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- Five Great Books: Reframe Your Brain, Sustain Peak Mental Performance, a Classic Writing Guide, and More!
Five Great Books: Reframe Your Brain, Sustain Peak Mental Performance, a Classic Writing Guide, and More!
Matt Karamazov
May 24, 2025 ā¢ Estimated Reading Time: 27 minutes
YOUTUBE š CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY š PATREON
The author of the first main book Iām going to recommend tonight has only a few months left to live.
His name is Scott Adams, creator of the world-famous Dilbert comic strip, and he recently announced that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones.
With my own father being in the hospital right now as well (which is one reason why this newsletter didnāt go out yesterday), itās certainly a difficult time.
But Scottās book is about reframing reality in such a way that you become the author of your own experience.
You control your own subjective reality - or at least heavily influence it - which is one reason why I refuse to be unhappy a moment longer than I absolutely have to be.
I mean, lookā¦
There are always going to be things that remain forever, frustratingly outside of our control, but a few of tonightās books will help you ācontrol the controllables,ā and be able to say, along with Albert Camus, āIn the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.ā
But hey, thatās kind of a heavy way to start off a newsletter, and I donāt want to give you the wrong idea! Life is wonderful!
There are so many things that we can all be grateful for each and every day, and we always retain the power to reframe reality in a way that helps us see the good, creating more of it in our own lives, and the lives of others.
With that said, below are my complete notes and summaries from the following booksā¦
In This Issue of The Reading Life, Weāve Got:
š What Iām Currently Reading
š Books Iāve Finished This Month
š The Book Quote of the Day
š„ Iāve Lost ALL Shelf-Control (Massive $350 Book Haul)
ā My Latest Medium Articles
ā New Book Releases Coming Soon
š Tonightās Five Main Book Recommendations
š Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
Letās not wait for our coffees to get coldā¦letās hit the books!
Book and Dagger, by Elyse Graham: The true story of how various scholars, librarians, etc. were recruited to be spies during WWII. Literature professors turning over double agents, gathering intelligence to help defeat Germany - itās great so far!
Dying to Do Letterman, by Steve Mazan: Another true story, about a standup comedian who received a shocking cancer diagnosis and decided to go all-in on his dream of performing comedy on The Late Show with David Letterman.
Napoleonās Library, by Louis N. Sarkozy: This oneās about Napoleon Bonaparte and the books he read that influenced him. Not just him though, but really the entire content - even the entire world. Itās also written by the son of the former president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy - so thatās pretty cool!
āIāve never known a person focusing on yesterday who had a better tomorrow."
I've Lost ALL Shelf-Control (Massive $350 Book Haul): You have to say the title of this video in Sean Connery's voice, or else it doesn't make much sense.
But yes, I just spent about $350 on books and I came away with some great ones. I lay them all out here in this video and give you a few more recommendations to go with them as well. [Watch Time: 7:22]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
This Harvard Professorās Mind-Obliterating Drug Trip Ruined His Life (But Saved a Generation): The wild, true story of two drug-addled professors and a countercultural revolution.
18 Ways Winners Manage Their Time Each and Every Day: World-class time management advice from the legendary Brian Tracy.
This Forgotten Viktor Frankl Book is (ALMOST) as Good as āManās Search for Meaningā: 11 months after being released from a Nazi concentration camp, Viktor Frankl delivered this EPIC speech.
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
Protocols, by Andrew Huberman: Andrewās 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 Houselās 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
āIf you discover a reframe that makes you feel like less of an imposter - in this book or anywhere else - go ahead and use it. If that doesnāt work, try the other side of the sandwich and reframe everyone else as imposters. You wonāt care so much about being an imposter when you realize youāre surrounded by them.ā
Years ago, if you had told me that a cartoonist/hypnotist would have such a profound impact on my life, I wouldnāt have believed you.
Well, maybe I would have. I mean, thatās oddly specific - if you came to me with that kind of prophecy, Iād assume you had some sort of insider information that I wasnāt aware of and I might have listened.
Anyway, the point beingā¦Scott Adams changed my life.
