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📚 Hey, good evening!

The latest book breakdown at the Stairway to Wisdom features an excellent fitness book, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation.

It's so much more than “just” a fitness book though.

Even if you're not necessarily the gym-going type (and that's totally fine), this book is more like a manual to Life.

The breakdown itself is about 9,500 words, covering all the Key Ideas, Book Notes, Action Steps, and more.

It’s also free, by the way.

It’ll only take you about 36 minutes to read the whole thing, and in it, you’ll learn why conquering meaningful challenges in the gym (or any other place where you choose to be active and push your limits) empowers you to tackle other, bigger challenges outside the gym too.

You can read the full breakdown here, but I’ll give you a little preview in this email so you can decide whether to check out the full one later.

Again, totally free.

I should actually say “free for right NOW,” because it’s going back behind the paywall very shortly.

Then it’s just for members only at the Stairway to Wisdom. 

Alright now, let’s open…

This Book is For:

*Everyone who wants to feel in control of their own health, body, and future, and who is willing to make the necessary investments in themselves to make that happen.

*People who have a vision for their bodies and lives, and who are driven to break free of artificial limitations, realize their unique talents, and fulfill their true potentialities. 

*Athletes and competitors who want to learn how to find that extra gear inside themselves and develop the physical, emotional, and spiritual strength and energy needed to overcome any obstacle.

*Anyone who hates feeling like they're moving in slow motion, and who wants to fight back against the exhaustion and inertia that's preventing them from healing what's unhealthy, fixing what's broken, and improving what's lacking.

Summary:

I haven't been this impressed with a fitness book in a long time, but in no way is this just a fitness book.

For whatever reason, most people think that the gym is just about working out, but training is never just training. The gym is...Life.

The lessons you can learn inside the gym, the person that working out can help you to become, can be taken with you everywhere else that you go in life and they will serve you well in every other thing it is you do.

Once you learn how to control what happens inside the gym, you find out that there's a lot more that you can control outside the gym too.

The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation is a thinking person's fitness book, and somehow...somehow...Mike Matthews finds a way to bring Epictetus, Solzhenitsyn, Teddy Roosevelt, Socrates, and more into a book about health and fitness and still make it accessible, easy to get into, valuable, and fun.

Moreover, fitness should be fun. It should make your life better, and not be seen as a chore, some fearful obligation, or something that's beyond your reach. This book is for people who want to be better than they are right now, and if there's just one thing you take away from this book I hope it's that being better than you are right now is never beyond your reach.

That's not to say that you won't be asked to make meaningful sacrifices and to do things that you don't want to do right now, in order to get you closer to the things you want most. As Mike says:

That's another thing the gym teaches you: the supreme importance of showing up. Getting back up after every failure, dusting yourself off after every defeat, and doing your best today, tomorrow, and every day. That's why you won't achieve a spectacular physique after one single day of training. It just doesn't work like that. You have to keep showing up.

Now, you won't find specific training or meal plans inside this book. Mike has other books like Bigger Leaner Stronger that offer plans like that. This book is more about the principles and fundamentals. Once you get those right, and understand the reasoning behind them, you can successfully choose, discard, and even invent methods accordingly. 

The main difference between the people who find this book helpful and the people who let it gather dust on their shelves is that the people who found value in it actually put these ideas into practice on a daily basis. They actually got up and started to get after it, which is how they avoided the trap of spending too much time thinking and too little time doing and looking.

As we'll see in the Key Ideas below, action is the only salvation that exists. But it has to be intelligently directed action, and that's one of the main things this book will clarify for you. It'll help you set meaningful goals, stress test them in the real world, recalibrate, get up and go after them again, and get closer each and every time you do.

Keeping an optimistic but realistic mindset as you move forward is something that Matthews emphasizes, and this is something we can all get better at.

