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Five Great Books: How to Live an Extraordinary Life, From 6 to 7 Figures, The Sweaty Startup, and More!
Matt Karamazov
September 02, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 28 minutes
YOUTUBE đź“š CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY đź“š PATREON
I’ve got five great books to recommend tonight (actually, way more than five), but first I want to invite you to a live workshop I’m running this Friday.
It’s specifically geared towards educational content creators (experts, or aspiring experts who want to begin teaching online and grow their personal brand), and it’ll be held inside Creator Launch Academy, my private business mastermind on Skool.
I’ve been earning a full-time living online for the last 3+ years, and over the next two weeks, I’m going to be teaching the core principles that I’ve found to be embodied by Top 1% Creators all over the internet. Here’s a simple preview…
THE CORE PRINCIPLES:
1. You Can Get Anything You Want in Life, as Long as You Help Enough OTHER People Get What THEY Want
2. Cultivate an Abundance Mentality: The World is Unbelievably Wealthy, and EVERYONE Can Build a Rich Life
3. Aim for Optionality: Build the Business YOU Want
4. Entrepreneurship is Really Personal Development
5. Cultivate DELUSIONAL Self-Belief
6. Build the Identity of a Creator and Reinforce It Every Single Day
7. Set the Standard for Your Niche: Push Boundaries and Make Other People Imitate You
8. You Must HONESTLY BELIEVE That You Are Better Than 99% of People at Making Money
9. Burn the Boats and Go ALL-IN
10. Think in Decades and Play the Long Game
11. Ask Moonshot Questions: How Can You Achieve Your 10-Year Goal in Six Months?
12. Reverse-Engineer Your Goals and Work Your Way Backwards from Success
13. Identify the Critical Path to Your Defined End State
14. Systems Are More Important Than Goals
15. The Compound Effect of Learning and Success
16. Be Prepared in Advance to Face Obstacles and None Will Be Able to Stop You
17. Detach from Outcomes: Do Your Best, and Forget the Rest
18. Make 100 Horrendous Videos Before You Decide to Quit
19. Quantity Leads to Quality: Get Your Reps In
20. Study the Platforms Religiously and Research What’s Working
21. Learn from Everyone You Meet: Always Remain Teachable
22. Compete But Never Compare: Envy is for Losers
23. Become OBSESSED with Human Psychology and Leverage It Effectively in Order to Win
24. Enter the Internal Conversation Already Happening Inside the Heads of Your Ideal Followers
25. Do the Unscalable Stuff That Most Creators Are Simply Unwilling to Do
26. Build Your Own Olympic Visualization Routine
27. Achieve and Sustain Peak Physical Health
28. Block Out Everything and Capture It
29. EVERYTHING is Your Responsibility: Nothing is Beneath You, and There is No One Else to Blame
30. The Infinite Game: You Need to Love It
That’s a lot to take in, but time after time, I’ve seen the most successful creators (the genuinely successful ones, the people making a real difference in the lives of others) share those traits, characteristics, and mindsets - and they’ve contributed to my own success too.
Over the course of 8 weeks (total), I’m personally going to show you how to leverage human psychology, motivational and behavioral principles, and the latest online business strategies that are working right now, so you can establish yourself as an authority, achieve expert status, and lay the foundation for a smoothly-run, $5,000+ per month business like mine.
Oh yes, and expect a Patreon book notes update within the next few days! Hopefully tomorrow, once I finish prepping and rehearsing for Friday’s workshop.
And now, let’s hit the books!
These five books are fantastic, and below in this newsletter I share my complete notes and summaries of each one:
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Also Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month
đź“ś The Book Quote of the Day
🎥 I Finished Reading My 1,400th Book
✍ My Latest Medium Articles
âś… 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!
Billion Dollar Communication Skills, by John A. Brink: I’m actually IN this book! My name and story appears in a section about social media marketing and branding, so I may be a bit biased when I recommend this book - but it is great.