I first read his other book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, where he laid out the difference between goals and systems, and how everyone fails to reach their goals for virtually 99% of the time theyāre chasing them.
Every day you havenāt achieved your goal yet, youāre currently āunsuccessful.ā Whereas with systems, youāre successful every day that you work your system.
You may not have lost 10lbs yet, but if you worked out and ate healthy that day, your system is working, and youāre successful. Achieving the goal is just a matter of time.
He also gave me the career advice that started it all, when he pointed out in the book that itās extremely difficult to break into the top one percent of any particular field.
However, itās so much easier to break into the top ten percent of two fields and combine them in an interesting way. Not only is it easier, but itās more profitable, because thereās automatically less competition, and very, very few people who can do what you do.
There are plenty of people who are smarter than I am, and plenty of people who are more jacked than I am, but when I combined books and bodybuilding, that became a scroll-stopping combination that helped me gain 100,000+ followers in just a few short years, and go full-time talking about books on the internet.
All of that is to say, whenever Scott Adams comes out with a new book, I damn well read it, and Reframe Your Brain is easily one of my favorite books of his.
Essentially, itās about reprogramming your mind for success and happiness by reframing reality and rewiring your brain to help you get what you want in life.
The collection of reframes covers everything from business and career success, to mental health, relationships, fitness, and more. The full range of human experience. Thereās literally a reframe for everything.
Thatās because reality is more malleable than most people believe, and you can literally author your own experience. The āreal worldā might be real for most people, but you donāt have to live there.
You donāt have to think like everybody else. You donāt have to live like everybody else, either! Instead, you can adopt some of these transformational reframes and achieve better outcomes than anyone who willingly and unthinkingly submits to āthe way things are.ā
āYouāre the same person ten minutes after you fail, only wiser.ā
The most powerful tool for achieving success isnāt an app, or a training protocol, a āframework,ā or some secret āhack.ā Itās your mind. Itās always been your mind, and this book will help you get the most out of itā¦every single day.
Andrew Thompson has spent decades coaching some of the most elite athletes and high-performers in the world, and A High-Performing Mind breaks down 12 of the key traits and characteristics shared by all of them.
Many of the lessons are taught through short stories emerging from his own life and work, including his personal (and eventually victorious) struggle against a debilitating medical condition that nearly killed him.
Andrew successfully passed through the worst of the worst (and guided many others through the most challenging moments of their lives too), and emerged with a vital understanding of how to pull out your very best at all times.
His book will show you how to sharpen and fortify your mind, and I actually feel quite fortunate having discovered this fairly underrated book! Itās not widely known, and having read it I felt that it gave me a sort of secret advantage. Reading it will give you a secret advantage too.
Add this one to your mental armory and you can keep coming back to it throughout your life to help you face a variety of difficult challenges and capitalize on your most incredible opportunities. What youāll find is that it helps you navigate every single one of them.
āThey will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom."
You thought you knew exactly how the world works. You thought you had the major answers all figured out, and that your personal picture of reality was fully updated.
But then, you happen to read just one perfectly-crafted aphorism, quote, or sentence, and then you realize that "Yes! Actually, the world is like that!"
Now imagine an entire book that's like that, containing more than 500 such lightning bolts to the prefrontal cortex, and you'd get something like The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Taleb.
It's a collection of aphorisms (memorable expressions of a general truth or principle), that investigate opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we donāt understand.
It's also extremely thought-provoking and wise, with valuable insights concerning every vital part of life that we deal with each day.
Alright, so why "Procrustes"?
Well, in Greek mythology, Procrustes was an innkeeper who had a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis.
He would invite visitors to spend the night, except that if the visitor didn't fit the bed - and they never did - he would either stretch them if they were too short, or hack off their limbs if they were too tall, in order to make them fit.
He continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, who "fitted" Procrustes to his own bed.
I know, Greek myths are awesome! But in this book Nassim Taleb makes the larger point that we are all like Procrustes in our daily lives. As he says:
āWe humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences.
Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit - but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers."
We each believe that our view of the world is the correct one, and we change our facts to fit our theories, instead of our theories to fit the facts.
