Sponsored by
Your Retirement Savings Need to Outlast You
Most retirement plans underestimate two things: how long your savings need to last, and how quietly inflation erodes them along the way.
The 15-Minute Retirement Plan helps you close both gaps with practical guidance on longevity risk, purchasing power, and building a financial plan that doesn't run out before you do.
If you have $1,000,000 or more saved, download your free guide to start.
📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
I bought a bunch of new books recently (they’re arriving soon, so you’ll hear about them!), I had more books sent to me by publishers, authors, etc., and…
I’m still not admitting defeat! In some remote part of my consciousness (a space packed with books, no doubt), I’m still holding on to the idea that I can read everything, and there’s nothing that anybody can say that will make me give up!
That being said, I have given up on the idea of being able to do everything.
In fact, my “theme” for May is radical simplicity and focus, and for that reason I’ve chosen Deep Work as the Book of the Month inside Creator Launch Academy, my private business mastermind for educational entrepreneurs.
If you want to become a full-time creator and hit consistent $5K months, join us here. I’m sharing everything I learned and am learning that helped me quit my job and get paid to talk about books all day.
And now, tonight, I’m also sharing my complete notes and summaries of each of the following Five Great Books:
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Also Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month
📜 The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 7 Books That Made Me IMPOSSIBLE to Control
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
✅ New Book Releases Coming Soon
📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations
🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
Let’s not wait for our coffees to get cold…let’s hit the books!
Choose Hard, Live Easy, by MJ DeMarco: This is the latest book by the author of one of my favorite business books of all time, The Millionaire Fastlane. It’s about how taking the easy path in life (cheap dopamine, junk food, gambling, etc.) leads to experiencing hard consequences later, and how making hard choices now (getting down to work!) leads to an “easy” life later.
Reality Transurfing, by Vadim Zeland: If you hear me talking about “the alternatives space,” “destructive pendulums,” and “balancing forces,” it’s from this book! It’s a little bit “out there” compared to what most people are comfortable with, but it’s one of the most impactful books I’ve read in a long time.
The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt: One of the best-selling business books of all time, The Goal is where the author introduced the Theory of Constraints, which teaches business owners to address the main bottleneck of their company, or the one thing that’s preventing breakout growth.
Learn how to code faster with AI in 5 mins a day
You're spending 40 hours a week writing code that AI could do in 10.
While you're grinding through pull requests, 200k+ engineers at OpenAI, Google & Meta are using AI to ship faster.
How?
The Code newsletter teaches them exactly which AI tools to use and how to use them.
Here's what you get:
AI coding techniques used by top engineers at top companies in just 5 mins a day
Tools and workflows that cut your coding time in half
Tech insights that keep you 6 months ahead
Sign up and get access to the Ultimate Claude code guide to ship 5X faster.
After achieving my (somewhat meaningless) goal of reading 1,000 books before I turned 30, I set a new (also meaningless but cool) goal of reading 10,000 books. As of today, I’ve read exactly 1,488 books, including 34 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“I’m a very serious ‘possibilist.’ That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason; someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview.
As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”
7 Books That Made Me IMPOSSIBLE to Control: I used to be relatively unfree, then I read 1,000 books before I turned 30, used what they taught me to build a business (and a life) around what excites me, and now I have total freedom over my time and my life.
None of it was an accident, and I definitely didn’t achieve it on my own. I had help from the authors of these 7 brilliant books. Read them and claim your freedom too. [Watch Time: 11:29]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: This lost self-help book from 1908 holds the key to owning every hour of your day.
Michael Jordan’s Personal Trainer Wrote This Book to Help You Become RELENTLESS: Read it if you want to leave “average” behind forever.
