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Five Great Books: Rise of the Reader, The Science of Money, How To: $10M, and More!
Matt Karamazov
August 23, 2025 ā¢ Estimated Reading Time: 28 minutes
YOUTUBE š CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY š PATREON
As we head into the weekend, I just want to remind you that if youāre one of those people who still reads for pleasureā¦youāre a marvel.
I saw that post earlier about the inability of most people today to unplug from the chaos of entertainment culture and actively direct their own lives, and it immediately sent me down two different lines of thought.
First, I couldnāt help feeling just a little bitā¦lonelier. Like the world was losing something extraordinarily valuable: control over our own minds, and the ability to connect meaningfully withā¦well, anything. And that itās in danger of being lost forever.
I still feel that way, to be honest. And itās not a good feeling.
But somewhat selfishly, I also thought about how easy it is to compete against people now. And especially in online business.
The entrepreneurship space is still viciously competitive in many ways, but when the people going after your leads, prospects, and customers canāt even focus on a book for sixteen seconds, or work on a landing page for long enough to string a sentence together before retreating to the comfort of their cat videos, you know thereās a major opportunity available for anyone with the mental capabilities to take advantage of it.
Thatās what my new coaching program is going to help you do, and it launches on September 1st.
Over the course of 8 weeks, Iām 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.
The majority of you wonāt be interested, of course, and I know that. Youāre just here for the books - and thatās totally cool! Weāll be diving into some great books today, donāt you worry!
But for the right person, this program will be nothing short of life-changing.
Just reply to this email with the word āwaitlistā and Iāll be in touch.
And now, letās hit the books!
These five books are fantastic, and below in this newsletter I share my complete notes and summaries of each one:
š How To: $10M, by William Brown
In This Issue of The Reading Life, Weāve Also Got:
š What Iām Currently Reading
š Books Iāve Finished This Month
š The Book Quote of the Day
š„ 3 Books That Have Changed My Life the MOST
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!
Billion Dollar Communication Skills, by John A. Brink: Iām 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.
Johnās one of the most genuinely accomplished entrepreneurs I know, and heās got decades of experience building and scaling profitable companies. To do that successfully, youāve 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, āyouāll see it when you believe it.ā Thatās the core thrust of the book, which Iāve 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 youāll run into jerks wherever you go. Iām liking the science-based reinforcement of a belief Iāve long held: that you get the kind of life you expect.
The Laws of Power, by Brian Tracy: Iām well on my way to reading everything that Brian Tracy has ever written, and this is probably one of his most valuable books.
All in one place, he presents the various Laws youāll need to have on your side in order to live a spectacularly successful life. Achievement, Wealth, Happiness, Relationships, Self-Fulfillment - itās all here.
āEnlivened once again, lifeās pulses waken
To greet the kindly dawnās ethereal vision;
You, earth, outlasted this night, too, unshaken,
And at my feet you breathe, renewed Elysian,
Surrounding me with pleasure-scented flowers,
And deep within you prompt a stern decision:
To strive for highest life with all my powers.ā
3 Books That Changed My Life the MOST (Out of 150+ Books): I read exactly 100 books last year, this year I'm at about 55 or so (it's also totally not a race haha), and the three books I recommend in this video were the ones with the MOST life-changing ideas per page. You seriously can't go wrong with any of them. [Watch Time: 10:27]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
āStatus Anxietyā 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 Iāve Ever Read is Also One of the Most Challenging Books of All Time: 39 flashes of brilliance from Infinite Jest thatāll make you think, laugh, cry - and probably all three at once.
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
āI think what makes it hard for us to enjoy happiness in the moment is our tendency to hold on too tightly to happiness from the past.
When we idealize the past and subconsciously crave a return to that safer, more certain time, we are taking energy and focus away from being in the present, which is ultimately where we spend our lives.ā
This is a tragically underrated (but hopefully not for long) book by the screenwriter-turned-therapist of the Ashton Kutcher movie, Dude, Whereās My Car?, and itās a āfriendly and engaging guide to talk therapy.ā But thereās so much more here, and even if youāve never been to therapy or had plans of going, you could still absolutely stand to benefit from reading the book.
