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10 Books to Help You Find Peace in Turbulent Times
Matt Karamazov
September 25, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 29 minutes
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Tonight’s newsletter is a monster, clocking in at nearly 4,000 words (but it’s broken up so you can just skip around to whatever interests you), so I’ll keep this intro short!
Next week I’ve got my breakdown of Dan S. Kennedy’s phenomenal No B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the Rules, which is one of my favorite business books that I’ve read so far (out of hundreds).
Here’s a summary and my complete notes from the book (all 12 pages of them), and of course my breakdown will go in a lot more depth on the key ideas and all that.
I’m also really enjoying Better & Better, by Bob Stiller - a man who built a billion-dollar business through optimism, self-awareness, and kindness, while at the same time funding all these charitable initiatives around the world. What a guy, and what a book!
Lastly, I made a recent guest appearance on The Compounding Project podcast - but last week I sent you the wrong link!
On the podcast, we talked about all kinds of things, like how I built a successful business on Instagram, my note-taking process that I’ve used to read and learn from 1,300+ books, and more. Check it out on YouTube with the right link this time!
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
We’ve got lots to learn today, so let’s hit the books!
“The actual truth is not negative or positive when you remove judgement from it. It simply is. Neutral is the harmony between two extremes, negative and positive.
Neutral thinkers remain aware of the situation as it changes from moment to moment. We give ourselves the opportunity to learn from every situation, even if the outcome is not optimal at that specific time. The next behavior remains consistently in our control."
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"Your demons may have been evicted from the building, but they're still out in the parking lot doing pushups."
The author rated his own book Five Stars on Goodreads, so hey, it must be good!
I actually did really enjoy listening to the audio version of this book – read by him, the famous news anchor Dan Harris. He discovered meditation after coming to a bit of a crisis point during which he had a full-blown panic attack on-air in front of millions of viewers.
It was at that point that it became clear to him that his innermost thoughts didn’t necessarily have his own best interests in mind.
What followed was an unlikely journey towards the benefits and realities of meditation, where Harris was able to become, in his words, at least 10% happier.
It’s not a miracle cure, it’s not going to solve every problem in your life overnight, but it’s a legitimate mental technique for overcoming stress, gaining flow, and coming to terms with your own mind.
Now he’s become something of a meditation evangelist, especially among skeptics and more “practical” types. You know, the kind of people killing them with stress, going to jobs they hate, buying shit they don’t need, and generally making a mess of their internal – and external – lives. The people who need meditation the most!
"Whatever news we get about the scans, I'm not going to die when we hear it. I won't die the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. So today, right now, well this is a wonderful day."
I’ll warn you straight up that this is one of the saddest books I’ve ever read, but out of all the books I have read, perhaps only a few have made a bigger impact on my life and work. I recommend this book all the time, and you should absolutely watch Randy’s “Last Lecture” on YouTube if you can spare the time. Please, spare the time.
Plenty of professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture,” the idea being that they would reflect on the totality of their lives so far and offer their most life-changing wisdom, the kind of advice that you’d give knowing that this was your very last day on Earth.
As it turns out, this was Randy’s last lecture, something he knew going into it.
Randy’s father used to say that whenever there’s an elephant in the room, introduce them, and so he began his original lecture by showing the audience his latest CT scans.
The scans showed an aggressive cancer spreading quickly throughout his body, and he mentioned in the beginning of the lecture that his doctors predicted that he had only a few months to live.
I warned you in the beginning. The actual lecture you’ll see on YouTube is barely sad at all though! Except for maybe the ending and the beginning. But the book that came out of it is nothing less than heartbreaking. And brilliant. And phenomenal. And everything in between.
Like I said, I recommend it all the time, and it’s rarely - very rarely - that anyone will tell me they weren’t profoundly changed by it. I know I was.
“The whole world is crazy. Certifiable lunatics! The only reason we're not locked up in an institution is that there are so many of us."
What does it feel like to imagine oneself as intimately connected with Reality - with everything that exists - and to live with your eyes, and your heart, wide open?
Anthony de Mello points the way to an understanding - and awareness - of what such a fully realized life feels like, and just like life, this book is full of surprises. Awareness began as a series of lectures that were later combined into a book, so it helps to imagine him speaking to an audience while you read it, and that you are in that audience.
De Mello was a Jesuit priest and spiritual teacher and he uses stories, parables, jokes, and striking insights - which he combines with his deep humanity and infinite care and affection - to wake people up to the life that's been sitting right in front of them the whole time they've been alive.
"The bold Stoic attempt to purify social life of all its ills, rigorously carried through, ends by removing, as well, its finite humanity, its risk-taking loyalty, its passionate love.