Do the Hard Things First: Plus 11 Other Procrastination-Killers to 11X Your Productivity
How to Try Again, by Steve Kamb: This a guide to help readers transform their lives by giving up more often, failing faster, and mastering the art of starting over. I read Steve’s first book, Level Up Your Life (about how to turn your life into a video game) years ago and loved it. Expected: June 16th, 2026
Incorruptible, by Eric Ries: This is a book about why good companies go bad, and great companies stay great, by the author of The Lean Startup. Expected: May 26th, 2026
Inside the Box, by David Epstein: This is David’s follow-up to his previous book, Range (which I really liked), and it’s about how limits are the key to stimulating creativity, innovation, and collaboration. Expected: May 5th, 2026
Protocols, by Dr. Andrew Huberman: Still a long way to go before this one comes out, but it’ll be an essential guide to improving brain function, enhancing mood and energy, optimizing your health in all kinds of ways, and rewiring your nervous system for high performance and a better life. Expected: September 15th, 2026
The Greater Game, by Dan Sullivan and John Bowen: Dan Sullivan’s the business mastermind behind some of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of this generation, and his next book is about creating 100X exponential growth, a strong legacy, and greater freedom than ever before. Expected: May 26th, 2026
Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, by Adam Grant: Adam Grant’s newest book goes into the science of these strong connections, and how you can stay sane in crazy (and lonely) times. Expected: October 13th, 2026
“Decide what you really want before you begin to worry about your limitations.”
I’m so fortunate that I started soaking my consciousness in the ideas of personal efficacy and total responsibility for outcomes early in my life, rather than learning these things the hard way out there in the world. I largely credit Brian Tracy for exposing me to these ideas, and so I’ve always been profoundly grateful to him for that.
Take Charge of Your Life takes you through the progression of taking complete and total responsibility for your life, building the self-concept of someone who’s capable of achieving great things, and then deciding what it is that you actually want out of life.
From there, it’s a matter of laying out a clear and effective plan, enlisting the help of the people you’ll need to make all of your goals a concrete reality, practicing effective time management, going above and beyond (doing more than anyone else could ever expect from you), and then, basically, just never stopping.
There’s more to it than that, of course, and in the book he covers what he calls the 12 master skills for success, and shows you how to implement them.
Strategies for generating maximum performance, personal strategic planning, time management, personal energy management, wealth-creation, and communication skills - all that and more are covered in extreme detail so that there are no steps skipped.
At this point I’ve read more than a dozen of Brian Tracy’s books, and I’ll likely read a dozen more, so I’m not saying that this is the “only” book you need to achieve success in life.
All I’m saying is that if you take his message to heart, put it into action in your own life, and then don’t stop, you’re going to end up a lot further than you ever thought you were capable of landing.
Take charge of your life! You can do it, even though most people won’t, and the rewards at the end (and all along the way) make it all worth it.
“Psychologists have found that humans can achieve three levels of well-being on this planet, each more pleasurable than the last.
The first level is moment-to-moment ‘happiness,’ or what’s often described as a hedonic approach to life.
The next level up is ‘engagement,’ which is defined as a high-flow lifestyle, or one where happiness is achieved not by the pursuit of pleasure, but rather through seeking out challenging tasks that have a high likelihood of producing flow.
The next level up, the peak level of happiness and the best we get to feel on the planet, is known as ‘purpose,’ which blends the high-flow lifestyle of level two with the desire to impact lives beyond our own.”
Nothing that’s ever been achieved by another human being has ever been supernatural - it just seems that way, and The Art of Impossible breaks down the psychology, neuroscience, and structure of how those people did it.
The “secret” of impossible performances, says Kotler, isn’t related to genetics, talent, luck, or any other mystical factor. It’s simply neuroscience plus structure. Brain chemicals, all lined up in a specific way that helps human beings achieve elite levels of performance, plus the disciplined pursuit of excellence for an extraordinary length of time.
The four core elements of elite performance that Kotler identifies include Motivation, Learning, Creativity, and Flow, and each of those elements can be trained.
When you create the conditions for them to occur, they show up naturally; it’s just that most people don’t seem to be interested in putting in the requisite amount of effort to appear supernatural.
Achieving the impossible is incredibly, insanely, ridiculously hard. It takes a long time, it’s uncertain, you’ll doubt yourself, everyone else will doubt you, you’ll get lonely, you’ll reach stages of exhaustion you never knew existed…and yet, if you push through, if you persist, you’ll emerge into the kind of rarified air reserved for the best of the best at what they do.