Easy answers and false promises have no place in the Mike Matthews playbook though. As he consistently reminds us, working out and eating right takes time, energy, effort, discipline, dedication, and patience, and Life always finds a way to test us and make us prove how badly we want it.

So keep this book close by and hold tightly onto your growing self-belief. Don't ask for an easy life; ask for the strength to endure a difficult one. Don't limit yourself to the light weights; motivate yourself to get stronger.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: Conquering the Fitness Game

People think it's "just the gym," but in reality, it can be so much more. Approached in the right way, you can learn just as much (if not more) about yourself and what you're capable of inside the gym than you can in any classroom.

Perhaps the biggest lesson that I see many people take away from their gym experience is that they have the ability to tackle harder, more complex challenges outside the gym as well.

After you've pushed through enough plateaus and lifted that bar for enough reps, you start seeing changes that you are in control of, and the knowledge that you can effect those kinds of changes is a before/after moment in many people's lives. It certainly was in mine.

Speaking for myself, I was able to take that newfound sense of self-efficacy and self-belief with me out into the wider world and make BIG changes happen out there too.

Those changes didn't happen overnight, which taught me patience. Results take time, inside the gym and out. Those changes came hard, and I had to keep at it for much longer than I had anticipated, which taught me the value of consistency and work ethic.

Every rep, every workout was a positive reinforcement of those kinds of life-changing lessons. Very little that most of my teachers have ever said to me has had that kind of impact on my life. I owe it all to the gym.

The gym is an extremely special place, somewhere you have the opportunity to put yourself in difficult situations (yet in a controlled environment), where you have to figure out how to make it. You have to do this, and so you're confronted with some difficult questions that you can't run away from: Are you going to lift this heavy weight or not? Are you going to run that extra mile or not? Will you persevere?

But the lessons don't stop there! Tracking your workouts, measuring your progress, and showing up at the gym every day whether you feel like it or not teaches you discipline and conscientiousness, which are valuable everywhere human beings seek to make an impact, no matter what the project or goal.

The gym also teaches you to handle your emotions when results don't come as quickly as you'd like them to, or when you feel overwhelmed and aren't sure whether you can make it through these last few, heavy, difficult reps. You almost always can, but until you prove it to yourself, your true capability will always remain "potential" and not "actual."

Perhaps most importantly, the gym teaches you the supreme importance of keeping your promises to yourself, no matter what.

The worst thing you could ever do is to let yourself down, and the gym gives you that choice: Am I going to come through for myself? Or am I going to lie down? Am I going to follow through? Or am I going to just fold?

Every single lesson and piece of valuable self-knowledge I've described in the preceding paragraphs is also valuable in the external world where we all live out our days. And the gym is one of the best places in which to learn these lessons.

It's all too easy to focus on the physical pain of each rep, and the emotional drain of doing your absolute best, no matter what. But you always have to remember: your mind is getting a workout too, and on the other side of this next, brutally challenging set is an entirely new self-concept, a whole new reality.

#2: The Most Rewarding Adventure

The perfect physique doesn't exist, and whatever you've achieved in life so far, isn't your true potential. You can always do more; that's yet another thing that the gym teaches you.

But again, there's more to it than that. The gym also happens to be one of those places where not only is everyone welcome, but it also doesn't matter who you are or how many times you've failed in the past: you're still always welcome within these walls. Nothing you do - or fail to do - can ever change that.

Look: every workout is a new workout. Every day is a new day. Every attempt is a new attempt, and our past doesn't determine our future. We determine our future, and it's always up to us. Something else that the gym teaches us!

The interesting thing you'll discover is that attaining that perfect physique (or anything else, like social acceptance, status, trophies, etc.) was never the point in the first place. Those are external measures of success that are undeniably important; we need to have objective ways to determine winners in sports and athletics, and competition does wonderfully focus the mind, elevating all the competitors in the process.

But in fitness, there is no finish line, and even if you were to get there, it would only represent a tiny fraction of the total time you've devoted to getting better and better at the gym.

