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Five Books: The Everyday Stoic, Burn the Boats, The Memory Police, and More!
Matt Karamazov
November 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 23 minutes
It’s Five Book Friday and I’ve got several different genres covered today! We’ve got some philosophy, fiction, personal development, and more, all down below.
On a personal reading note, I just finished my 78th and 79th book of the year, bringing my lifetime total (since 2014, when I started counting) to 1,331 books:
So that’s pretty cool! It’s certainly been an adventure and a half.
But I also want to welcome the newest Premium Members of The Reading Life: Suri V., Jason F., and Anna G.! Thank you for joining us!
And now, before your coffee gets cold, let’s talk about books!
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
📜 The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 7 Books I Can’t WAIT to Read Next
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
✅ New Book Releases Coming Soon
📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations
🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
Diary of a Gym Addict, by Tom Moss: Tom’s a natural bodybuilder (meaning no performance-enhancing drugs), and his book is one of the most sensible, straightforward books about successful training that I’ve ever seen or read. The fitness industry is a minefield of misinformation, and that’s why when you finally come across someone like Tom, you’ve gotta read his book and never forget what he taught you.
Living Young, Dying Old, by John A. Brink: John recently turned 84 years old and he’s still competing in bodybuilding! I just started reading his book, but it’s fantastic - he reminds me of the 1950s fitness superstar Jack LaLanne. Anyway, this one’s about longevity, healthy living, love of life, and thriving until your mid-eighties and beyond.
Stronger Than Yesterday, by Michael Matthews: Matthews is one of my favorite fitness writers, and at this point I’ll buy and read anything he puts out. This is his newest book, featuring 169 insights for transforming your body, mind, and motivation. I’m about fifty pages in, and it’s just as good (if not better) than his last book.
“Stop thinking about what your money can buy. Start thinking about what your money can earn. And then think about what the money it earns can earn.”
7 Books I Can’t WAIT to Read Next: I just finished my 77th book of the year (Beyond Positive Thinking, by Dr. Robert Anthony), and I'm looking to crack 100 books for the ELEVENTH year in a row!
In this video, I run through the 7 books I'm MOST excited to read next, and offer a few related book recommendations along the way. [Watch Time: 9:12]
If you got value out of this short video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
Book Review: Zero Resistance Selling: The brilliant surgeon and author of “Psycho-Cybernetics” returns to help millions of salespeople get out of their own way.
You’re Leaving Money on the Table by Writing on Medium Without Having a Newsletter to Back It Up: A realistic, math-supported plan for getting to $1k/month with a profit-generating “welcome sequence.”
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.
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
The Obvious Choice, by Jonathan Goodman: Jonathan’s one of the world's leading experts on helping people simplify their business, and this book offers 15 essential lessons on profit and success that are timeless because they prioritize the humans who buy from you and not erratic and temperamental algorithms. Expected: January 14, 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!
“Your potential is really up to you. It doesn't matter what others might think. It doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't even matter what you might have believed about yourself at a previous time in your life. It's about what lies within you and whether you can bring it out."
Reading this book feels like gaining access to secret knowledge - except nothing here is a secret. John C. Maxwell has exposed millions of people to these life-changing and career-lifting ideas over many decades of global thought-leadership.
Every single thought we think and action we take is either a +1 or a -1 on the road to achieving our vision, and Success is a Choice is studded with +1s on every damn page. It's a book about stacking the odds in our favor by doing every single thing within our power in order to give us the best possible chance of succeeding.
A lot of it comes down to simply making the right choices, and this is a manual for how to do that (virtually) every time.
Making the right choices - over and over again until you win - is how you eventually construct your dream life, and consistently making the incorrect choices will make this as-yet-unrealized dream life a more and more distant reality. It's really as simple as that.
We all start with different talents and abilities, advantages and disadvantages, and it's the choices we make in addition to our talents that makes the greatest difference. It's in the choices we make to believe in ourselves; to fire up our passion; to initiate action; to focus our energy; to cultivate good relationships; and embracing practice (all covered in the book) where we can recognize our power to make the desired changes in our lives.
It's choices, all the way down.
In the end, your level of success is mostly determined by your choices, multiplied by your effort. Luck exists, sure, and not everything worth attempting has a 100% chance of succeeding. We know that. But there are three things that the most successful people on the planet all do exceedingly well: they get started, they keep going, and they never give up.
“To actually know this consciously, to realize that we were not intended to reach breaking point so quickly and easily, would obviously alter a man’s whole approach to his life and its problems. To effect such an alteration in human consciousness was Gurdjieff’s central aim.”
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff was one of the most charismatic, enigmatic, powerfully self-possessed mystical teachers of the 20th century, and this book is a short introduction to his life and work. Gurdjieff taught that most humans exist in a state of "waking sleep," where they remain unaware of their infinite potential and ultimate value as human beings.
