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Your Next Five Moves, by Patrick Bet-David
“You must act like a great entrepreneur long before you ever become one.”
Matt Karamazov
August 28, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 24 minutes
📚 Hey, good evening!
The author of the book I want to tell you about today has an absolutely wild life story.
He’s from Iran originally, but when I think of the American Dream, I think of this guy.
So here he was, as a very young boy in Iran…his parents fled the country. Literally escaped with just the few possessions they had and set out for America.
One of his earliest memories is of the bridge they just crossed in order to escape getting demolished by government forces.
That could have been his last memory.
Alright, so he lands in America, grows into a young man, loves bodybuilding and working out - he wasn’t much of a reader, but he got into the army, finds some discipline, and realizes that he wants to do more with his life.
But he’s still partying all the time, drinking, doing all the stuff young people normally do. And that’s cool. Honestly.
Still, no one really thought he’d amount to much. Including him.
Then, he starts reading books.
A lot of books. Changes his life through reading (just like this other guy you know!) and starts his own insurance company. Grows it nationwide, scales across the country, and has sales teams working 24/7 making him money, and growing his business.
Then he starts a YouTube channel…grows it to millions of subscribers in just a few years by sharing his business advice and book recommendations.
Fast forward, and he’s written two books, has a wildly popular podcast, interviews all these impressive, successful people…ends up buying a Ferrari worth $1,000,000…
I’m talking about Patrick Bet-David, who I like to think of as the Iranian Jordan Peterson, and his book is called Your Next Five Moves.
It’s one of the best leadership books I’ve ever read and it came out of nowhere to become a book that now I recommend all the time.
In fact, I thought so highly of this book that I wrote a complete breakdown of Your Next Five Moves for the Stairway to Wisdom, highlights of which I’ll share with you here in this email.
The breakdown itself is about 8,700 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 34 minutes to read the whole thing, and in it, you’ll learn how to inhabit a future reality in your mind that’s so compelling it forces people to follow you there, how to become an effective decision-maker at the highest possible level, how to think and strategize several moves ahead, and more.
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 at the Stairway to Wisdom.
Alright now, let’s strategize and plan out…
This Book is For:
*Aspiring leaders looking for clarity about what they want, who they want to be, and the specific skills they'll need to develop to ensure they get there.
*Driven entrepreneurs who want to take their businesses, their careers, and their lives to the next level, and learn from the very best in the world what it really takes to elevate their contribution and their success to stratospheric heights.
*Everyone who feels as though they've run up against the limit of their potential (hint: they haven't), and wants to discover what it takes to lead an extraordinary life at the highest level of business and entrepreneurship.
*Professionals within any organization who are searching for an edge to help them reason better than their peers, strategize more effectively than their competitors, and rise higher than the rest.
Summary:
“Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.”
Your Next Five Moves completely overwhelmed my expectations going into it and provided me with a wealth of business and leadership knowledge in just a few hours that I'll be able to use and profit from for the rest of my natural life.
Such is the power of reading!
Your Next Fives Moves is a high-level, high-impact playbook for how you can maximize your effectiveness in five areas: gaining self-knowledge, mastering the ability to reason, developing and building the right team, learning strategy to scale, and deploying power plays that will help you negotiate more effectively and take down some of the biggest competitors in your industry. This book will show you how to do it all.
The overarching theme of this book is the absolute necessity of thinking several moves ahead if you want to succeed in business, especially if you want to make a bigger impact than just earning a comfortable living. There’s nothing wrong with having a goal like that – something I love Patrick for emphasizing – but if you do decide to set bigger goals for yourself, you need to develop a work ethic to match.
Your discipline has to be as unshakable as your dreams are large, or you’re just not going to get there.
Moreover, we all need to understand that the most important person you’ll ever study will be yourself. Yet, most people are so concerned with other people and what they’re doing that they never take the time and make the effort to gain invaluable self-knowledge. In this book, Patrick Bet-David clearly and lucidly lays out why this is a tragic misstep that you need to avoid at all costs.
He also argues - again, rightly - that what separates average business owners from exceptional leaders and entrepreneurial visionaries is the ability to anticipate future events and plan effectively well before they actually happen. By thinking, planning, and strategizing at least five moves ahead.
Your competition isn't doing this.
Your meager competition isn't doing this, I should say. The competitors you should be worried about absolutely are thinking several moves ahead, and if you want to play at the same level as them you need to elevate the quality and substance of everything that you're doing in your business.