As they say, the person who loves walking will go further than the one who just loves the destination. It's the present that we inhabit - one where we're tested by meaningful challenges and must prove ourselves worthy - where we'll find the majority of the rewards of our training, and when you think of it like that, the fact that this process never ends is actually the most wonderful news of all.

#3: Paying the Full Price

Throughout history, the people who stored food for the winter, learned to anticipate the changes of the seasons, and sacrificed at least a little bit of their present comfort for their future survival were the ones who actually made it.

While we may not face nearly as many existential threats to our safety as we did in the past, the same general principle is true today: the people who win make the right sacrifices, and the people who lose don’t. It's all about giving up at least some of what you want now, in exchange for what you want most later.

In his book, The Power of Regret, Daniel Pink identifies four distinct categories of regret (foundation, boldness, moral, and connection regrets), and the sacrifices that people make in each category partly determine what kinds of regrets they're saddled with (and/or avoid) in the future.

For example, foundation regrets involve things like not saving up money for retirement, never gaining an education, etc. All those things contribute to one's stability throughout life; they serve as the foundation for a better life. But in order to save enough money for retirement, you can't blow all your cash (not to mention your health) on getting drunk every weekend. You have to sacrifice at least a little bit of what you want now (an entertaining weekend out that you may or may not remember), for what you want most, which is the calm, peace of mind, and equanimity of knowing that you'll be provided for financially when you choose to stop working.

Similarly, with training, the more you sacrifice, the more you'll be able to achieve. Maybe you won't be able to eat whatever you want, skip workouts whenever you feel like it, or stay up late and wreck your sleep watching movies. You're going to have to get up, you're going to do some work, and you're going to have to undergo some discomfort to get what you've said that you want: to get in shape and improve your body. But that's just the price you'll have to pay.

A quote from football legend Tom Brady gives perfect voice to this idea. He said:

Now, depending on your goals, you certainly don't have to give up your whole life. But how far do you want to take this? How hard are you willing to train? How long are you willing to maintain your workout streak? Are you willing to impose certain limits on yourself in some areas so that you can transcend your limits in others? What are you willing to give up now for what you want later?

The answers to those questions make all the difference between the people who make it and the people who fail.

But I'll also say this: you don't have to be perfect. Not if you don't want to be a world champion. You just have to do enough. You just have to determine the full price of whatever it is that you want and promise to pay it. As Matthews says:

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

Action Steps:

So you've finished reading. What do you do now?

Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!

Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.

Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...

#1: Drill Down to Your Deepest WHY

Often, what we think are the reasons we have for doing or wanting something aren't the real reasons. Or, at least, they're not the deepest, most visceral reasons why we're motivated to start a new fitness habit or buy some particular thing, etc. There's some other reason, perhaps just a little bit below consciousness awareness, why we actually want what we want.

I may be making it sound more mysterious than it actually is, but an effective exercise to help you access those reasons is to keep asking "why" questions until you get to the very bottom of it.

So, what's your "why" for fitness? Why do you want to get in shape, get healthy, etc." Why do you keep showing up?

At first, you might say something like, "Because I want to look better."

But then, if you ask "why" again, you might say, "Because then they'll take me more seriously at work."

You can keep asking "why" again and again until you come to the deepest possible reason you can come up with for why you actually want to prioritize your health and fitness.

You might come into this thinking that you were doing it for more "superficial" reasons like looking and feeling better, but then discover that for you, it's actually about living longer and experiencing a greater quality of life, one where you're able to keep up with your kids when they're playing in the backyard.

There aren't any "wrong" answers here, but just keep asking "why" at least 3-5 times until you come up with something that can help keep you going when it gets tough. And it will get tough.

#2: The Seven-Day Sacrifice Challenge

Getting better at fitness is all about getting better at sacrificing. We have to sacrifice for what we want; we have to give up at least a little bit of what we want now, so we can have a better chance of getting what we want most.

