YOUTUBE 📚 CREATOR LAUNCH ACADEMY 📚 PATREON

People who make a lot of noise about how “university’s a scam” can get a ton of views online, but the truth is, I do not regret going to university myself, and I’d never try to convince someone else not to go.

At least not without knowing more about their unique situation.

For myself, even though my philosophy degree isn’t how I make money, university re-ignited my love of reading, led to numerous lifelong friendships, and on top of that was just a hell of a lot of fun.

That being said…

If you want to start an actual business, shelling out $200,000+ for an advanced business degree rarely makes sense.

Sitting in a boring classroom being taught by professors who aren’t even close to being millionaires and who have never even run a successful business themselves just doesn’t seem like a good move.

Instead, just read The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman, condense $200K worth of lessons into ten hours or so, and then focus on making your first dollar.

Then your first thousand dollars. Then your first million.

To that end, I’ve prepared a complete breakdown of The Personal MBA, with all the Key Ideas, Action Steps, and Takeaways you’ll need to hit the ground running.

The full breakdown is right here, with a preview below, right here in this newsletter.

Oh yeah! And one more thing I wanted to mention before we get into it…

My guest appearance on the Fit Rich Life podcast just went live!

My friend Justin and I covered a ton of ground - books, business, money, lifestyle, happiness, success - and you can listen to the episode basically everywhere!

Spotify |  YouTube |  Apple Podcasts |  Fit Rich Life

Justin’s a fantastic podcaster, with a real track record of business success behind him, who has a literal wealth of knowledge to share when it comes to designing your life intentionally and setting yourself up for a lifetime of financial freedom.

And remember when I said that university was where I kicked off a multitude of lifelong friendships? Well that’s basically what we now both get to do online every day!

And now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!

Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per week and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.

This week’s book is $100M Leads, by Alex Hormozi, a book I’ve read twice, and from which I’ve taken more than 10 pages of profitable notes. Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!

1. Sales Success, by Brian Tracy

2. Awakened Imagination, by Neville Goddard

3. Start Thinking Rich, by Dr. Brad Klontz and Adrian Brambila

4. Dying to Do Letterman, by Steve Mazan

5. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, by D.T. Suzuki

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 1,390 books, including 38 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.

This Book is For:

*Students who are thinking about pursuing a career in business, but aren't quite sure yet whether business school is the right move for them, or if there's another way to meet their same goals.

*Anyone who doesn't have $200,000 lying around to spend on business school, but who wants to expand their knowledge of crucial business skills, learn about best practices, and set themselves up for a career in business without saddling themselves with unmanageable debt.

*Mature entrepreneurs who want a top-level refresher course on the fundamentals of business success, and who want an expert overview that they can keep within arm's reach and access whenever they're faced with a critical business decision that they need to get right.

Summary:

The Personal MBA is a wide-ranging, comprehensive overview of (virtually) everything you need to know to succeed as a business owner, and there’s a reason it’s sold more than a million copies.

Not only that, but it also passes the “Investment Test” with flying colors. Ask yourself: If you were to trade 10 dollars and 10 hours of your time, and in exchange, you’d save one hour a week for the next two years, would you take that offer?

If you value your time at, say, just $10/hour (a gross underestimation, in my opinion, no matter who you are), then after that time, you’d have saved $1,040 ($10/hour, for 104 weeks = $1,040, minus your initial investment). So yes, this book can save you a ton of time and frustration, but it also goes much deeper than that, considering the exorbitant cost of business school today!

Attending one of the top three business schools (in America) will saddle you with around $150,000 worth of student debt, but you’ll also lose $100,000 or more (as an estimate) in lost salary or opportunity costs because you were in school “learning” when you could have been out in the real world earning.

At the time of this writing, there are eight different US business schools where the cost of an MBA exceeds $300,000. This book? The Personal MBA? You can get it for free from the library, for just a few dollars at a used book store or on Amazon, and this breakdown is completely free. Total savings for you? Nearly $400,000!

The fact is that MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge. You can learn about these things on your own, without drowning in debt, and this book is an excellent start.

It covers more than 200 basic-to-advanced business concepts, explains them simply, with easy-to-understand examples, and links back to Josh’s website, where he goes into them more deeply. The Personal MBA is an invaluable reference manual that deserves to be found on every serious businessperson’s bookshelf.