For one thing, I found Philās use of metaphor wonderfully insightful, as heāll describe depression like being caught in quicksand, addiction as being controlled by a planetās gravityā¦just on and on. A completely different way of looking at things that helps you instantly understand, and even if youāve never struggled with those afflictions yourself, itāll help you better relate to people in your life who have.
In 50 chapters, he deals with all these things people end up in therapy to help them deal with, like grief, anger, relationship issues, worry - basically everything. By the end of it you almost canāt help but feel that if you ever were to end up in therapy, youād want to have a therapist like Phil.
āKnowing who youāre selling to, and more specifically, the exact right person for your product or service, is the difference between making $25,000 a year and $25 million a year. ā
Thatās not just a figure Iāve plucked from thin air, by the way - I personally know three people who make over $25 million per year in total sales volume, and their businesses are built on this level of spectacular depth and detail.ā
This book contains everything you need to know about scaling a coaching and/or e-learning business to more than $10,000,000 in revenue. I know, I know, bold claim!
But I know and (briefly) worked with William personally, and heās the real deal. Ten million is what he sold his own company for, the book itself is phenomenal, and he literally holds nothing back. Itās all here.
Weāre living through the greatest wealth transfer in human history, and itās the people who develop high-value skills - and the ability to market them effectively - who will be the big winners in the new economy. Whether thatās through paid ads, organic content, or a combination of the two, nowās the time!
How To: $10M is perfect for anyone with an information product, coaching service, or agency offer, and I used it specifically to scale up my coaching practice (and associated community).
Itās basically an exact, step-by-step blueprint, and because I followed it, I got results. Thatās basically all there is to it! Stop overcomplicating online business. Just get Willās book, follow the steps, and capture some of this exploding wealth for yourself.
āThe ideas that underpin our modern world ā meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on ā were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon.
To them he added rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.
At the same time he dispensed with the absurd revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the theology of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the corruption and cronyism of the Directory and the hyper-inflation that had characterized the dying days of the Republic.
āWe have done with the romance of the Revolution,ā he told an early meeting of his Conseil dāEtat, āwe must now commence its history.ā For his reforms to work they needed one commodity that Europeās monarchs were determined to deny him: time.ā
Itās difficult to imagine how someone so active, so energetic, so alive could now be still. There have been more books written with the word Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821, but in a very real, visceral sense, this book brought him back to life, at least in my imagination.
Most everything I thought I knew about Napoleon ā which, admittedly, wasnāt all that much ā turned out to be either wrong or incomplete, and in this 800-page biography that I inhaled in a week I found myself swept up in the larger-than-life majesty of Napoleonās life and campaigns.
Itās actually astonishing how many of the institutions and laws and reforms that exist today come directly from him. Meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education and so much more were ushered in during Napoleonās reign, and he championed all of it.
It took almost every nation in Europe banding together in order to defeat him, and they had to adopt many of his reforms themselves in order to do it.
A little piece of advice from me to you when reading this book: donāt skip the footnotes! Thatās where some of the most fascinating and strangest items are to be found.
Itās often worth the small detour to learn things such as the fact that at the battle of Borodino between the French and the Russians, the French fired more than 60,000 cannonballs and 1.4 million musket balls. An average of three cannonballs and seventy-seven musket balls per second! Thatās insane!
A Russian soldier who was there later said that he had to keep his mouth open in order to balance the percussive impact of all that iron flying around. Read the footnotes!
The main parts of the book are sometimes really, really funny as well, such as the time when Napoleon called his foreign minister, Talleyrand, a āshit in silk stockings.ā
Talleyrand was also once asked if Napoleonās wife Josephine possessed intelligence, and he was heard to say, āNever has anyone managed so brilliantly without it.ā Hilarious! And the whole book is like that.
