Alex is a champion of smaller and up-and-coming accounts on X, and he’s “leading from the front” by supplying everyone with the secret sauce when it comes to getting on the algorithm’s good side, making connections, building a real business, and just getting the most out of the platform. If you want to build a following on X, you need to be following Alex.
Clifton Sellers: Speaking of leading from the front, there’s Clifton, helping hundreds of founders (200+ last time I checked) grow their personal brands online with his elite agency, Legacy Builder.
I’ve learned a tremendous from him already about “building in public” and staying accountable, and if you’re a founder who has finally seen the light and decided to start building your personal brand, talk to Clifton.
“Since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating this complex world we’ve created, understanding it is critical. If you choose to master it, money becomes a wonderful servant. If you don’t, it will surely master you.”
It's actually simple to read at least 30 more books this year, and every year. In this video, I break down the simple math behind it, but there’s more to it than just “spending more time reading” (although that’s definitely part of it).
This way of thinking gets crazier and crazier as I explain this idea further, showing you how your minutes aren’t actually minutes...they're books.
If you got value out of this short video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing the video with a friend. Cheers!
Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell: Twenty-five years after the publication of The Tipping Point, Gladwell’s returning to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time examining their dark side. Expected: Oct 1, 2024
The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom: It’s happening! It’s actually happening! Sahil Bloom is coming out with a book!
I’m really looking forward to this one, and it’s going to be about the 5 types of wealth - Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth - that will lead to a durable satisfaction and happiness you can build and maintain across the seasons of your life. Expected: Feb 4, 2025
What’s Your Dream?, by Simon Squibb: Simon’s the founder of HelpBnk.com, and he started his first business when he was homeless at 16, later selling his agency for more money than he’ll ever need.
Now, he’s built up a massive social media audience by giving free help to aspiring entrepreneurs and asking them, “What’s your dream?” This is his first book and I am HERE for it! Expected: Jan 16, 2025
Here again are my five main recommendations for tonight! They are…
I don’t want to keep you here all day (I’ve got reading to do), so let’s get right into it!
“The most urgent and stimulating things in your environment are rarely the most significant. This is why switching off autopilot mode is so critical. Directing your attention toward the most important object of your choosing - and then sustaining that attention - is the most consequential decision we will make throughout the day. We are what we pay attention to.”
People seem to be conflicted about what’s most important to one’s quality of life - your time, or your attention.
I would argue that they complement, strengthen, and inform one another. You can have all the time in the world, but if you can’t focus on anything during that time, you’re not going to wind up doing anything important.
Hyperfocus is one of the better books out there (and certainly one of the most comprehensive) on focus, attention, and productivity.
It’s his follow-up to The Productivity Project, which I also enjoyed, and he explains in simple, helpful terms how to use this amazing, though limited gift of time and energy we receive each day.
As he says, what you pay attention to becomes your life, and so you have to be extremely selective about what you allow into your attentional space.
You need to ruthlessly curate your own reality, or else it’ll end up filled with other people’s priorities, other people’s agendas, or, perhaps even worse, nothing meaningful at all.
There’s also a ton of excellent material in this book about maximizing creativity and learning, and it’s worth reading for those chapters as well. The biggest takeaway, though, is that what you pay attention to matters. It needs to be intentional, and conscious, if your life is going to mean anything at all.
“Coach Wooden was more upset if we won but didn't work up to our potential than if we lost playing at our best."
It's hard to do your best, much harder than most people realize. By definition, "your best" is the absolute greatest effort you are capable of giving, and sadly, most people just never even come close to that.
Legendary basketball coach John Wooden was a master when it came to seeing potential greatness and infinite self-worth lying dormant inside the players on his teams, and his leadership style - that you can learn to adapt for yourself - was perfectly suited to drawing excellence from the teammates entrusted to his care.
For Wooden, there was a standard that ranked above winning, and he believed that if you give every single thing you have within you to be your very best, then you're already a success no matter what.
Doing your best is all that can ever be asked of you; it's literally everything, and although winning may be a natural byproduct of that supreme effort, it could never be the sole reason for a team's or a person's existence.
Before people start to think that this "gentle" approach may be good for building self-esteem and making players "feel good" but wouldn't translate into winning actual ballgames, they should know that John Wooden was also one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time.
Teams he coached won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, including winning 88 consecutive games, setting legendary records that likely will never be broken. So yeah, there might be something to this "gentle" approach after all.
John Wooden also possessed an immense moral strength that was given expression in many of the actions he took as a coach and leader.
For one thing, when racism was still a significant presence in collegiate sports, he refused to enter basketball tournaments that his black players weren't allowed to participate in. They were a team, and if they couldn't all play, then none of them were going to be there.
It was this strict, incredibly demanding coaching style, combined with this gentleness, and a strong, enduring belief in human potential and infinite human worth that made John Wooden such a spectacular role model. One that we would all do well to emulate in our own lives.
The mindsets, tactics, and strategies laid out in this book will arm you with virtually all of the tools you'll need to achieve championship results in your life, whatever that looks like for you. The Essential Wooden is about determining what true success looks like and how you can achieve it, no matter what it says on the scoreboard.
“Forgetting yesterday neither will I think of tomorrow. Why should I throw now after maybe?
Can tomorrow’s sand flow through the glass before today’s? Will the sun rise twice this morning? Can I perform tomorrow’s deeds while standing in today’s path? Can I place tomorrow’s gold in today’s purse? Can tomorrow’s child be born today? Can tomorrow’s death cast its shadow backward and darken today’s joy?