Ironically, it’s even been used as a textbook for business courses at Stanford University, New York University, Howard University, and Portland State University!

Josh's research has directly saved prospective business students millions of dollars in unnecessary tuition, fees, and interest by publishing this extremely high-level book, which covers:

*The 5 Core Processes of a Business

*The 5 Fundamental Human Drives

*10 Ways to Evaluate the Potential of a Market

*The 12 Standard Forms of Value

*The Only 4 Methods Used to Increase Revenue

*And so much more...

Honestly, the only thing better than reading this book would be actually going out and starting a business, learning by painful trial and error until you absorb these lessons from personal experience in the real world.

You’ll have to learn them anyway, so you may as well arm yourself with as much business knowledge as you can - basically for free - before you head out and start learning the hard way.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: The 5 Core Processes of a Business

According to Kaufman, there are five core processes of a business, and they are, as he shows, interdependent. Each part impacts the other core processes, and when they all function well together, you have the makings of a wildly successful business.

The first part is about value creation, which we’ll discuss in the next Key Idea. Every business produces or provides something of value to a market of customers that values it.

If you don’t create something that other people value, then your venture is essentially a hobby. It can be done purely for its own sake - if you find value in it - but it won’t be a good business idea that generates profits.

Next comes marketing, which is just as essential as having a valuable product. If you’ve created something of value that fills a need, but nobody knows about it, you don’t have a business. There’s probably a Zen koan in there somewhere, which you can come up with yourself, but you get the idea.

Third is sales. You need to sell the value you create, and if you don’t, you’re basically running a nonprofit, giving away your great product for free.

You can do that, and perhaps as a form of lead generation, giving away something for free can be a great idea, but in order to have a business, you eventually have to sell something at a price that people are willing to pay.

Value delivery comes in at number four, and that’s absolutely critical as well. You have to deliver on the value that you’ve promised to deliver, or your business isn’t going to be around too long. In fact, the bar is so low here, that it’s quite lonely along the “extra mile.”

We used to notice service when it was bad, but now we notice it when it’s good! 

Average is everywhere, so value delivery is one area where you can really set yourself apart by going above and beyond for the people who’ve placed their trust - and their cash - with you. It’s so easy to win here. Everybody else is competing for “average, while the competition for “exceptional” is actually quite low. No one’s really even trying.

Lastly, we’ve got finance, and here we’ll simply say that a company that doesn’t bring in enough money - or lets enough of it slip through the cracks and disappear - will eventually close. You have to be good at the finance side of things, and that’s where systems (checklists, procedures, etc.) can play a big part.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that any skill related to those five core processes is always going to be economically valuable for individuals to learn as well.

If you can create something of value, let people know about it, sell it to them, deliver on your promises, and capture/retain at least some of the value that you’ve created, then you will be rewarded financially in today's business world.

#2: How to Create Value

The above quote is one that most people would do well to have pasted onto their bathroom mirror or on the dashboard of their car so they can see it and think about it every single day. It really is the essence of business: solving problems for people who are in need of solutions.

In fact, if you say that you can’t find a good business idea, what you’re really saying is that the world is perfect and needs nothing.

Alex Hormozi, the business mentor I’ve personally learned the most from over the last year, uses a very simple “value equation” to create offers that people would feel stupid saying no to. The equation basically goes like this:

[Dream Outcome] + [Likelihood of Achieving It] / [Time Delay + Effort]

What this means is that you paint a vivid picture of what their “Dream Outcome” looks like, or what their life will be like after they’ve bought, consumed, and implemented your solution. You also show them that your solution is the right vehicle to bring them to the solution and that it won’t take nearly as much time or effort as the other possible solutions on the market.

If you can satisfy those four demands, you’ve created an extremely valuable offer. You also win by satisfying an extremely acute need, such as, for example, the need for water in the desert. A person suffering from dehydration in the middle of the Sahara will be willing to pay more for a bottle of water than they’d be willing to pay for a diamond ring or literally anything else. The value increases in direct proportion to the need or desire.

Valuable offers also satisfy one or more of a customer’s core human drives, which we’ll be discussing in the next Key Idea. What you always want to be focusing on, though, is increasing the value of the offer, and not necessarily increasing your own personal profit.

The latter is a natural byproduct of solving big, important problems in the lives of your customers. Business is inherently unselfish, despite what Ayn Rand may want us to believe!