John’s one of the most genuinely accomplished entrepreneurs I know, and he’s got decades of experience building and scaling profitable companies. To do that successfully, you’ve got to possess billion-dollar communication skills, which is exactly what he teaches in this book.
The Expectation Effect, by David Robson: In a very real sense, when it comes to what you experience in life and how you perceive it, “you’ll see it when you believe it.” That’s the core thrust of the book, which I’ve seen play out in my own life.
Expect people to be generous and kind, and they often will be. Expect everyone you meet to be a jerk, and you’ll run into jerks wherever you go. I’m liking the science-based reinforcement of a belief I’ve long held: that you get the kind of life you expect.
Time Wise, by Amantha Imber: This is a fantastically helpful time management book about the productivity secrets of the world’s most successful people.
What I like about this one (besides the occasional chuckle-worthy joke) is the focus on action and implementation. Literally every chapter (and there are dozens of them) features practical steps that you can take right away to start putting the ideas into action. I’m somewhat of a productivity book veteran, and I’m still finding this one worth reading.
Nothing Yet (But We’re ONE DAY into September, guys! Give me some time, okay?!)
“As long as we refuse to give in to despair and resolve to continue taking concrete action, some kind of victory is always possible. So when everything seems hopeless and you want to give up, no matter how much others may doubt you or you may doubt yourself, hold that knowledge fast to your heart and fix your mind unwaveringly on this most imperative of calls to action: never be defeated.”
On my way to reading 10,000 books, I just finished reading number 1,400!
It's just a number - a vanity metric, honestly - but setting and going after this goal changed my life in ways I can't even describe. The whole journey has been...INCREDIBLE.
I've also been reading some other great books, and I share a few of them here in this video. Nothing really too heavy this month, unless you're counting Don Quixote.
But you shouldn't be intimidated by that one either. As I explain in the video, the jokes are STILL funny, even 400+ years later! [Watch Time: 17:21]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
“Status Anxiety” is the Source of Your Paralyzing Fear of Never Having Enough: And this fantastic book is the antidote (14 key takeaways).
The Business Book That Helped Me Buy My First Porsche: Ignore the scammy title - this book took me from minimum wage to financial freedom in 5 years flat.
The Saddest AND Funniest Book I’ve Ever Read is Also One of the Most Challenging Books of All Time: 39 flashes of brilliance from Infinite Jest that’ll make you think, laugh, cry - and probably all three at once.
Protocols, by Andrew Huberman: Andrew’s a neuroscientist and tenured professor at Stanford, not to mention hosting one of the most popular health podcasts in the world. This book is a collection of simple, evidence-based solutions to a whole host of challenges, and a distillation of his very best advice from the podcast. Expected: September 9th, 2025
The Art of Spending Money, by Morgan Housel: This is Morgan Housel’s third book, after the 6-million-copy bestseller, The Psychology of Money, and the (in my opinion) shamefully underrated Same as Ever. I cannot WAIT for this one! Expected: October 7th, 2025
The Way of Excellence, by Brad Stulberg: The last of Brad’s books I’ve read was Peak Performance, which was fantastic, and so I’m looking forward to this one as well. It’s a practical guide to realizing our potential amid the chaos of modern life. He’s also got another one I’ve been meaning to read, Master of Change, but I’m a little behind! I plan to read both though. Expected: January 27th, 2026
“Once you understand that life is full of power laws, you will begin to make decisions differently. It allows you to ignore the small decisions, while simply focusing on getting the big ones right.
It only takes a few investments to build a significant portfolio. You only need five good personal relationships, or one amazing trip each year. This makes your pursuit of an extraordinary life much more attainable.”
This book from entrepreneur and investor Anthony Pompliano includes 65 letters to his children, wherein he offers his best advice on how to succeed in business, invest in the stock market, invest in quality relationships, prepare for the future, cultivate resilience and fortitude, and basically just grow into a respectable, healthy, and happy human being. He covers a lot of ground, and his wisdom is world-class.