Abandoning the zeal for absolute perfection as inappropriate to the life of a finite being, abandoning the thirst for punishment and self-punishment that so frequently accompanies that zeal, the education I recommend looks with mercy at the ambivalent excellence and passion of a human life."
In The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum, one of the most brilliant thinkers I’ve ever read, examines the medical model of philosophy, based on the work of famous Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics, all of whom prized the kind of philosophy concerned with real beneficial effects out there in the world, the kind which improved the lives of real people in real-time, instead of the more academic philosophy practiced today.
No stuffy, ivory-tower philosophy in this book. It’s about examining what we really want in life, how we can adjust our desires to better fit what we say that we want in life, and about developing the intelligence and insight to make sure we want the right things, in the right amounts, at the right time.
Essentially, the thinkers she discusses believe that any philosophy that doesn’t alleviate human suffering isn’t worthy of the name. Same as medicine which doesn’t cure what’s wrong with the body should never be called medicine.
This book also put into words something that I’ve often felt previously, namely that the value of each individual human life is infinite.
The implication, of course, is that there is nothing that any of us have to “do” in order to become worthy of unconditional positive regard (in Rogerian terms) and nothing that we have to “become” in order to be persons of absolute value in the universe.
“Always think about what you're really being asked to give. Because the answer is often 'a piece of your life', usually in exchange for something you don't even want."
If you can tolerate enough boredom, you can achieve pretty much anything. Almost everything that’s worth achieving isn’t going to be the result of one single exciting event, but rather the sum total (or sometimes, the exponential total) of relatively unexciting actions, repeated over and over and over again until your personal summit is reached.
Clearly, there’s a lot more to stillness than boredom, and indeed, whenever such a wide range of societies, belief systems, and successful individuals all converge on one idea as being of singular importance - in this case, stillness - then you know that it’s important and that you overlook its significance at your peril.
Through the stories of people like Confucius, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nietzsche, Fred Rogers, Anne Frank, Winston Churchill - and on and on - Ryan Holiday’s book will show you that stillness isn’t just “sitting still,” or silence, but a superpower that will lead directly to self-mastery, discipline, focus, achievement, and, indirectly, to personal fulfillment.
You’ll learn how to become like a deep lake, capable of cultivating stillness and serenity, while the waves crash and break above you on the surface. While the rest of the world is like a tiny sailboat being thrashed about in a storm, you’ll be as solid as the ocean floor.
“The problem is that we genuinely have no idea of what lies outside of the mediocrity. We don’t even question the possibilities because we are ignorant of them. Our measuring scale is inadequate. We compare our lives to those of sick people, not to the people that are thriving.
I was one of the healthiest and happiest people I knew, but only because I measured myself within the median range of sick, unhappy, stressed, depressed, angry, broke, bored, unfulfilled folks.
I was originally put off by the title of this one, even though it was blowing up on Instagram and it seemed like every Bookstagrammer I follow was recommending it.
My initial thoughts were, “But I don’t feel bad! Why do I need to read this? It sounds…whiny and…weak.”
However, after blazing through it myself, I’ve found it’s pretty much the opposite. And now I recommend it fairly consistently!
The ideal reader here is the high-achiever, or wannabe high-achiever, who is already doing relatively well, but who endeavors to go further.
The book starts off with some fairly simple – but important – foundational stuff that many successful people seem to struggle with, like breathing properly and getting enough sleep, and then it moves on into mindset, career success, and money, before finishing on a high note with respect to relationships and love.
So yes, Nate Dallas covers quite a bit of ground in a fairly short book, and it certainly wasn’t written to be the “definitive” book on any of these topics. But it’s rooted in Dallas’s invaluable personal experiences getting to the top of the Career mountain and realizing that he’d neglected important parts of himself along the way.
There’s also an element of ceaseless self-questioning in this book that would be a wonderful skill for all of us to develop more fully.
“If parents love their children, they will not nationalistic, they will not identify themselves with any country; for the worship of the State brings on war, which kills or maims their sons.
If parents love their children, they will discover what is right relationship to property; for the possessive instinct has given property an enormous and false significance which is destroying the world.
If parents love their children, they will not belong to any organized religion; for dogma and belief divide people into conflicting groups, creating antagonism between man and man.
If parents love their children, they will do away with envy and strife, and will set about altering fundamentally the structure of present-day society.”
I always describe Krishnamurti as like someone standing between Friedrich Nietzsche and Jesus.
Uncompromising in his stance against ideology, conformity, and antagonism between human beings, he always refused to set himself up as a teacher. While he was alive, he used to insist that no one should blindly follow what he said as though he were some sort of authority.
