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Five Books: The Pathless Path, Hemingway on Writing, Ask the Dust, and More!
Matt Karamazov
October 05, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 26 minutes
In partnership with
I really did it to myself this week. I bought so many books, started so many books, received so many books…
It’s just wild. But that just means I have even more to tell you about, besides the five Featured Selections today.
Here are just a few of the books I’ve bought/received recently:
📚 Living Young, Dying Old, by John A. Brink (an 83-year-old competitive bodybuilder and businessman who reminds me of Jack LaLanne)
📚 Good Work, by Paul Millerd (whose previous book, The Pathless Path, is featured tonight)
📚 Keeping It Real on Commercial Real Estate, by Todd T. Nepola (100% of profits from this book go to charity, and Todd’s an incredible guy to follow on Instagram)
Honestly, there are so many. That’s not even all of them, I just don’t want to spam you with links! The above books are ones I’m really looking forward to dipping into though.
And now…
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
🧠 Who I’m Learning From Right Now
📜 The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 Their Secret to Success is NOT What You Think
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
✅ 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!
Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes: A classic novel about chivalry and madness, beloved for more than 400 years, that I’ve been reading for months because I’m enjoying it too much to finish it. [Update: Only 600 pages left to go!]
Feel-Good Productivity, by Ali Abdaal: I ran into somebody the other day who didn’t know who Ali Abdaal was. Wild! Anyway, he’s the world’s most-followed productivity expert, and his book is about increasing productivity by cultivating joy. It’s great!
YouTube Secrets, by Sean Cannell and Benji Travis: YouTube is one of THE best platforms for creators who want to earn a living (and a good one) on social media, and it’s about damn time I started taking it more seriously! This book is helping a lot.
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Sam Ocean: Sam’s a full-stack YouTube growth partner helping info brands launch offers, build massive audiences, & scale revenue on YouTube, but apart from all that, he’s just one of those guys who make the creator economy worth being a part of. Just by being him he’s helped me so much, and if YouTube is on your radar at all this year, you’ve just gotta follow him.
Taylin Simmonds: Taylin’s taught me an incredible amount when it comes to blowing up my personal brand online, and I’m a member of his Microcreators community. Wonderful group to be a part of, and Taylin’s the real deal. As evidenced by the massive following he’s built up and the impressive revenue to match!
Captain Yaroslav: A big priority for me this year is growing The Reading Life newsletter, and I’ve been learning a ton from this guy. We had a brief call earlier where I came away with at least 2-3 ideas that are going to help me reach 48,000+ subscribers like he has! He’s running a free challenge to help people reach their first 10K subscribers, and I signed up myself.
“Just knowing what you want to do and then making an effort to pursue it distinguishes you from almost everybody else."
Their Secret to Success is NOT What You Think: Everyone you look up to in business right now has done this one thing better than the rest of their competition, and it’s something anyone can do.
If you do what I recommend in this video (what I’ve done myself, and what every other successful businessperson has done), you’ll become one dangerous entrepreneur. [Watch Time: 4:11]
If you got value out of this short video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
The Future is Decided by Optimists: If you’re not FOR humanity, you’re against us (please be “for” us!)
The Crazy Power of Compounding to Help You Overcome Even Your Biggest Mistakes: It’s never too late…until it is.
How You Choose Your Enemies is More Important Than How You Choose Your Friends: The top 11 takeaways from Choose Your Enemies Wisely, by legendary businessman Patrick Bet-David.
Stronger Than Yesterday, by Michael Matthews: I’ll buy and read literally anything that Mike comes out with, and his latest book features 169 insights for transforming your body, mind, and motivation. Expected: Oct 6, 2024
The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom: This is one of my most-anticipated reads, and it’s about the 5 types of wealth: Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth. Expected: Feb 4, 2025
What’s Your Dream?, by Simon Squibb: Simon started his first business while homeless at 16. He later sold it for more money than he’ll ever need, then built up a massive social media audience by giving free help to aspiring entrepreneurs and asking them, “What’s your dream?” Expected: Jan 16, 2025
Below are my complete notes, summaries, and breakdowns of 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!
"I want to see people live the lives they are capable of, not just the ones they think they are allowed to live."
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 book itself kind of meanders between Paul's personal story of leaving his high-profile career in search of work that matters, the history of work in our society, the meaning of money, entrepreneurship, alternative careers and lifestyles, and more.
There's a Table of Contents, sure, but it doesn't tell you any more about the experience of reading the book than a map of Athens would tell you about ambling through the ruins of the Acropolis.
Mostly, though, it's about looking at the ladder you're climbing right now and asking yourself whether it's actually leaning against the right building. So if you've ever woken up in the wrong life (and who hasn't?), this is one of the books you may want to read next.
“Here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men.
The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness.
Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.”
I only ever heard about this book because of Charles Bukowski. He’s one of my favorite poets - right up there with Milton and Goethe - and Ask the Dust is one of his favorite books, a chance find at the Los Angeles Central Library, where you could usually find Bukowski if he wasn’t at the bar.