Pompliano is definitely a list-maker, just like myself, and for the first four decades or so of his life he’s been taking note of the most transformational lessons he’s ever learned. Which I believe is such a great thing to do, because you really cannot trust your memory.
I’ve been taking notes on every single book I’ve read since 2014, jotting down every fantastic memory I could think of shortly after they happened, and recording as much as possible as I’m living, to help myself thrive in the future.
How to Live an Extraordinary Life features such fantastic advice because Pompliano’s life actually measures up to the title. He’s lived in a war zone, invested in more than 200 businesses, started (and nurtured) a loving family, and much more besides.
I got the sense too that he doesn’t view his recommendations as commandments. They’re simply what’s worked for him - helped him to find happiness and success - and now he’s simply passing it along.
He didn’t invent this stuff, and he won’t be the last to discover it, but by writing this book, and letting us into his private thoughts, all our futures will likely be brighter and more extraordinary.
“In business, numbers rule. They are your guide to the next level.
When we come into a company or start working with a business, the first thing we ask after the vision and goals is, what are the numbers?
Ninety-nine percent don’t know them! They think they know some of the key metrics or financials, but when we look into it, they are often significantly off. And if you don’t know the numbers, you can’t make objective decisions.
I can’t emphasize this enough. Numbers are at the center of your multi-million dollar business machine. If you want to make your job easier and start making better, faster decisions, let the numbers be your secret weapon.”
From 6 to 7 Figures is a step-by-step manual for moving into the headspace of a seven-figure CEO, as opposed to a “six-figure hustler.” The target market is semi-successful business owners who just haven’t been able to crack that next level.
I wouldn’t say that getting to six figures in revenue is “easy,” but there’s certainly no trick to it. It’s absolutely achievable with enough relentless action and fearless salesmanship, but getting into seven figure territory isn’t possible using the blunt force tactics of the “hustler.” Instead, it requires the systematic approach of the seven-figure CEO.
The main focus of this book is getting consistent cash flow, but the overall theme centers on determining your dream lifestyle and then reverse engineering your business strategy to help get you closer to making it a reality.
For myself, that means reading books basically all day, while batch-creating content that I enjoy making and establishing relationships and business partnerships with people who can advance my aims. I’m not so focused on getting to seven figures. For me, it’s not so much about the dollar amount as it is about the lifestyle. Which is probably one reason that this book was such a great read for me.
When most six-figure hustlers try to scale their business, they just end up scaling their headaches instead. Their business machine falls apart when they try to make it go faster, because they haven’t taken the intelligent, systematic approach laid out in this book.
Maybe I should have mentioned this earlier, but the author’s company, 2X, has helped a small army of entrepreneurs achieve more than $250M in growth in just the last few years. They’ve done this by helping their clients install a million-dollar mindset and establish extreme clarity about where exactly their business is going.
Then it’s all about implementing the framework laid out in this book to build a business machine that doesn’t rely on just one person, so everything is consistent, repeatable, and scalable.
From there, each new step they lay out builds on the previous one, giving your business a chance to hit its stride and achieve exponential growth, year after year after year.
“Actually, 99 percent of professions have zero leverage.
There are a few like wealth management, insurance, and sales that create passive income into the future long after the work is done - I love those careers. But for the most part, if you work a W-2 job, you will forever be trading your time for money.
So what is your first goal? How do you get started? You start small. You get $2,000 per month coming in from something you own (either a side hustle or a small business or a piece of real estate).
Then keep doing that thing to turn that $2,000 into $5,000 over the course of a few months or years. Then $10,000. Then $20,000, and suddenly you can tell your boss to go shove it next time he tells you to do something you don’t want to do.
And then you have the leverage.”
The reason I’m so philosophically aligned with Nick Huber here is that his approach to business and lifestyle design has led to a great deal of success in my own life as well.
