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- Five Books: The Millionaire Fastlane, Crime and Punishment, As a Man Thinketh, and More!
Five Books: The Millionaire Fastlane, Crime and Punishment, As a Man Thinketh, and More!
Matt Karamazov
January 05, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 26 minutes
YOUTUBE đź“š THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE đź“š PATREON
Happy Sunday! I feel like it’s the day where most people would gladly spend the entire day reading, and if you’re looking for your next 5-star read, I’ve got several candidates to share with you…
I don’t have much in the way of announcements today, although I will say that I’m working on something to help educational content creators make at least $5,000/month and go full-time with their creative passion.
You’ll be added to my private community on Skool once we start working together, but I’m still in the beginning stages of building out the new curriculum and I’m not quite ready to accept any additional clients.
I’ll keep you updated though, and I’m also likely to need your help: specifically, hearing from you what exactly you’d like to learn about becoming a full-time creator.
I’ve been doing this for about 7 years (the last two being full-time), but sometimes experts suffer from the “curse of knowledge,” meaning that we forget what it’s like to be a beginner! So I’ll be asking for your help at some point to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
But hey, that’s all in the future. Today is all about books, and Sunday is for the stacks!
So without letting our coffees get cold, let’s dive straight into the first book!
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month
đź“ś The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 My Top 7 Books From Last Month
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
âś… New Book Releases Coming Soon
📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations
🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
We’ve got lots to read today, so let’s hit the books!
Do the Hard Things First, by Scott Allan: This book has been on my reading list for ages, and since 2025 is going to be the biggest, most profitable year yet for my business, I figure I’d better rip out the procrastination habit by the roots with this book! I just started this one, but first impression’s extremely favorable - it’ll help tremendously.
From 6 to 7 Figures, by Austin Netzley: Speaking of hitting record profits in my business, here’s another excellent book about getting to that next level. Another one of my mentors, Dan Martell, has praised this book and it’s living up to Dan’s hype so far.
Wonderhell, by Laura Gassner Otting: You’re noticing a theme here! What I’ve found in the process of going full-time as a book reviewer/creator is that the problems never really stop coming; they just get better, if that makes sense? I mean, success comes with additional challenges too, and Laura’ book is about overcoming those. It’s great so far!
“His teaching went beyond just trying to win. Before games, he told us to do our best, never harbor ill feelings if we lost, never denigrate our opponent, and, if they played well, to congratulate them. And, of course, no profanity.
His morality - that basic decency he has - affected me deeply. He was a gentle man who was a very strong coach. I came away from him with a feeling of wanting to do my best in whatever I took on. We were prepared and trained well. And not just for basketball."
-Ray Regan, former player under Coach John Wooden (Complete Breakdown Here)
I Read 19 Books Last Month (Here Are My Top 7): I finished reading 19 books last month, and even though they were all good (I don't finish bad books), these are my top 7.
You'll definitely recognize a few of the titles, and I reference others that you might enjoy as well if you like the ones I mention in the video, but I always aim to recommend books that you might have never heard of before! [Watch Time: 8:24]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
Realistically, This Book Can Make You…Oh, About 10% Happier: For just a few hours of your time, I’d say that’s a fair trade! (4 key takeaways)
You Only Need This One Book to Address EVERY ASPECT of Personal Development: 10 key takeaways from “You’re Too Good to Feel This Bad”
5 Time-Tested Buddhist Strategies for Avoiding the “Hook” of Anger and Resentment: From the globally-renowned (not that she’d care) Buddhist monk, Pema Chödrön
Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business, by Ed Latimore: My friend Ed is a former heavyweight boxer too (his record is better than mine though), and his long-awaited new book is about how boxing gave him the tools to overcome childhood trauma and alcoholism. Really looking forward to this one! Expected: August 5th, 2025
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!
“The dreamers are the saviors of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers.
Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as the realities which it shall one day see and know.”
Published in 1903, As a Man Thinketh is one of the most popular self-help books of all time, and it's one that I try to re-read every single year. The benefits that it’s added to my calmness, peace, positivity, self-assurance, and boldness are all worth it!