You will have succeeded in pulling the stars down to earth, which is what The Art of Impossible will help you believe is possible.
“The challenge for all of us is an inner one: to keep going when it seems like no one is paying attention or cares. And to believe that eventually the world will catch up.”
While the rest of the world thinks we're playing checkers, readers of this book will know that we're actually playing chess instead.
The greatest Grandmasters in chess plan many, many moves ahead, and the best players in the game of life tend to do the same thing. That's what The Long Game is all about.
In this book, Dorie Clark doesn't claim that the hard path is the only correct path, but she does explain that we have to be intentional about how we structure our choices and prepare a long-term plan for our careers and lives.
She also shows readers how to enjoy today, because you'll have greater confidence that you're on the right path, instead of scrambling from one imminent deadline to the next, never lifting your head above water for long enough to do any effective planning.
Creating the white space in our lives necessary in order to step back and take in the whole picture is one of the goals of this book, and she presents a ton of high-level concepts to help you make this kind of thinking more common in your daily life.
In a world where everyone’s mind is dominated by short-term thinking and their strategies sabotaged by self-destructive impulses, The Long Game will give you an incredible competitive advantage. Absorb its lessons, implement your long-term strategy, and you’ll be the one who emerges at the finish line completely transformed.
“Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.”
The Prince was written in the 16th century (close to 500 years ago) as a gift for the Duke of Urbino, Lorenzo de Medici, who was basically Machiavelli’s boss.
It's a work of political science, which I usually find quite boring, but Machiavelli was a very insightful student of human nature, and so anyone interested in how people think, work, and behave should find plenty of fascinating material here.
Yes, this guy’s last name is where the term comes from. So don’t expect to be instructed on how to become a “morally-perfected human being” or anything. Instead, take notes if you want to take power…or to keep yourself from losing it.
The book’s enduring power actually comes from the fact that it’s still supremely relevant to what’s going on today. It almost doesn’t matter when you’re reading this summary, either. It’ll still be true! Which also means that it’s one of those books you could keep returning to again and again, and still find more and more to think about and use.
Specifically, Machiavelli claims that it’s better to be feared than loved (if you can’t be both), and that you have to use force when necessary, and subtler tactics when force won’t work.
In his discussion of how to deal with enemies, he suggests crushing them completely or not engaging with them at all. And when it comes to presenting yourself to the outside world in general, he says that it’s more important to appear virtuous than it is to actually be virtuous. Shades of Plato’s Republic here! Specifically Socrates’s dialogue with Glaucon.
As you can likely tell, it’s been extremely controversial ever since it was published, and it’s an open question of how closely the book even reflects Machiavelli’s personal beliefs, since he had various competing motives in even writing it.
But it’s a sharp, perceptive, and yes, dangerous look into the hearts of men (and women), and I consider it essential reading!
“Armed with these strategies, you’ll be whipping your days and weeks and months into shape in no time. And you can finally give your pet hamster a turn on the wheel.”
At this point, I’ve read dozens of time management books, and hundreds of personal development books, but I still found some great stuff inside Time Wise. It’ll save you more time than it takes to read it, and it’s got dozens of helpful time management strategies and tactics to help you get into flow, work faster and smarter, and more.
Time Wise is a collection of productivity secrets from the world’s most successful people, including Adam Grant, Cal Newport, Rita McGrath, Oliver Burkeman, and others.
It’s divided into sections on Focus, Efficiency, Connection Reflection, etc., with many, many practical strategies inside each section to help you work better, live more fully, and succeed at an even higher level.
Amantha Imber is actually quite funny too, which makes this one feel a lot less sterile than most time management books. And there’s also a focus on practicality and implementation, with a section at the end of each tactic or strategy that will guide you in putting it to use in the laboratory of your own life.
Forward this to a friend you think would love these books!
If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.
To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.
Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).
OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
And if you want to learn how I’ve built an audience of 200,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how I’m rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy 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 day!
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:
Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.
Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.
Become a Premium Member and get 150+ exclusive Book Breakdowns, my full notes from 1,400+ books, and more.