The good news is that sacrificing is a skill, and we can get better at it with practice.

With that in mind, consider taking on this seven-day challenge:

Day 1: Sacrifice a little bit of your comfort and warmth by taking a 5-minute cold shower in the morning.

Day 2: Sacrifice your sloth by waking up at least 15 minutes earlier.

Day 3: Sacrifice your afternoon brain fog by going without caffeine for a day, especially not within 12 hours of going to sleep.

Day 4: Sacrifice some of the toxic chemicals floating around in your bloodstream by avoiding highly processed food.

Day 5: Sacrifice a few of your addictive neurochemicals by going on a digital detox and limiting your social media consumption for a day.

Day 6: Sacrifice your lethargy by doing an hour of low-to-moderate cardio.

Day 7: Sacrifice your ignorance by reading a book for an hour.

Every time you give up something that feels good in the moment for something that will make you feel good about yourself for a lifetime, it gets easier to do. You're unlearning slavery to your automatic drives and impulses and learning about freedom and achievement.

#3: The Warren Buffett "2 List" Strategy

There's some controversy about whether Warren Buffett ever actually offered this advice or not, but he's since heard that his name was attributed to it and said that it wasn't a bad idea! So here's what you do:

You make a list of the goals, projects, opportunities, etc. that you'd like to pursue, trying to keep it to 25 items. Then you pick the top 5 that most excite you and that you think will make the biggest positive difference to your quality of life, and then you place them on a separate, second list.

Now, take that first list of 20 less meaningful goals and aspirations, put it away in a drawer, and never look at it again.

Next, expand on your top 5 and write out why they're most interesting or meaningful to you out of all of the things you listed. You may have to ask "why" several times, as you did in the first Action Step above.

After that, you're going to write down three of the biggest obstacles that might get in the way of you achieving these goals. What might make them hard to achieve? What might you have to sacrifice?

If, after soberly evaluating all the positives and negatives surrounding each goal, project, priority, etc., you're still fired up about them, great! Review what you've written down every single day of your life from this day forward and never lose sight of these precious goals.

Naturally, you can change or edit them as you see fit, but it's very important that you limit yourself to just a few opportunities, establish why you want to go after them and what they mean to you, and hold onto them with everything you've got.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Mike Matthews is the #1 bestselling fitness author in the world, with over 1.5 million books sold, as well as the founder of the #1 brand of all-natural sports supplements, Legion.

His simple and science-based approach to building muscle, losing fat, and getting healthy has helped tens of thousands of people build their best body ever, and his work has been featured in many popular outlets including Esquire, Men’s Health, Elle, Women’s Health, Muscle & Strength, and more, as well as on FOX and ABC.

Additional Resources:

Legion Athletics | Mike Matthews

Muscle for Life | Mike Matthews Podcast

Natural Science-Based Sports Supplements

Stacked | The Free Weightlifting App

Get 3 Free Chapters of The Little Black Book

Get Additional Bonus Materials from Mike

This Book on Amazon:

The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation, by Michael Matthews

If You Liked This Book:

Bigger Leaner Stronger, by Michael Matthews

Thinner Leaner Stronger, by Michael Matthews

Do Hard Things, by Steve Magness

Discipline Equals Freedom, by Jocko Willink

Discipline is Destiny, by Ryan Holiday

The Essential Wooden, by John Wooden and Steve Jamison

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Badass Habits, by Jen Sincero

Can't Hurt Me, by David Goggins

The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller

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OK, that’s it for now…

More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!

Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free (for now!), and you can find it right here.

What you see in this email is less than half of what you get at the Stairway to Wisdom. I left out most of the Book Notes, all the Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking, several of the Key Ideas, etc.

So there’s a lot more for you left to read if you enjoyed what you read in this email!

With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you apply the wisdom found in the greatest books ever written to your life:

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