In the book, James Allen poetically likens our minds to a garden, where the thoughts that grow are exactly like the ones that are planted. But it's so much more than just "positive thinking" or "wish-fulfillment."
Simply put, our life is what our thoughts make it, and when we think uplifting thoughts, we lift ourselves up at the same time.
Allen was writing before Neville Goddard, but As a Man Thinketh is also about how we’re constantly “out-picturing” the images that are most dominant in our minds, which shapes our external circumstances over time.
In much the same way that we tend to see what we’re looking for, so long as we entertain thoughts of integrity, justice, hope, positivity, wealth, and abundance in all its forms, that’s what we’re most likely to see “growing” in our lives.
As you can see from my book notes here, the writing is just beautiful too - stunning, even. And it’s like that from start to finish! The whole book is less than 50 pages, so it’s another one that you can easily read in a single day but keep returning to for a lifetime.
The Law of Effection: “The more lives you affect in an entity you control, in scale and/or magnitude, the richer you will become.”
I always tell people to ignore the slightly scammy title of this book and just read the thing, because it’s absolutely incredible, and downright life-changing for the right person at the right time.
That “right person” was actually me, as I can still remember exactly where I was when I first read it. It marked a turning point in my life, and I say that with no exaggeration whatsoever.
Briefly, I read the book sitting in my car, while working a minimum-wage, overnight security job that held absolutely no future whatsoever.
I finished reading - implementing and taking action on everything M.J. told me to do (this took years, but it was worth it) - eventually leading to me becoming a full-time content creator reviewing and recommending the books I love, and even having M.J. appear as a guest on my podcast at one point!
“Fastlane” does not mean “get rich easy,” by the way. Get rich quick exists, but get rich easy does not, and even most people’s definition of “quick” would be much different than DeMarco’s.
He’s talking 5-10 years of building a business, likely using the internet, which is quick, compared to patiently investing your money in the stock market for 40 years, hoping and praying that the economy doesn’t implode, just so you can finally start enjoying yourself when you’re a senior citizen.
Wheelchairs don’t fit inside the trunks of Lamborghinis, after all!
The Millionaire Fastlane changed the way I think about business, about making money…about life! It changed everything for me, and I wholeheartedly recommend it all the time, basically to anyone who will listen. Even just learning the “C-E-N-T-S” framework and the difference between “scale” and “magnitude” can make you rich.
At the end of the day, owning a business is one of the greatest keys to freedom available to anyone with an internet connection and a burning desire to succeed.
The Millionaire Fastlane also taught me that you can just do stuff; you don’t need anyone else’s permission to be successful, and you certainly don’t need to spend your entire life getting bossed around by other humans at some job you despise.
Days of the week aren’t even real! They’re just abstractions we use to make sense of an inherently chaotic universe. You don’t need to live in fear of Monday, and you certainly don’t need to live the kind of life that the rest of society expects.
“What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”
Crime and Punishment is a major Russian novel about Rodion Raskolnikov, a young, impoverished student in St. Petersburg. It’s the story of how he comes to murder and rob an old woman in what he convinces himself is an altruistic act, and of his subsequent complete psychological disintegration. And it also plays a part in the story of how I would eventually come to read more than 1,000 books.
This particular book is one of Dostoevsky's most significant works, and it’s a layered literary masterpiece that set the standard for psychological thrillers ever after. The central moral question of the book, in my view, is whether a brutal act (in this case the murder of an old woman with an axe) can ever lead to good. You might not think that’s even a question! Of course that’s terrible and wrong and could never be justified…read the book.
You can also make a connection between the character of Raskolnikov and a kind of underdeveloped “Overman,” as described by Friedrich Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Raskolnikov believes that most people simply aren’t capable of taking drastic, courageous, aggressive action to change their lives or effect real change, and that only a relative few people throughout history have possessed the qualities necessary to radically alter their circumstances.
The book itself is an incredible read, just packed with suspense and populated with vividly realized characters you almost can’t believe wouldn’t be found in a real history book somewhere. None of these people existed, and yet, for the entire time you’re inhabiting Dostoyevsky’s creative world, nothing else exists.