Just the massive scale and scope of Napoleonās adventures, his sweeping vision, and his humanityā¦they all combine to make this one of the greatest books Iāve ever read, biographies or no.
Napoleonās single-minded focus, the fierce love and dedication he was able to inspire in his soldiers, his grand ambition and stunning boldness are all painted in vivid detail, and by contrast, his last days hit me as being so tragic.
I actually had a hard time reading the last 50 pages because I hated to see him brought down to earth. Itās still hard to imagine that someone like that ever truly perished from the earth, but Iām grateful to have been able to read his story.
āI was missing out on the worldās best kept secrets by choosing not to read.ā
It's said that the person who doesn't read books has no advantage over the person who can't read them, and this one's absolutely true.
Almost every single person you look up to, who have led great lives, accomplish magnificent things, and have elevated themselves above their initial circumstances have credited large parts of their success to a habit of lifelong, dedicated reading and a love of the profound ideas found in great books.
You almost literally can't read a biography, memoir, or even an article about someone influential and impressive in some way without hearing about how their parents read to them when they were younger, their teachers inspired a strong love of reading early on, or about how they were lucky enough to stumble upon that one book that "started it all."
All three of those things happened to me too.
What I'm saying is that it can't all be a coincidence. There must be something in books, something you can't find anywhere else (at least not delivered in the same way) that propels these powerfully influential people forward in life.
The author of Rise of the Reader, Nick Hutchison, feels the same way, and he's written a wonderful book that captures the magic of what it's like to have the idea hit you that, by holding a book, you're holding decades of wisdom and experience in the palm of your hand.
Every page crackles with Nick's breathless enthusiasm for reading, and his story makes it clear that books and reading are for everyone.
You don't have to be intimidated by the "Great Books," or swayed by the "100 Books You Must Read to Be Considered Well-Read" lists or anything like that, and even though there are more Starbucks than libraries, everyone is welcome in the book stacks too.
Books are another kind of "Third Place" where everyone is welcome, everyone is equal, and everyone can return to for as long as they want to feel inspired to keep moving forward in life.
I won't oversell the book. It's very good, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but the real selling point is Nick's sheer enthusiasm for the reading life, and as he explains in the book, we all need to surround ourselves with people who are dedicated to growth, learning, self-expansion, and fulfillment.
Basically, he's one of us: he's a reader, a passionate developer of human potential, and this book can serve as excellent encouragement for you build and maintain your intention to become a rising reader yourself.
āIf you invest in yourself, you own 100% of the investment forever. You get 100% of the return.ā
You can get virtually anything you want in life, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want.
That's one of the earliest lessons I learned from one of the first self-improvement books I've ever read (an idea originally put forth by Zig Ziglar), and people like Brian Tracy have been a staple of my wide reading ever since.
The truth of his principles has been proven time and time again, and in my own life, much of my success can be directly attributed to what I've learned from him.
In this book, The Science of Money, Brian breaks down some of the myths and misconceptions concerning how money works and how to bring more of it into your life, as well as provides enlightening explanations of the ideas that will help you create wealth. Perhaps "science" is too strong a word - there's certainly a softer, more human element to wealth creation, too - but these ideas are solid.
Importantly, the ideas in this book are foundational. They will help you to start your journey to riches on the right foot.
There's a ton of misinformation, bad advice, and downright lies that are propagated today when it comes to making money, but you'll find none of them here. And even if you're a little further along on your journey, you'll find that this book is an excellent refresher and one that you may want to keep close by.
There are a ton of great ideas contained here in this book, such as the vital importance of investing in yourself, a discussion about identifying infinite opportunities, and advice about how to increase your earning capacity, but I will just say this: if you bring these ideas to your life through your daily actions and activities, your financial life will change for the better. It will improve.
The world is getting richer all the time; the principles of wealth creation are known; you are more capable than you know, and Brian Tracy's hard-won wisdom is available to all who seek it here in The Science of Money.
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.
Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.
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