You need to combine devastating offense with awesome defense and then you have to move forward with sickening consistency and unrelenting passion.
This is how you separate yourself. This is how you enter the highest echelons of business and show the world that you deserve to be there.
When the rest of the people you're competing against are mired in today's problems and dealing with the challenges threatening their existence right now, you'll be living, thinking, planning, and acting in a larger, brighter, more distant future that they will just never be able to get to.
This book will help you outwork, out-improve, out-strategize, and outlast your competition, and it’s written by someone who’s actually done the work himself; he’s done exactly what he’s telling his readers to do, and that kind of accountability and authenticity is something you hold onto for dear life once you’ve found it in a person.
None of this is going to happen by accident, just like Patrick Bet-David didn't just "stumble" into his massive success. It was intentional, it was planned, and by utilizing the strategies he lays out in this book, it became damn near inevitable.
Key Ideas:
#1: Visionaries Are Already Living Five Moves Ahead
“A visionary is someone who is not living in the here and now. He or she has already seen at least five moves ahead and is living in that reality.”
Every business idea, every spectacular achievement, and every great adventure all started inside the mind of the person who would eventually make it real in the external world.
Everything starts in the mind, and it's the job of the leader to craft a compelling vision of the future, inhabit it inside their own mind, and then inspire people to follow them there.
We naturally want to follow people who see clearly where they intend to go, and who can persuade us that it's worthwhile making the effort to get there. We follow people who know exactly where they are going, and who have the audacity to believe that it's their destiny to arrive there.
If you want to become a great leader, you need to maintain that vision as a living reality inside your own mind, long before anyone else is going to be capable of seeing it out there in the "real" world. You need to have made that same trip in your mind countless times before and transmit that vision to the people you seek to lead. There is no other way.
Ask anyone who has ever won an Olympic medal whether they visualized themselves up on that podium long before it ever happened. Every single one of them will say, "Yes, absolutely. It was real in my mind before it ever became a reality to anyone else."
Then, not only do you need to hold that energy but you also have to make it visible and compelling to others. This is the essence of leadership. It's why you are the leader and they are your followers.
#2: Act Like It Before You Become It
“You must act like a great entrepreneur long before you ever become one.”
"Act as if" is one of the most powerful success strategies I've ever adopted for myself and it's worked for countless people before me. To be clear right up front: this is not the same thing as "fake it until you make it." The two may sound the same, but they are wildly different.
Faking it means pretending that you're someone you're not...all the while deluding yourself that you might "accidentally" become that person in the future.
By contrast, "acting as if" means to intentionally adopt the identity of the kind of person you wish to become, and, most importantly, to adopt the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of that person right now.
You are literally acting as though you are the person you're seeking to become; you're not trying to trick yourself or others into thinking that you already are that person. Catch the difference?
Whatever your desired identity - in this case, as a leader - you have to behave as that person would behave now. As we discussed above, you have to live in that future reality and embody the highly qualified, exceptional leader that you're becoming. An example might help make this clearer.
In my own life, I would observe the people in my current reality behaving in ways that I wanted to behave, achieving the results that I wanted to achieve and so I asked myself these kinds of questions:
"Who do these people associate with?"
"What do they do with their time?"
"What actions do they take on a daily basis in order to do what they do?"
"What do they NOT do?"
"Who do they NOT spend time with?"
"What do they AVOID doing?"
I'd ask myself these kinds of questions constantly, and, slowly but surely, a picture started to form in my mind of how I would need to behave if I wanted to develop into a great entrepreneur myself.
Obviously, this is an infinite game, so I certainly haven't "arrived" yet or anything, but I now consciously choose to behave in a manner concordant with the type of person I want to become.
This is about identity change as much as about anything else. I am acting as if I am already a highly successful entrepreneur, a dynamic, passionate YouTuber, an insanely disciplined fitness model, etc. But, you have to realize that I never started out as any of those things!
I had to act my way into those roles, and I'm still acting! But what you'll find is that when you keep taking the kinds of actions that the people you admire are taking on a daily, continuous basis, eventually you wake up to discover that you are that person and then you just never go back.
#3: How to Tell When You're Winning
“You’ll know you’re succeeding in life when others are winning simply because of their association with you.”
An easy way to tell whether you're winning in life is to count how many people are better off just by knowing you. How many other people are winning because they are in your circle? How many success stories have you been an integral part of?
It's not nearly as impressive to be doing extremely well for yourself when the people around you are struggling. That goes for the people in your immediate friend group, your family, your local community, your country, and even the entire world.