This is a business book, primarily about pursuing unglamorous opportunities for wealth creation in unfashionable industries, but it’s also about consciously choosing your own path forward in life, and not just falling in line with what the people around you are chasing. It’s about saying no, resisting cultural gravity, and carving your own path.
What Huber calls “boring businesses” are things like landscaping services, storage units, and a variety of other things that will never have much “viral” potential.
No one dreams about one day opening a business helping college students store their stuff, but it’s that exact business that made Huber something like $30,000,000 in personal wealth. So maybe it’s not the worst business idea in the world?
There’s also so much untapped opportunity in businesses and sectors like these because of that very reason. Everyone else is getting excited about going into venture capital, or building the next Instagram, which, although it might be cooler than mowing lawns for a living, comes with horrifically low odds of success - financial or otherwise.
To be wildly successful, you don’t even need to have some revolutionary new idea, or be at the head of some miraculous innovation. Nick never “revolutionized” the self-storage business, he just examined his competitors honestly, saw where they were weak, and outcompeted them on his way to a multimillion-dollar net worth.
A great idea with horrible execution can only lead to disaster.
But a boring idea with powerful, precise, and professional execution can lead to the accumulation of obscene wealth over time.
“If you walk the same path as everyone around you, you’ll end up at the same destination. However, if your trajectory is just one degree different from everyone else’s, you’ll eventually be in completely different places.”
This is an extremely personal memoir by the professional boxer Ed Latimore, and it’s probably one of the most honest books I’ve read in recent years. Honest without being overly sentimental or dramatic, which unfortunately is all too rare.
Latimore takes you back through his unbelievably difficult childhood growing up in the roughest part of Pittsburgh, and shares how the discipline he found through the sport of boxing gave him much of what he needed to transcend his circumstances.
Very few human beings on this planet have an easy life, and you’ll find exactly zero self-pity in this book, but most people would have collapsed under the weight of his burdens: Absent dad, negligent mother, violent neighborhood, scarce opportunities - hardly anyone truly comes back from that, and virtually no one ever bounced back as high as Latimore did.
Personally, I loved reading about the ins and outs of professional boxing (I never made it out of the amateur ranks myself, and so a lot of the business side of things was new to me), although I would have liked to have heard more about his growth and evolution as a writer. That’s not a criticism of the book, though. Not at all.
One thing that stands out for certain is that Ed’s going to be a much greater father to his son than his dad was to him. Because it often goes one of two ways: either the generational trauma is passed on because “that’s how I was raised,” or it’s not passed on because “I don’t want to raise my son like that.”
For Ed Latimore it’s the latter, and this entire book is proof that a man can stand in the center of the ring, taking life’s best shots, and still remain standing at the end.
“I am proud to say that while growing Binary Tree, I held every single role in the business, from chief executive officer to chief financial officer to chief of running network cables through dropped ceiling tiles, and anything and everything in between. Your employees will respect you when you show them no task is beneath you.”
I’ll read almost anything by someone who’s achieved remarkable success in two or more areas and combined them in an interesting way, and so Steven Pivnik’s book caught my attention immediately.
He’s an ultramarathoner who sold his tech company for millions (either would have been impressive enough), and in this book he shows you how to “go the distance” in business and life.
What I found is that he confirms a lot of the advice I’ve received from other successful business owners I’ve known and interviewed:
There’s the willingness to do every job that needs to be done within a company, especially in the early days and regardless of your job title.
There’s the emphasis on maintaining your physical health as a necessary requirement to deal with the stress of building and growing a company. And there’s the focus on drive, discipline, and self-awareness that enabled so much of that success. It’s all in here.
One of Pivnik’s crowning achievements was competing in the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona, and Built to Finish includes everything he’s learned from one domain and how to apply it to whatever area of life you want to succeed in.
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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 160,000+ 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 two 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.
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