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Five Books on the Psychology of Affluent People, Status Anxiety, Anger and Forgiveness, and More!
Matt Karamazov
September 12, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 24 minutes
Alright! I’m back with 14 great books to tell you about, including the five that make up my Featured Selections today.
We’re talking: marketing to affluent people, building self-discipline, anger and forgiveness, the history of doubt, status anxiety…
There’s a lot to get into, so I won’t keep you waiting!
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.
Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson: A fantastic biography of Elon Musk that reads more like a novel than the true story of some dude’s actual life. Wild!
Plagued by Fire, by Paul Hendrickson: Another excellent biography, this time of Frank Lloyd Wright, the brilliant architect and inspiration for the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead.
Steve Kamb: My friend Steve started Nerd Fitness, and every week, he sends out a short email that’s guaranteed to make you live a tiny bit better, think a little deeper, and overcome the obstacles that get in the way. In a very fake internet, Steve stands out as very real and very kind. His book is really good too!
Jay Yang: Barely out of high school, my other friend Jay recently had his first $16K month in business, and he’s worked for some of the most inspiring entrepreneurs on the internet today. Dude’s a phenom. Here’s his newsletter.
Mike Romaine: And my new friend Mike is a 7-figure newsletter operator who’s been an inspiration to me as I grow and optimize this one. If you have a newsletter of your own or are thinking of starting one (and you should!), then Mike’s your guy!
“Over and over I have taught those under my supervision that we are all given a certain potential unique to each one of us. Our first responsibility is to make the utmost effort to bring forth that potential in service to our team. For me, that is success.
Then perhaps when circumstances come together, we may find ourselves number 1. If that happens, it is merely a by-product of the effort we make to realize our own competency - our full potential. Success may result in winning, but winning does not necessarily mean you are a success."
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!
What This 9,000,000-Copy Bestselling Novel Taught Me About the Greatness of Humanity: Whether it’s greatness or awfulness, you’ll find whatever you’re looking for.
I Finished 10 GREAT Books Last Month, Bringing My Yearly Total Up to 60 So Far: Plenty of fantastic business books here, but I regret not reading anything from this other genre…
The Human Mind is Like a Jet Airplane Flying on Just One Engine: What could you accomplish if you turned on ALL the engines?
Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell: After twenty-five years, 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: 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!
“It is true that a lot of affluent customers’ purchasing is done as a means of showing themselves respect and giving themselves recognition for their hard work and accomplishment that they don’t feel they are getting from others.
Being told, subtly, that ‘you deserve this (and most others don’t)’ and ‘owning this signifies accomplishment and status and commands respect’ is extremely persuasive to the affluent.”
It seems like I enter a new tax bracket every time I finish and apply a new Dan Kennedy book.
Dan is the legendary marketing genius standing behind virtually every marketing superstar you and I follow today. He’s the guy they all learned it from, and before everyone had a copy of $100M Offers or $100M Leads sitting behind them as their Zoom background, people displayed Dan Kennedy’s books.
This book, unsurprisingly, is about how to get rich people to buy your stuff. There are, understandably, only a few books on this subject, partly because there are relatively few people who are qualified to write about it. Dan Kennedy is.
His demonstrated competence and multimillion-dollar track record speak for themselves, and have helped establish him firmly among the top business professionals thinking, writing, and speaking today.
This book covers the psychology and buying behaviors of the “Top 1%” of the consumer base, how to find them, sell to them, what they like and what they’re looking for.
All the strategies and tactics are right here, and in an economic environment where blending in with the masses means poverty and death, this book will help you stand out, command attention and respect, and both protect and expand your bottom line in any economic environment.
“Think about it: Most people don’t even show up. Of the people who do, most don’t really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.”
Self-discipline has traditionally been a hard sell. Self-indulgence, quick dopamine hits, and having a good time have been winning the marketing battle lately, similar to the "battle" between chocolate and asparagus. Or between reality television and educational documentaries.
But what if the problem is simply that we've been thinking about self-discipline in entirely the wrong way?
Up until now, self-discipline may have been the equivalent of a Henry James novel in a TikTok world. But Ryan Holiday's book, Discipline is Destiny, will have you reimagining the whole concept in a much more liberating, fulfilling way.
This involves thinking of self-discipline in the "proper" way: not as a punishment, as self-deprivation, but as it really is: a pathway to even greater freedom.
Some days will be hard. Actually, that's not true...many days will be hard. The hard days will outnumber the easy ones, but the meaningful days will also outnumber the meaningless ones. Living this way won't always be easy, but it will always be worth it.
“Most of us are helpless with respect to many things, including the life and safety of those we love. It feels a lot better if we can form a payback project and get busy executing it (suing the bad doctor, depriving one's ex of child custody) than to accept loss and the real condition of helplessness in which life has left us.