Would I murder an evil old woman and redistribute her ill-gotten wealth to people who were more deserving? Would you? What’s stopping us?
Crime and Punishment was also the very first book I finished, ever since I decided to track the number of books I read, beginning in 2014 and continuing up to the present day.
It started me on a path to read more than 1,000 books before I turned 30. And after engaging with it, pondering it, pushing through it to the end, Dostoyevsky’s brilliant philosophical novel helped give me the confidence to imagine that I could read 1,000+ books: difficult ones, the greatest ones; and that if I could finish this masterpiece, there were also potentially thousands of others that I would eventually come to love too.
"I like to see a man standing at the foot of a skyscraper. It's man who made it - the whole incredible mass of stone and steel. It doesn't dwarf him, it makes him greater than the structure. It reveals his true dimensions to the world. What we love about these buildings, Dominique, is the creative faculty, the heroic in man."
There aren't many writers who inspire such strong feelings in readers - either of fierce admiration or antipathy - as Ayn Rand does. Architects, libertarians, business owners, and individualists love her to death, and plenty of people find her philosophy absolutely abhorrent, but one thing she will not be is ignored.
However, if you feel as though there is something special in human beings, some potential, some higher purpose to our existence than simply going along to get along - some higher value than mere safety and conformity - The Fountainhead is likely to speak to you as well.
The novel's protagonist, Howard Roark, is Rand's conception of an "ideal man," an architect (in every sense of that word) who refuses to compromise on the clear vision he maintains in his mind concerning his life, his work, and his values, which, for him, ultimately amount to the same thing.
It's the story of a supremely strong-willed "Self" being fully what he is, and his struggle against the collectivism of his contemporaries: a category of "soft-willed" people that Ayn Rand refers to as "second-handers."
The book has sold more than 9,000,000 copies since its initial publication and while it's not a "perfect" book by any means, its portrayal of the strong individual against the fearful collective, "the struggle for integrity of Roark's creative work against every form of social opposition," and the need for an unshakeable vision by which to orient one's life makes it an absolutely transformative book for the right person at the right time.
Maybe the "right time" to read The Fountainhead is when you're young, when you still believe that you can take on the world and win, before you allow the natural (but not inevitable) calcification of old age to set in and you lose your will to fight. That is to say, you should read this book before it's too late.
“Your psyche has to be rewarded for paying a price. You program your psyche by using a reward to reinforce your dream. When you decide on the award in advance of achieving your dream, you are programming your mind to believe I’m willing to pay a price because this reward is going to happen. This is a continuous feedback loop that you must integrate into your plan.”
It turns out that having the right enemies in your life can help launch you straight towards extreme success and significance. This is a book about selecting the “right” enemies, however, and engaging your emotions in the proper way - channeling those feelings into productive pursuits instead of self-destructive ones.
Patrick Bet-David is a legendary entrepreneur who came to America with basically nothing (his family literally escaped from Iran, crossing a bridge moments before it was destroyed) and inspired millions of others to put real effort into their own personal development, curb their vices, and help build up their communities.
The man also has enemies, which he’s used in productive ways, instead of getting stuck in a cycle of anger and retribution that would have scuttled his chances of any meaningful success long before he ever got started.
Choose Your Enemies Wisely explores the link between logic and emotion, and acts as a bridge between the two. Myself, I’m much more logical than emotional. Which is great for business planning, but sometimes I just don’t feel anything when I think about what I have to do each day. I don’t automatically get fired up, which can be just as harmful to one’s dreams as boiling over with emotion, yet having no actual plan.
The book is phenomenal - I’ve read three of his books so far and he’s never let me down yet - and it’ll teach you how to build a solid business plan, fortify it with logic, amplify it with emotion and feeling, and dominate your competition in business and in life.
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 150,000 followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience + profits in 2025, join us inside The Competitive Advantage and that’s exactly what I’ll teach you — we’d love to have you in the community!
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
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:
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