Five Great Books: The Top 1%, The Mamba Mentality, The Turn of the Screw, and More!

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The last of tonight’s book selections doesn’t fit at all with the rest of them, but it’s a fantastic book.

The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James has been adapted thousands of times for the stage and screen ever since it first came out in 1898, and it has one of my favorite endings in all of literature. I’m not even exaggerating in the slightest.

Not everybody agrees with me, of course, but if everyone agreed with everyone about everything, there wouldn’t be so many great books being written all the time!

For Friday, I’m working on updating an old book breakdown for you: Food for the Heart, by Ajahn Chah, Thailand’s best-known meditation teacher.

That same night, I’ll be publishing a new book breakdown too: How to Get Rich, by Felix Dennis, which is an amazing book with layers of depth to it that makes it so much more than just a “how to make money” book. It’s actually quite special, and I can’t wait to share my full breakdown with you!

How to Get Rich will be a free book breakdown available to everyone, and Food for the Heart will just be for Premium Members of The Reading Life (you)!

With that said, below are my complete notes and summaries from the following books…

📚 $100M Leads, by Alex Hormozi

📚 The Mamba Mentality, by David Mitchell

📚 The Top 1%, by Dan Strutzel

📚 The Six-Word Secret to Success, by Earl Nightingale

📚 The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:

📖 What I’m Currently Reading

📕 Books I’ve Finished This Month

📜 The Book Quote of the Day

🎥 How to Get Paid Like an Expert (Even If You’re Not Famous)

✍ 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!

Book and Dagger, by Elyse Graham: I’ll read almost any “book about books,” and this one is particularly fascinating. It’s the true story of how various scholars, librarians, etc. were recruited to be spies during WWII, and so you have literature professors, archivists, historians, and other academics turning over double agents, gathering intelligence and everything to help defeat Germany, told in this fast-paced narrative style that makes you forget that the ending’s already been written. It’s great so far!

Dying to Do Letterman, by Steve Mazan: I first heard Steve’s story in his TEDx Talk, where he talks about his childhood dream of performing comedy on The Late Show with David Letterman, a dream that was brought back into deathly sharp focus after a shocking cancer diagnosis, his doctor telling him that he only had five years to live.

After the “finish line” was laid out for him, Steve decided to turn “Someday” into “Today,” and chase down his dream. Amazing book so far, and none of us needs to receive a cancer diagnosis to do what Steve did. We can just do things.

Napoleon’s Library, by Louis N. Sarkozy: My friend Alex recommended this one and I bought it immediately. It’s about Napoleon Bonaparte and the books he read that influenced him. Not just him though, but really the entire content - even the entire world. It’s also written by the son of the former president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy - so that’s pretty cool! I’m savoring this one, so I’ve been reading it for a while, but it’s very good.

1. The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom

2. Wonderhell, by Laura Gassner Otting

3. Your Faith is Your Fortune, by Neville Goddard

4. Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It, by Richard Koch

How to Get Paid Like an Expert (Even If You’re Not Famous): Joshua Lisec is the multimillion-dollar ghostwriter of more than 80 BOOKS(!) and this particular book is for underpaid experts whose paychecks don’t measure up to the actual value they provide to their clients and customers.

Besides dishing out quite possibly the best marketing advice of all time (and I’m not just saying that), Joshua’s book will help you develop a genius-system with no steps skipped that will allow your clients to experience sensational, almost literally unbelievable results, such that people don’t believe they could possibly be true.

I read this book last year, and it helped me make more money than I ever have before. It also taught me a ton of valuable marketing lessons that I used personally to turn attention into cold, hard, cash. [Watch Time: 5:41]

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How “Renegade Millionaires” Get Rich (And Why 95% of People Never Will): 18 secrets to extreme wealth, freedom, and business success from “the millionaire-maker” Dan S. Kennedy.

18 Ways Winners Manage Their Time Each and Every Day: World-class time management advice from the legendary Brian Tracy.

8 Ways to Develop a High-Performing Mind (Backed by Science): What Olympic athletes and ultra-high-performers do and know that the rest of us don’t.

