In partnership with
Someone just spent $236,000,000 on a painting. Here’s why it matters for your wallet.
Late last year, a Klimt sold for the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.
An outlier sure, but it wasn't a fluke. U.S. auction sales grew 23.1% in 2025. The $1-5mm segment even grew 40.8% YoY.
Meanwhile, Apollo’s chief economist Torsten Slok said to expect ‘zero in return in the S&P 500 over the coming decade.’
Each environment is unique, but after dot-com, post war and contemporary art grew about 24% annually for a decade. After 2008, about 11% for 12 years.
It’s also had near-zero correlation with the S&P 500 since ‘95.*
Now, Masterworks lets you invest in shares of artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso.
$1.3 billion invested across over 500 artworks.
28 sales to date.
Net annualized returns on sold works held 12 months+ like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.
Shares can sell quickly, but my subscribers can skip the waitlist:
*Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.
📚 Welcome back to The Reading Life!
I say this all the time, and it’s true:
The number of books you’ve read, or I’ve read, or that anybody else has read is just a vanity metric. It doesn’t really mean anything…unless it means something to you.
I keep track of the number of books I’ve read because I find it motivating and fun. It’s cool to see my progress, and I love having the list of books separated by year so I can go back whenever I want and see what I was reading at a particular age…
There are just so many reasons to keep a list. And so many reasons not to!
For example, if it takes the fun out of reading for you, or if it makes you feel inferior to anyone else, or just…isn’t helping you in any way, then by all means, don’t do it!
That being said, I’m about to finish my 1,500th book since I started keeping track in 2014! In fact, it’s likely going to be one of these books here:
For some weird reason, I also remember random #’s of books that I’ve finished:
#100 was the Tao Te Ching
#133 was Walden, by Henry David Thoreau
#500 was The Collected Letters of Alan Watts
And of course, #1,000 was Introduction to the New Existentialism, by Colin Wilson.
I was reading a few different books at around the same time, but I had to pick the one that made me sound the smartest to be Book #1,000, right?
Anyway…
So that’s a cool milestone I’ve got coming up, and we’re almost at 15,000 subscribers of The Reading Life! That’s pretty cool as well. Thank you very much for being here!
Now, tonight I’ll be 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 to Take the Wheel of Your Own Life
✍ 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!
One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.
Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.
That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.
5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.
Fearless Pricing, by Robin Waite: I received an early copy of this book, and it’s getting me to re-evaluate my whole pricing strategy across my business. For whatever reason, business owners keep undercharging for their extremely valuable expertise (myself included) and the first part of the book is about how to get past all that. That’s where I’m at now, but I’m already seeing tons of possibility for profit expansion here.
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.
The Process: Six Mechanics of Achievement, by Mitesh Jani: This is a great, fast-paced read about self-directed learning and growth, tied to an efficient system of tracking and measuring progress, celebrating small (and big) wins along the way. I’m only 30 pages in right now, but I’m hooked.
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 1,490 books, including 36 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“Anyway, so what if he was crazy? What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”
7 Books to Take the Wheel of Your Own Life: It’s a bit cringe to say that “nobody is coming to save you,” but besides being true, it’s also true that nobody’s coming to stop you, either. You can just do things. You can take the wheel of your own life, and build one that works for you. These 7 books can show you the way. [Watch Time: 10:14]
If you enjoy the video, please consider subscribing to my channel and sharing it with a friend. Cheers!
Homeless to Billionaire: Andres Pira’s 8 Principles of Wealth Attraction: No home, no money, no excuses.
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
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
Short Selling Master, by David Capablanca: The author made more than seven figures shorting companies on the stock market, and this book breaks down his entire trading strategy. Though I typically invest for the long term, I’m interested in checking out his approach! Expected: August 4th, 2026
The Arcadian, by Steven Pressfield: I’ve read virtually all of Pressfield’s nonfiction work (it’s amazing, by the way), but I’ve never read any of his novels. I’m thinking I should get on that! Expected: May 26th, 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
“Only in facing a strong enemy are we able to become strong ourselves.”
I first read The Undefeated Mind around the time I was just getting into reading in a big way (this would have been in 2015), and so a lot of what Dr. Lickerman covers in the book was brand new to me at the time.
For that reason, this is one of my favorite books from that time in my life, as it played a massive part in shaping my character, resilience, and the emotional stability that I enjoy today. In a few words, it changed my life.
The core idea of the book is that so much of what happens to us remains frustratingly outside of our control, but that we have a tremendous degree of influence over how events unfold.
We can choose our response, even if we can’t always choose our circumstances. At least not directly.
We can choose strength and optimism, instead of weakness and fear, and we can take the bricks that life throws at us, and use them to build a solid foundation for our future success and happiness.
“Goals and contingencies, as I’ve said, are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it, feel it.
To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them.
To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.”
For context, I have 11+ pages of notes from Mastery. From a 176-page book. If that tells you anything about how amazing I thought this book was.
Briefly, it’s about human potential, and the evolutionary destiny of human beings to learn - and keep on learning for as long as we live. But it’s about so much more than that.
It’s about how the modern world relentlessly socializes us, sapping us of our original creative energy and forcing us to conform to a world that stifles our most noble, most human impulses for generativity and greater life.
It’s about committing to a life of excellence, about all the fantastic rewards associated with traveling such a path, and how to really live while you’re alive.
On the surface, Leonard talks about martial arts, and his experience as a fighter pilot, to explain the 5 essential keys to mastery and how to achieve your athletic, creative, and intellectual potential. But on a deeper level than that, it’s about how not to waste a single moment of your one and only life.
So many of the things we do each day feel “in-between,” as though they’re not part of our “real” lives. We climb stairs to get somewhere else, never for the sake of climbing.