Colin Wilson believed that most human beings are like great big and powerful jet airplanes attempting to fly on just one engine. That is, we possess vast lakes of "vital reserves," or extra energies that we habitually fail to call upon.
So if you feel as though there is something missing in your life, that the world is more gray and bleak than it could be or should be, then you're beginning to wake up.
This whole book is about getting that process started. It's about the effort to attain self-knowledge, and the super-effort that full aliveness may require. It's about abandoning destructive habits and automaticity, and about keeping the mind awake.
It's about firing up all the engines.
This philosophy is about kicking everything about your life into high gear, but nobody is claiming that it's going to be easy.
To realize how powerful we are, and how alive we can be, however, is to effect a revolutionary alteration in human consciousness. It really is like waking up.
“To accomplish something great, you have to give yourself no escape route, no chance to ever turn back. You throw away your backup plans and you push forward, no longer bogged down by the infinite ways in which we hedge our own successes.”
The only thing that having a Plan B does for you is distract you from Plan A. The title “Burn the Boats” comes from the age-old practice of all the great conquerors of literally setting fire to the ships they arrived on and forcing complete focus on winning no matter what. Your Plan B should be to succeed at Plan A, and this is the playbook.
Matt Higgins was a high-school dropout caring for his sick mother in Queens, New York, before burning his own boats and eventually (and I do mean eventually) becoming an investor on Shark Tank, a lecturer at Harvard Business School, and a serial entrepreneur with a billion-dollar portfolio of some of today’s most iconic brands.
He lives an all-in life, and he holds nothing back here. Not his expert advice, not the harsh truths that we all need to hear, not the painful episodes from his own life. Nothing. It’s all here. And for that reason, Burn the Boats doesn’t read like other “success” books out there. There’s something special about this one.
His philosophy is my own, in fact. I’ve ruthlessly eliminated any and every thought of failure or giving up from my own thoughts and I literally - literally - never even entertain the idea that my largest visions won’t someday become a reality.
It…does…not…even enter my mind.
It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be successful - that I’ll get everything I want in this life - and I highly recommend adopting a similar philosophy yourself.
Burn the Boats is such a fantastic book, and I really do hope that you’ll read it. But more importantly, I hope that you launch that business; try out for that sports team; ask out that girl (or guy). Laser in on the highest vision you can possibly imagine for your one and only life, lock in, gather a team of mentors, shut down the haters, and move fucking forward no matter what. And that boat in the back of your mind? Burn it.
“The moon and the stars were nowhere to be seen, as though they had been scattered by the brilliance of the flames, and only the corpses of burned books lit the sky.”
Another random bookstore find, this is a sparse, dystopian novel that will stay with me for quite a while. The “book hangover” from this one lasted a long time!
Actually, the more you think about the book, and consider the structure – the hidden meanings, the references – the more you come to appreciate the craft and the care that went into writing it.
Not surprisingly, it was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, it and the author have received a crazy number of other literary awards, and it has been favorably compared to 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and others.
The basic plot is that, on an unnamed island, the unnamed narrator tells of the “disappearances” from the island of things like photographs, novels, even birds, and she explains how it’s the job of the Memory Police to find people who still remember - and eliminate them.
Or at least “disappear” them as well since it’s never really clear what happens to them once the Memory Police take them away.
That’s what’s so eerie and cool about this book: hardly any of the main characters are named (there’s “R”, her editor, “the old man,” her closest friend, etc.) – nothing is fixed in time or place, and that gives this novel a disorienting, uncomfortable feel that meshes perfectly with its exploration of memory, loss, and significance.
The ending, too is just…phenomenal. I’m so glad I picked up this book in a bookstore I forget the name of, on an island I rarely go to, during a time in my life I’ll never forget.
“People who are content and unafraid might become harder to influence if you’ve only got fear and consumerism to do it.”
The philosophy of Stoicism has made an enormously positive impact on my life - ever since I first read the original works of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and others in my 20s - and this has got to be one of the most conversational, approachable introductions to it that I’ve ever read.
Living like a Stoic is all about being unflappable, being able to withstand everything and still coming back smiling. It’s about maintaining your inner peace no matter what, and it’s also for everybody, not just “Serious Students of Philosophy” and other people who are no fun at parties. This is a book for life.
Personally, very little in this book was “new” to me. Other than the author’s own experiences, of course. But that doesn’t even matter, because Stoic ideas are the kind of things that you can (and should) keep coming back to for the rest of your life.
You can read this book in less than a day, but if you take the time to sit with its ideas and let them inform your worldview, you’ll be able to cultivate an inner strength that lasts for many decades to come.
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
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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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