You know, for such an insensitive guy, Bukowski’s literary sensitivity is astonishing, because Fante’s book is incredible.
Ask the Dust is a minor existentialist classic about a guy named Arturo Bandini (not-so-loosely based on Fante himself), a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who’s struggling to earn a living through his writing, and struggles even more mightily when he falls for an unstable (yeah, let’s call her unstable) waitress named Camilla.
Things are looking up, actually. Bandini’s doing well. He gets his first novel published, his first taste of success. Then suddenly Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears, bringing Bandini down with her as he confronts the endless L.A. desert that swallows up everything and will continue to swallow up everything until the end of time.
"If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work."
Ernest Hemingway was one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, and he’s influenced my own work tremendously, even as I’m writing this summary right now. I’m eliminating useless words, focusing on impact, and leaving some blanks for you to fill in yourself, among other things.
This particular book is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to become a more powerful, persuasive, prolific writer, and we’re even somewhat lucky to have a book like this.
Hemingway always swore that it was unlucky to talk about writing, and so he never actually came out with a book about how to do it. This particular volume was instead compiled from various sources: novels and stories, interviews, articles, and letters to editors, critics, friends, and fellow writers.
As it turns out, he did write about writing (quite a bit about writing, actually), and here we’ve got advice about improving in the craft, specific tips on work habits and discipline, what to look for (in your own writing and in the outside world), and different elements of the writer’s life that often go overlooked.
Ernest Hemingway on Writing is full of amazing passages and helpful advice, and I even found value in typing out his sentences myself.
It’s not quite the same as generating original thoughts, of course, but by copying down sentences that he wrote - I don’t know, I can’t quite explain it. You just feel what it feels like to write like that, and you feel as though you’re better off as a writer for the effort.
“You don’t want that horrible regret, feeling like you spent your life pursuing what someone said you should want, instead of what you actually wanted.
For example, if you want to make a lot of money, you need to admit that. If you want to be famous, you need to pursue that. If you want freedom and no responsibilities, or want to learn as much as possible, or whatever else, you need to realize it and embrace it.
Whatever you decide, you need to optimize for that goal, and be willing to let go of the others.”
Certain authors just become associated with particular ideas over time, and one that I continue to profit from handsomely – year after year after year – is Derek Sivers’ insight that when making a decision, it’s either a “Hell yeah!” or it’s a “No.”
Either you’re consumed with interest by what you’ve decided to do - it’s just so completely obvious that this is the thing you should be doing/want to do - or you’re better off not doing it at all.
Hell Yeah or No is a fairly quick read, full of exceptionally useful frameworks for thinking, and I ended up with dozens of book notes and brilliant ideas to think about later. The interesting thing, though, is that many of Sivers' conclusions contradict each other!
Derek is a special thinker in that way. He can calmly and wisely approach big, intimidating questions, and he can disagree with himself multiple times (sometimes even in the same essay), all while getting closer and closer to a tentative answer that he then rigorously tests in the lab of his own life.
He's no armchair philosopher either! I'd even say that he's one of the most interesting people alive today. The dude sold his company, CD Baby, for millions of dollars, enabling him to forget about earning more money (he doesn’t need it or want it), and letting him put every single creative neuron in his brain into his creative work and, you know, living his actual life. And what a life!
In the past, he’s been a musician, a producer, a circus performer, an entrepreneur, a TED speaker, and a book publisher, but here in this book, he’s just your friend Derek.
“The politicians and media companies make you sad, angry, and depressed. When you're sad, angry, and depressed, you work out less and eat more. When you work out less and eat more, you get sick, and someone is there to provide the perfect pill to cure you just enough for you to go through the entire cycle all over again."
This is a book that tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. It’s a book that tells you how the world actually works, not how you think it should work.
Read this book if you want to learn from the valuable experiences of someone who has actually achieved the kinds of results that most of us want in our own lives:
The freedom to do work that excites you and stretches you creatively. The opportunity to make a great living doing what you love and what you're good at. The mental toughness necessary to thrive in an unfair world. The ability to build life-changing habits and execute them on auto-pilot (even if you’ve tried and failed before).
Not everyone will resonate with Awosika’s somewhat harsher, more realistic style, but one thing that no one can ever say about his writing is that he's being inauthentic or dishonest. There may not be Absolute Truth in this world, but this book represents his hard-won truth, which is damn near close enough, as far as I can tell.
All of the advice in this book has been battle-tested in the real world. You and I live in the real world too, and if we want to succeed there, we have to learn how to be both optimistic and realistic at the exact same time.
We need to learn how to hold two different, contradictory, opposing viewpoints in our minds at the same time without retreating to the false comfort and safety of either one of them. It's all about being able to say to yourself: "This thing is true, but also...that's part of it too." That’s how this book will help you think about the world.
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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