Should I concern myself over events which I may never witness? Should I torment myself with problems that may never come to pass?
No! Tomorrow lies buried with yesterday, and I will think of it no more.”
Og Mandino. What a name, eh? But listen, this guy went from being a depressed, divorced alcoholic on the verge of suicide to selling more than 50,000,000 books, and this is one of my absolute favorite books of all time.
Seriously, I had no idea that it would have this kind of impact on me, and even if you’re not technically in sales, it’s really a book about life.
The Greatest Salesman in the World takes the form of a parable (which I found kind of dry in the beginning, to be honest), about a camel boy named Hafid who achieves a life of wealth and success after learning and applying what he learns written on these ten ancient scrolls that are given to him to read.
The framing parable puts some people off, but then it launches into all these fantastic chapters (the ten scrolls) about mastering your emotions, cultivating persistence, greeting each day with love and gratitude, and treating people the way you would if you wanted the absolute best for them.
Themes of love and forgiveness, generosity, forbearance - in a sales book! The language itself is graceful, beautiful, and poetic as well. Yeah, I love this book.
The main message of the book is to “do it now.” Yesterday is past, tomorrow may never arrive, and if you waste today, you waste “the last page of your life.” “These hours are now my eternity,” Mandino says. Incredible. If Marcus Aurelius was an insurance salesman, he’d probably write something like this!
The Greatest Salesman in the World came out in 1968 - nearly two thousand years after Meditations - but both are just timeless. You can learn so much from both of them; about life, about kindness, about true success and abundance.
It just so happens that Mandino’s book can help you make a hell of a lot of money too.
“It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability.
This single fact - that our intellectual abilities are not fixed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape - is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us, 'Why bother?'
We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we're capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do."
Everything you want in life is on the other side of effort and sacrifice. In life, we appreciate what we worked hardest for, and in education, we remember what we struggled to learn.
That's one of the core messages in Make It Stick, which represents the gold standard when it comes to books about effective study strategies and efficient learning.
It's also one of the only scholarly books on learning to contain the word "motherf*****," but it's only used in the context of one of many spectacular examples of learning in action that makes this book so special!
Basically, we remember the information that we recall to mind most frequently, and the more effortful it is to do so, the more entrenched it becomes in our minds and the less likely we are to forget it when we need to use it.
This is known as a "desirable difficulty," which is one of many counterintuitive ideas you'll encounter across the landscape of the science of successful learning. It means that instead of making learning easier, we need to make learning harder if we want it to stick.
Even though this is true, well-meaning teachers and educators all over the world persist in perpetuating the use of ineffective and inefficient study strategies that they think are working but are actually next to useless. The science is ahead of the application in most cases, but if you read Make It Stick, you'll have a major competitive advantage over most people.
Something like 80 percent of all students (in some surveys) say that their primary study strategy is rereading their textbooks and highlighted notes, which is actually one of the least effective study strategies out there. And don't even get the authors started on "learning styles" theory!
The fact is that the more your brain has to work, the deeper it will entrench new learning and the more likely you will be able to recall it when you need it.
As we'll explore later on, there are several illusions of knowing that make it seem as though learning has taken place when it really hasn't. And there are far more effective things you can be doing to study and improve than cramming, rereading, highlighting, or practicing the same move over and over and over again.
At the end of the day, the universe rewards effort, exertion, and striving. We need to go beyond what we think we can do if we want to find out how far we can really go.
This same theme - the hardest path usually being the best - shows up again and again in life, and Make It Stick will show you how applying that wisdom to your studying and your practicing will allow you to reach levels of mastery that are simply unavailable to people who aren't familiar with the science of successful learning.
“If I eat at a restaurant just once per week, spending $100 each time, and I go there for five years, I’m worth more than $25,000 to that restaurant. If you own a restaurant, do your waiters treat your customers like they are worth $25,000 in business or like they are just worth the $25 meal they’re buying that night?”
The Dream 100 method was pioneered by Chet Holmes, and this classic business book has at least 5 more strategies and ideas like it that are almost as valuable to the success of your business as that one is.
The idea of the Dream 100 is that you go ahead and make a list of your top prospects, the people you’d most like to work with, the biggest players in your space, etc. Then, you systematically engage with that list, attracting their attention, and drawing them closer to you so that you can make the most progress in the least amount of time.
Everyone you know of in business today uses or at least has heard of this strategy - myself included - and it’s potentially transformational for any business.
But you don’t need a bunch of fancy tactics and strategies, says Chet Holmes. You just need to work on implementation, to apply the fundamentals of business, over and over and over again until you win. With pig-headed discipline, as he says. Instead of chasing after all these shiny objects, zero in on the essential areas that make an actual difference to your business.
A huge theme in the book is also, naturally enough, relationships. Holmes mentions that virtually all of his best clients have eaten dinner at his home, and more than a few even attended his wedding.
You cannot skip this book if you want to increase your business profits over the next year. Or even the next month! It’ll teach you management skills, sales skills, organizational skills, public relations skills…the fundamentals! Get these right and you’ll never have to worry about lead flow ever again.
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
And if you’d like me to buy you a new book every month, (and rapidly scale your personal brand while earning more money in your business), click to join us inside The Competitive Advantage - we’d love to have you!
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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