We drive, not for the thrill of commanding an unbelievably complex machine (the car) by using an even more unbelievably complex machine (our brain), but merely to arrive at some other distant point in time and space.
But in the same way that the point of dancing isn’t just to get to a particular spot on the floor, attempting to gain mastery in any worthwhile endeavor isn’t just about the end result. It’s about the process, the plateaus, the pleasures of being here while you’re alive, and feeling every moment of your existence.
Mastery is one of the greatest, purest distillations of this philosophy for living, and George Leonard gets it.
“This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us toward life then drags us toward nothingness…
We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time. Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.
In Hindu mythology, the river of the cosmos is portrayed with the sacred image of Shiva dancing: his dance supports the coursing of the universe; it is itself the flowing of time. What could be more universal and obvious that this flowing?
And yet things are somewhat more complicated than this. Reality is often very different from what it seems. The Earth appears to be flat but is in fact spherical. The sun seems to revolve in the sky when it is really we who are spinning.
Neither is the structure of time what it seems to be.”
I’m more confused now about the nature and reality of time than when I started reading, but this is a beautiful book by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli about how our common experience of the universe doesn’t reflect its true objectivity, and how much of what we thought was true about time is actually false or misleading.
Rovelli has spent his career grappling with quantum gravity, and he’s among the founders of the loop quantum gravity theory. I can spell it, but don’t ask me to explain it! He’s also intensely interested in the history and philosophy of science, and he draws on the poetry of Horace – and specifically his Odes – to talk about how time is stranger than fiction.
For example, time moves faster not only depending on how fast you’re going (even I knew that), but also on whether you’re closer to the ground. Seriously, time literally moves slower for short people than it does for tall people.
In the same way that your feet are “younger” than your head, there is no “present moment” that is true for the universe at all times and in all places. Just like it wouldn’t make sense to ask, “Where is here in Beijing” when you’re in New York, the present moment in one part of the universe is totally separate from the present moment in other parts of the universe.
It’s almost like we create time, in the same way that as we travel to the end of the universe, we would create the boundary of the universe as we kept going. It’s difficult – notoriously so – to say what time “is,” but the closest approximation would be that it is a collection of events, a process. Time and the universe are flow, change, growth, entropy, decay – in short, movement and dance.
As Jorge Luis Borges put it, “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
“How should a twenty-one-year-old peasant boy from the Banat region not go a bit mad with vanity when suddenly his weekly income from pushing some pieces around on a wooden board is more than what his whole native village makes in an entire year by cutting wood and scraping by in the most menial jobs?
And isn’t it actually damned easy to think of oneself as a great man when one is not burdened with the faintest idea that a Rembrandt, a Beethoven, a Dante, a Napoleon had ever existed?”
This novella was my first introduction to Zweig’s work, and here’s another instance of the phenomenon where, now I just want to read everything he’s ever written.
I thought it was tremendous, and it’s given devastating force by virtue of the fact that it was sent off to his publisher just days before his suicide.
The story itself is about an enigmatic passenger aboard a ship traveling from New York to Buenos Aires who “interferes” in a game of chess between a disdainful, arrogant world chess champion and a group of passengers who team up and try to defeat him.
The drama emerges from the events leading to the stranger’s mysterious mastery of the game, and here’s where I’ll drop some light spoilers.
The stranger, it turns out, was held captive by the Nazis in a Vienna hotel during WWII, which doesn’t sound so bad, until you read about the psychological torture of being denied even the most basic and fleeting human contact, cut off completely from every other living soul, with no one to talk to, nothing to read, nothing to think about except thoughts.
Eventually, while outside of his hotel room for one of his regular interrogations, he has occasion to steal a book of famous chess matches, which his mind seizes upon, and, in his soul-crushing, stultifying captivity, he commits to memory.
Torn apart psychologically from the inside out, his only refuge the letters, numbers, and coordinates of those memorized matches, he builds himself into a chess master himself, without even possessing a board.
What I’ve just described doesn’t do justice whatsoever to the moral, ethical, and psychological force of Zweig’s writing, so I don’t feel too bad for “revealing” the source of the stranger’s mastery.
The story itself won’t take you long to read, but if you’re anything like me, it’ll stay with you for a long, long time.
“Although your mind can contain thousands of thoughts, it can hold only one thought at a time, and you are always free to choose that thought at any given moment.”
Personal development is pretty easy when nothing goes wrong. When the economy’s great, you’re getting tons of sleep, and you’ve got lots of free time, it’s not hard to read a book a week, study high-income skills, and grow your business.
But when things aren’t going great, the strategies and tactics in this book will help you survive and thrive.
A few things stand out as being particularly helpful during tough times.
For one thing, constantly focusing on solutions rather than problems goes a long way. Just like how racecar drivers look away from the wall when they’re about to crash, you move toward where you place your focus, so it’s in your best interest to always look toward solutions.
Targeting the one major constraint holding you back at any given time is another helpful strategy, made popular by Eliyahu Goldratt’s book, The Goal.
Basically, what you want to do is take aim at the one single bottleneck, the one major problem that, if you solved, would make a number of other problems either irrelevant or at least much easier to solve.
Another thing that Brian Tracy himself is known for is zero-based thinking, by which he means avoiding the sunk-cost fallacy of throwing good time and money after bad.
If you knew what you know now, would you still start this business? Marry this person? Go down this road? If not, then get out as soon as you can and never look back.
This is another fairly short book that you can bang out in much less than a day, but it’s got a ton of helpful advice in here, and practical tips you can use to come out the other side of any difficulty bigger, stronger, wiser, and wealthier than you were when you went in.
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 2026, join us inside Wealth Creators 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 Wealth Creators, my mastermind for educational entrepreneurs 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.