Champion Mindset, by Patrick Mouratoglou: I had never heard of this guy, but apparently he was Serena Williams’ tennis coach for more than a decade, on top of his work with other icons of the sport. This book contains his “ten commandments” for success, applicable not just to sports but everywhere in life. I don’t even watch tennis, but I expect to learn a ton from this book. Expected: May 13th, 2025

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

Moral Ambition, by Rutger Bregman: I’ve read (and loved) Rutger’s first book, Utopia for Realists, and plan to read his follow up book, Human Kind - now I have to add this one to my list too! The subtitle is “How to stop wasting your talent and start making a difference,” and it’s a book about using your career for good, and to make the world a better place. Expected: May 6th, 2025

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

You Can Just Do Things, by Jay Yang: This is my friend Jay’s first book (of many!), and it’s about permissionless action. It’s the idea that you can create your own opportunities in this life, even if you don’t see anyone handing them out. You can dictate your own future, and call your own shots. You can just do things. Expected: April 30th, 2025

I’ve paid Alex Hormozi probably less than $2 over the course of my life (not counting the value of the hundreds of hours of my time I’ve spent watching his content on YouTube, of course), and I’ve earned back such insane, compounding returns on that investment - it’s just wild. 

Hormozi makes his books available on Amazon for the cheapest possible price that the platform will let him list them for, just to eliminate any barrier between his business principles and tactics and the people whose businesses they can completely transform. 

$100M Leads is the second book in his series, the first being $100M Offers, where he taught people what to sell. In that book, he shows you how to build out what he calls a Grand Slam Offer, something so tantalizing that people would feel downright stupid saying no. In $100M Leads, he teaches you how to let people know about it.  

Hormozi has said in the past that the difference between him sleeping on the floor of the gym he owned and, years later, owning a portfolio of companies doing $200,000,000 in revenue each year was how many leads he was getting in his businesses. That’s been my experience too. Everything else could be crashing down, but if you have people coming through the door, primed and ready to give you money, you’ll likely be okay. 

Lead flow is everything in business, and this book will show you how to get 2x, 10x, even 100x more of them, without changing anything except how you get them. 

When you consider that he now has 20,000 leads coming in per day, across 16 different industries, it’s safe to say that he knows a thing or two about a thing or two when it comes to getting leads. And, after reading this book, you will too.

Get This Book on Amazon: $100M Leads

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I don’t even like basketball, and I still think this book is amazing. Kobe Bryant was a superstar basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers known for his sickening work ethic and dedication to the sport; this is a book about his career with that team, and it gives special insight into his game, how he played, and how he became such an unstoppable force on and off the court. 

Again, I’m not even a basketball fan (although I don’t mind it) - I just remember Kobe as an absolute legend who gave everything he had to the game that he loved, and set the standard for champion-level competitiveness, depth of preparation, and the indefatigable will to win. Truthfully, this book is just as much about success and excellence as it is about basketball. 

It’s a good thing it’s not a basketball manual, or else I probably wouldn’t have made it through! It’s more so about how he thought, how he prepared, how he competed, and how he learned to be the very best he could be. His famously detailed approach to the game set an example for the entire league, and if you have aspirations of getting to the top in anything, you’ll find lots here to motivate and inspire you. 

The book is also accompanied by epic photos taken by the Lakers’ official photographer, Andrew D. Bernstein, who took both the first and the last picture Kobe Bryant ever took with the team. It won’t take you long to read this one, but speaking for myself, I’ll carry Kobe’s example with me for the rest of my life.

Get This Book on Amazon: The Mamba Mentality

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Never try to keep up with the Joneses. Because even when you do eventually catch up, they just refinance. That’s one of my favorite lines from this book, and it gives you a hint that it’s not just another “how to get rich” book. Now, I’ve read and enjoyed more than a few of that type of book - don’t get me wrong - but this book is different. 

Dan’s book goes further into the character traits of “The 1%” - into things like commitment, discipline, generosity, an attitude of service, and the like. As this other businessman, Dave Anderson says in the foreword, “If I became a part of this ‘Top 1%’, it happened only because of my desire to serve the 99%.” 