You’ll notice, in fact, that most of the time Krishnamurti just keeps asking questions. If you break down the transcripts of some of his public talks, it’s rare that he’ll make a concrete statement. He wants you to think for yourself.
He wants you to question what you’ve come to believe is self-evident.
He wants you to question the dominant culture of acquisitiveness, envy, ambition, and groupthink.
In this collection, the focus is on education, of course, and he says that there is no “method” that one can follow to become “educated,” if there’s ever an end to education at all. Intelligence is not separate from love.
True education is a movement of the mind away from fixed structures and prepackaged beliefs. It is the approach toward the essential, away from the superficial. Not in the past or in the future, but grounded in the present.
“The individual problem is the world problem. It is what we are as individuals that create society, society being the relationship between ourselves and others.
I am speaking – and please believe it – as one individual to another, so that together we may understand the many problems that confront us. I am not establishing myself as an authority to tell you what to do because I do not believe in authority in spiritual matters.
All authority is evil, and all sense of authority must cease, especially if we would find out what is God, what is truth, whether there is something beyond the mere measure of the mind. That is why it is very important for the individual to understand himself.”
Discover the Immeasurable contains a series of six lectures given by Krishnamurti in the fall of 1956, where he speaks about the inherently evil nature of authority, the constant flow of existence, and how the structure of our current society and even our own minds perpetuates needless conflict, misery, and tragedy.
His central idea here is that the "immeasurable," i.e. truth, reality, God, the universe, and the human mind, can never exist or function according to a fixed pattern.
The universe is always changing and evolving, and truth is never stagnant. A mind burdened with the "known," as he would say, can never move beyond the strictures of society and discover truth, or reality.
It's about experiencing directly what is immeasurable, since "only direct experience has validity." We can't live according to theories but must flow with everything else that is going on in the universe and inside our own minds, which essentially amounts to the same thing.
It's not about going off into a cave by ourselves and working out some complex theory, but about realizing that the truth is revealed in every moment and in every relationship we have with everyone and everything else that exists.
“You can't just go up to a group of monkeys and say, 'Hey, you monkeys! Stop that!' If you do, that just means that you don’t understand monkeys. When you understand what monkeys are like, that’s enough; you can be at peace.”
Ajahn Chah is Thailand’s best-known meditation teacher, and I challenge you to look at this guy’s picture and not smile. It’s damn near impossible.
In fact, I’d say that achieving enlightenment is probably easier than suppressing a smile when you look at any photo of Chah. It’s not that he’s particularly funny looking or anything, it’s just that he positively radiates happiness, joy, and love of life.
Food for the Heart combines many of Chah’s most powerful teachings on things like meditation, calming the mind, dealing with people, and eliminating suffering. All classic Buddhist themes, of course.
What struck me, however - besides his intimate, often hilarious style and obvious joie de vivre - was that a lot of his ideas have found expression in some of the most important texts in the Western canon as well.
I’m thinking here of Chah’s “three characteristics of existence,” (below) which one can just as easily imagine finding in the pages of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Both Aurelius and Chah - effortlessly grouped together in the same breath - claim that it’s impossible to go through life without experiencing any problems, so maybe we ought to expect them!
At the end of it all, Chah just says, “Hey look, guys” - I’m paraphrasing, of course - “I’ve been learning this stuff as I go along, same as you, and I haven’t found too many answers. Everything is uncertain; suffering exists and it’s coming for you eventually; nobody really knows what the hell is going on. But there’s beauty and life and strength and love and awesomeness everywhere you look, and you’re going to miss it if you’re not right here, right now, living. So let’s dive in!”
“The people who most annoy us are usually the most unhappy, and we can kind of give them a break by being one of those people in their lives who doesn’t push back in anger and who actually models some of the kindness of which they have been deprived.”
You can only find this book on audio, but it's wonderful! It's a fantastic little audio program on not "biting the hook" presented to you by situations that usually provoke you to anger - and I also love that she has a voice like Lisa Simpson. I’m serious! That's immediately who I thought of when I heard her speak for the first time.
As Chodron points out, I’ll bet that as soon as tomorrow you’ll have an opportunity to practice patience, and this book will show you how.
She helps us relate and respond constructively in situations that would ordinarily drive us over the edge, instead of reacting with mindless anger.
For such a short audiobook, it’s packed with insights and moments where all you can do is press “pause” and really reflect on how self-evidently true what she’s saying actually is:
That patience is a revolutionary act; that however we react, we’re casting a vote for who we want to be in the future; that so often we say we want happiness, and yet so many of our words and actions are pulling us away from happiness.
There’s more wisdom-per-minute in here than most things you could spend your time watching or listening to, and I find myself coming back to my notes from her book whenever the world reminds me that it’s time to work on my patience again.
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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