Payback, thus, often has a psychic function. If people are culturally sold on the idea that payback is good, they will feel real satisfaction when they get it. Often this satisfaction is called "closure". But of course the fact that a cultural teaching constructs patterns of sentiment that become real should not make us embrace a deception.”
Martha Nussbaum is one of the most brilliant thinkers I’ve ever discovered in all my wide reading, and, just as the title would suggest, this book is about something that not only surrounds us, but can also overtake us, causing even the best of us to lose a bunch of IQ points: anger.
I was a nightclub bouncer for over a decade, and so I’ve seen some anger in my day. I’ve felt its corrosive influence in my own life, and I’ve seen its deleterious effects on the wider society. So I’m especially grateful for someone of Nussbaum’s brilliance to come along and show us what we’ve all been missing when we talk about anger - and its equally misunderstood corollary, forgiveness.
Nussbaum claims in her book that people are generally confused about anger: about when they should be angry, if ever, and about the role it plays in both public and private life.
Most striking (no pun intended) of all for me was her dissection of the current, retributive criminal justice system. We seem to have this erroneous belief that if we make someone else suffer for what they’ve done to us, or to our community, this will make the first injury somehow disappear.
Where forgiveness is concerned, is it really the best way of transcending anger? Or does it sometimes cheapen itself by disposing us towards projects of humiliation and diminishment of the “other” as a condition of abolishing our anger? Is forgiveness always good everywhere, and anger always bad everywhere? We need a closer look. We need Martha!
She’s clear-thinking and wise and kind and generous, and she’s exactly the kind of guide you should wish for when you’re looking to understand the all too human emotion of anger.
Currently, she's the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago; she also has more honorary degrees than I’ve been alive, and I absolutely loved her thought-provoking book.
“If we can root out the sense of self entirely (and the best way to do that is to go looking for the self), you find you are a collection of thoughts amid the universe, with nothing to do but be delighted with that surprising truth, and with the whole range of experience, without preference, without hurry, without dread.”
Smart people who read a lot of books often realize how little they actually know (compared to what there is to know), while religious fanatics usually just read one book and think they know everything.
Doubt is the history of both belief and non-belief, and it’s an incredible book that unfortunately is quite underrated! I thought it was excellent. The author, Jennifer Hecht, is a champion of the disbelievers - or rather the questioners. This isn’t a one-sided attack on religion, or anything like that, but rather a celebration of doubt as one of the greatest intellectual traditions of the West.
She also runs through a huge cast of characters throughout her discussion, such as Socrates, Galileo, Darwin, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jesus - just an incredible array of diverse thinkers and questioners who wouldn’t stop asking “Why?” And also, “Why not?”
Her research isn’t limited to Western thinkers either. Her book is about how doubt and belief has emerged from and shaped societies all over the world, throughout human history. Her conclusions are often surprising and magical too, as you’ll see in my notes below.
Personally, doubt plays a large part in my life as well. Doubt and curiosity. Because, I mean, how dreadfully boring it would be to know everything! To have nothing left in the universe to be surprised and delighted by!
Intelligence isn’t limited to doubters or believers, by the way. There are intelligent atheists and intelligent people of varying religious beliefs, but the really brilliant people are those who never stop trying to find out.
“Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled on, and their singularities ignored.”
Most people are paralyzed by the fear that they aren’t “enough”; that they aren’t “worthy” enough in the eyes of others, or that they need to add something to themselves in order to be deserving of love and acceptance. De Botton refers to this as status anxiety, and it’s the topic of his positively brilliant book.
I’m somewhat desensitized to it myself, having been on “both sides,” as it were. I spent a long time working minimum-wage security jobs in hospitals and bars (which is where I found so much free time to read!), and so I have plenty of experience dealing with people who thought they were “better than me” for whatever reason.
It’s funny: the doctors never talked down to me (they always treated me with respect), but the nurses were the worst!
Nowadays, I have more of the “trappings” of success and status, with people going out of their way to befriend me or make me notice them, etc. But here’s the thing: “rich” or “poor,” I was always me! And I was always enough, no matter who may have thought otherwise. Truthfully, I barely even noticed them - I was just going on about my life!
Status anxiety, however, is not a new phenomenon, and it’s got a wildly colorful history that de Botton explores in this book. It’s a phenomenon that he says has less to do with material comfort than with love and the deepest forms of human acceptance.
People everywhere are rushing around in a great panic trying to “achieve” things, to make themselves “worthy” of love and respect, but they’ve already had it all along!
They (and you) don’t need to do anything extra or have anything or be anything to be worthy of unconditional acceptance and human dignity. It’s already yours.
I found many of his conclusions and recommendations fascinating too. For instance, his reminder that we can choose who and where to derive status from. If we give the matter careful thought and consideration, we can decide whose acceptance we want to gain, and what we are and are not willing to do to get it.
What’s more, we can get to a point where we realize that the less anxious you are about your relative status, the less desire you’ll feel to showcase how deserving of it you are.
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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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