That’s very true. From what I see, many people have this sort of “adversarial” view when it comes to those on the higher/lower ends of the economic spectrum, whereas the reality, as Strutzel explains so well, is that most wealth is created by people who provide value to the rest of the population in some way.

Think: Starbucks, Apple, Ford, Netflix - the reason why those companies generate such massive profits is because their customers’ lives are improved (at least subjectively) by consuming what they sell. 

None of this is to deny the reality of greed, avarice, hostility, and nastiness in the world, no matter where you look on the economic spectrum.

People treat each other horribly irrespective of their tax bracket, and that brings me to one of the other things that’s so refreshing about Dan’s book. He states in no uncertain terms that wealth generated through the oppression of others isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. 

Today, literally thousands of new millionaires are being created all the time; economic opportunity is exploding, enabled partly by the internet and social media.

Wealth and financial security is within reach of more people than ever before in the history of humanity. But Dan’s belief is that just having money doesn’t put you into any top 1% worth being a member of. More is required. 

In this book, yes, Dan Strutzel lays out practical methods and advice for attaining wealth and advancing your career. He walks you through all the success tactics and the strategies.

But in his view, if your journey towards becoming a member of the top 1% doesn’t also make you a more compassionate, helpful, genuinely respectable human being, you’re wasting your time.

Get This Book on Amazon: The Top 1%

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“We become what we think about.” That’s “the six-word secret to success,” but I did NOT just save you from reading the whole book, because you still absolutely should. 

Earl Nightingale was a legendary American broadcaster and his audio programs have been listened to by millions of people since 1956, when he released The Strangest Secret, a spoken word record that sold more than a million copies. 

The Strangest Secret, much like James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, is one of those books that you could read in less than an hour, but think about for the rest of your life: You become what you think about. You become what you think about! How simple and how powerful and how…true! 

Your character (and thus your life) takes on the color of your most dominant thoughts, and what you “plant” there inside your own mind will be brought forth. You become what you think about. 

The Six-Word Secret to Success is similar to The Strangest Secret, but even more autobiographical and conversational. It’s not a radio broadcast, more of a quiet conversation between friends about life, meaning, and real success. The kind based on fulfillment and service, and not (exclusively) on external rewards. 

Earl Nightingale’s one of my favorite people ever, and I honestly can’t recommend his books highly enough. It’s always, always time well spent, and at least for me, I always come away with practical and inspirational insights that I keep returning to for years.

Get This Book on Amazon: The Six-Word Secret to Success

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Henry James has been a favorite of mine ever since being completely captivated by his other book, The Ambassadors. 

The Turn of the Screw is a classic ghost story that’s been retold and recast in many different forms in the century since it was first published - we’re talking movie adaptations, TV shows, Netflix series, plays…everything. 

It’s slightly more difficult to read than even some of the other books of that time period (late 19th century), mostly due to Henry James’s “F-you, just try and read this” writing style and lack of punctuation. And it’s not even a lack of punctuation, really, but that there’s so much of it! A typical sentence of his can be strung out for half a page or more. 

The Turn of the Screw is told within a framing narrative, where a group of people are huddled together on Christmas Eve telling ghost stories. One guest tries to one-up everyone else with his scary story, basically asking, “You think that’s scary? Listen to this!”

The story he tells, the main, nested narrative, centers around a governess who’s hired to look after two young children who have just lost both of their parents. 

In the course of time, it becomes clear that the children have some sort of supernatural connection with the dead, former governess and her lover - or is it actually a story about the living governess’s struggle with mental illness and her descent into madness? 

That’s the ambiguity, deftly handled and brilliantly imagined that makes The Turn of the Screw such a classic. And the ending! We have to talk about the ending! 

I won’t spoil it (obviously), but I’m telling you: the very last word, on the very last page, after such a long, typically Jamesian setup, complete with run-on sentences - not to mention asides like this one, that add to the syntactic complexity of the whole - and digressions every which way, concludes the tale with a terrific hammer-blow that you will not see coming.

The story itself may not be terribly scary by today’s standards, but the ending is one reason I’ve been haunted by this novella ever since.

Get This Book on Amazon: The Turn of the Screw

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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 150,000+ 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

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