Leaders cause the tides that raise all ships. Leaders step up and bring the people around them with them to a brighter, richer future, and the more people you've caused to live a better life, the more successful you are.
Book Notes:
“We are trained to believe in climbing other people’s ladders. First, you climb the school ladder: get good grades, get into a good college, and then try to get into an even better law, business, or medical school.
If you excel on the school ladder, you get to start climbing the corporate ladder: work for a comfortable salary, and do work with no personal meaning so you can climb your way up to middle management. Then you’ve reached ‘security.’ That’s a lie, as those who have climbed the ladder can attest.”
“Treat your people right, or someone else will.”
“If you have a plan in place for how to replace every key member of your team, you can handle an unexpected exit without missing a beat. Plus you’ll sleep better at night, knowing your next several moves are already planned out.”
“If 30 percent or more of your revenue comes from one place, you’re in trouble.”
“The world today is counting on us to solve big problems that will never stop coming.”
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: Don't Lose the Lesson
We all have losses in our past - sometimes significant losses - but the proper response to experiencing a loss is never to allow it to go to waste. You may have taken a loss, but don't lose the lesson.
Think back to a recent loss you've suffered and mine it to the very depth for lessons that you can apply when you face similar challenges in the future. Don't let go of the loss until you've retrieved the lesson!
As Patrick Bet-David says, great processors rarely repeat their mistakes. Especially not painful mistakes. In fact, sometimes the most painful mistakes are the stickiest because if it's painful enough, you'll never forget it. Think about the first (and probably last) time you burned your hand on the stove!
#2: Think Beyond Your First Move
Your competitive advantage in life is the ability to think further ahead than the people you're competing against. Thinking beyond your first move is a critical skill to master, and you can take comfort in the fact that most of the people you're up against just won't do it.
See, most people just go ahead and do the very next thing, without anticipating the possible reaction to their actions, and what they might have to do in response to the effects they've caused. Again, their oversight is your competitive advantage.
This is a mode of living and seeing that needs to become automatic and instinctual, and will, over time, if you keep practicing it. Great chess masters are always thinking several - and sometimes even dozens of moves ahead, and that's why they achieve the top rankings.
The key is to anticipate how others will respond to your move and to deploy additional moves that can't be counteracted. If you do X and the other person is likely to do Y or Z in response, try and put R, S, and T in place so that they can never gain the upper hand.
#3: Implement the "Rule of Three"
While evaluating any decision, always come up with at least three potential moves or proposals for dealing with an issue. This is the Rule of Three. It will allow you to compare various courses of action and it will give you a frame of reference with which to evaluate their individual efficacy.
It all comes back to the ability to think several moves ahead and to anticipate the responses and counteractions of others.
You can't go in blind! Not in situations where there is real money, success, and reputation on the line. You need to be prepared, and following the Rule of Three consistently across time will eventually provide you with the depth of experience necessary in order to make the best possible decision when the time comes.
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."
-Tony Robbins
About the Author:
Patrick’s amazing story starts with his family immigrating to America when he was 10 years old. His parents fled Iran as refugees during the Iranian revolution and were eventually granted U.S. citizenship.
After high school, Patrick joined the U.S. military and served in the 101st Airborne before starting a business career in the financial services industry. After a tenure with a couple of traditional companies, he was inspired to launch PHP Agency Inc., an insurance sales, marketing, and distribution company – and did so before he turned 30.
PHP is now one of the fastest-growing companies in the financial marketplace. Patrick is passionate about shaping the next generation of leaders by teaching thought-provoking perspectives on entrepreneurship and disrupting the traditional approach to a career.
Patrick speaks on a range of business, leadership, and entrepreneurial topics including how and why to become an entrepreneur and the importance of learning how to fully process issues.
From a humble beginning as a young immigrant escaping war-torn Iran with his parents to founding his own company, Patrick has gained a first-hand understanding of what rags-to-riches means and how it is fueled by freedom and opportunity – the core tenants of the American Dream.
Additional Resources:
This Book on Amazon:
If You Liked This Book:
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!
You can also apply to work with me directly on this page right here. I help clients gain wisdom and strength by using the knowledge found in the best books to assist people like you to get in peak physical shape, master your mind, make more money, and live a life you won’t regret.
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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Simply head to this page if this is something you're interested in working with me on, and I'll let you know more about it, answer all your questions, etc. Click here to apply!
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