We're stretching and hacking what we see, hear, and perceive, and in the process we're doing things like inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in the classroom, trying to mold society into our tight little theories, and modifying humans to fulfill the promises of technology.
Taleb is trying to get us to stop squeezing life into neat little packages and pre-constructed narratives, and instead come to terms with what we don't know.
So, among the 500+ aphorisms in the book, there are tons of big ideas concerning love, happiness, ethics, success, randomness, chance, religion, and everything else that humans care about.
The aphoristic form is perfectly suited for the purpose of getting us to question our received opinions, because the moment of insight comes on suddenly and catches us off guard. It's not what we were expecting.
With short, almost tweet-like brevity, huge concepts are broken down into immediately digestible sentences, and we suddenly "get it."
This is not a book to be read quickly, even though you could finish it in an hour or so if you really wanted to. It's kind of like the Tao Te Ching in that way: you can read it in an hour, but you could study it for a lifetime.
"Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.
What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.
Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
They are full of all the things that you don't get in real life - wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat. And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention.
An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean."
This is one of my all-time favorite books about writing, and I donāt think Iāve ever laughed out loud more often than I did while reading it, with the possible exception of the work of David Foster Wallace. To answer the most pressing question, āWhy is it called Bird by Bird?ā hereās the passage where the title comes from:
āThirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that heād had three months to write. It was due the next day.
We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.
Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brotherās shoulder, and said, āBird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.āā
Thereās so much incredible stuff in here, itās just an inexhaustible well of wisdom, creativity, and motivation for making the craft of writing your lifeās work. And now, of course, I recommend it all the time.
I have more than eight pages of notes on everything from the advantages and pitfalls of actually getting published, to the more technical considerations of character, plot, and voice, all the way through to what books are actually for, and why any otherwise sane person would want to dedicate their life to writing them.
I honestly canāt say enough wonderful things about this book, and as far as Iām concerned itās an absolutely essential book āon writing,ā right up there with On Writing, by Stephen King, and The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard, among others.
Just like a really fantastic novel, I keep coming back to it, again and again, and every time I do, I come back richer and wiser than before, in all sorts of wonderful ways.
āThis long-term view of partnerships always felt obvious. My goal was never to make the most money possible on each deal, but rather to increase the number of times each client hired us. I figured weād make more money and attract sponsors like a magnet if we became their favorite people to work with.ā
Iāve been a full-time creator for several years now, and even though Iāve already passed the $5,000 per month mark, I still ended up with six pages of notes from this incredible book about how to land sponsorships and brand deals.
Sponsor Magnet filled in several critical blind spots I had with respect to the whole process, and the author, Justin Moore, is the guy when it comes to sponsorships, having earned more than $5,000,000 in the online space since he started not too long ago. Thereās literally no one else I trust more, and he lays out all his best advice here in this book.
The wealthiest and most profitable creators Iāve known donāt wait for brands to reach out with opportunities. They create their own opportunities, and using Justinās frameworks youāll learn how to price your work with confidence (and stop being taken for a ride), and how to craft excellent pitches that stand out from the pile and help you get noticed.
Thereās a literal wealth of knowledge in here about structuring win-win-win partnerships, making sure the sponsorship itself is masterfully executed, and plenty of word-for-word scripts you can use to help you navigate the whole process. There are also detailed and helpful breakdowns of various pricing models, along with the pros and cons of each, and a ton of other templates that Iāll be using in my own business for sure.
And again, Iām not a beginner! Iāve landed plenty of sponsorships and brand deals before, and I still learned things in this book that are likely worth $100,000+ to me over the next few years. So if you are a beginner, Sponsor Magnet is likely to be revelatory.
Forward this to a friend you think would love these books!
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OK, thatās it for nowā¦
Iāve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
And if you want to learn how Iāve built an audience of 160,000+ followers across social media, became a full-time creator, and how Iām rapidly growing my audience and my profits in 2025, join us inside Creator Launch Academy and thatās exactly what Iāll teach you ā weād 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 timeā¦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 Iāll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business.
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