Alex Hormozi’s and Josh Kaufman’s approaches come together in their discussion of the “hassle premium” as well, which is basically when you charge to remove some level of inconvenience from your customers’ lives.

If it takes too much time, and too much effort to achieve a positive result, and involves an extra layer of confusion, complexity, uncertainty, etc., then you can work that into your price, and customers will still be willing to pay it.

People pay for ease and convenience, and that’s an important part of the value as well. For example, it’s said that the greatest business idea in the world would be just to take something that people need to do anyway and do it for them in half the time.

Also important here is constant, never-ending improvement - iteration - over time. You want to be constantly on the lookout for ways to improve your product and your offer and to increase the amount of value you’re delivering for the price that you’re charging. This is how you win in business.

The key is to do this quickly and to make a series of small bets about what you can improve on and what your customers will favorably respond to:

What’s working right now? What do customers say they like or don’t like about your product? What can you add or remove that will increase the amount of value they’re getting? How can you make your offer better?

Implement what you learn as quickly as possible, release that next iteration, and then gauge customer reaction and feeling. If they like this new version, you can make additional tweaks or execute other ideas to add value.

As long as you’re keeping track of what you’ve tried before, how customers have responded to it, and what you have planned for the future, you’ll be on the right track.

#3: The 5 Basic Human Drives

Theories and models meant to describe innate human drives vary in complexity, truth, and understanding, but many of them cover the same ground, and all successful products and businesses cater to at least one or more of them.

As far as Josh Kaufman is concerned, they fall under five distinct categories, and they are:

The Drive to Acquire: To accumulate material objects and possessions, and also intangible things like status, influence, and power, to name just a few. We like to get stuff and to have other people know that we have that stuff. Porsche satisfies the drives (no pun intended) of their customers to acquire.

The Drive to Bond: To feel valued, loved, needed, and respected. Social media satisfies (and sometimes frustrates) this desire, as well as any product or service that makes us feel attractive, desirable, liked, and/or connected to others.

The Drive to Learn: To satisfy our craving to know, our curiosity about the world, our place within it, and our direction. Books, courses, basically all of academia, etc. They all satisfy this drive.

The Drive to Defend: To feel safe, to protect ourselves and the people we care about, and to maintain our property and possessions. Home security systems satisfy this drive, as well as self-defense classes and courses, etc.

The Drive to Feel: To experience new sensory stimuli, have intense emotional experiences, feel pleasure and/or excitement, anticipation, etc. Disney Land, Hollywood, Netflix - all these products, places, services, and experiences help satisfy this drive.

That’s Josh Kaufman’s view on the basic human drives. But, as I mentioned above, theories and models differ. For example, Tony Robbins has it that humans have six needs, being Certainty, Uncertainty/Variety, Significance, Connection/Love, Growth, and Contribution.

I have a lot of sympathy for Robbins’ formulation as well, but there’s, of course, Abraham Maslow, the pioneering work of Scott Barry Kaufman, Ken Wilber’s ”Theory of Everything,” and also the subconscious fear of death, as described in Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.

Humans are complicated, okay? We have many different competing - and complementary - drives pushing and pulling us in all these different directions, and we’re strongly but subtly influenced by all of them each and every day. Kinda makes it hard to plan your day, doesn’t it?

For our purposes, however, it’s important to understand that all of these drives coexist, and successful businesses satisfy these drives with their products and services. If you can add value in any (or many) of these areas, and deliver that value efficiently and effectively, you’ll be extremely well-rewarded in the global marketplace.

READ ALL THE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ ALL THE BOOK NOTES HERE

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Action Steps:

#1: Question Higher Education

There are plenty of fine reasons for going to business school (networking, credibility, access to mentors, etc.), and plenty of reasons why it may not be the best choice for you.

For one thing, it’s an awful lot of student debt to take on, simply to learn the few important things that Kaufman doesn’t cover in his book. Seriously, most of what you need is in that book, and you can get it basically for free.

Still, it’s important to reflect on your true motivations. Do you want to be a consultant, a banker, or to work on Wall Street? If so, then you’re probably best served by going to business school. At least, it wouldn’t be the worst idea.

But if you’re still just “figuring things out,” then $200,000+ is a pretty hefty price tag for something like that. There’s nothing "wrong" with taking time to sort out your priorities (indeed, people don’t do enough of this kind of long-range thinking!), but if you already know that you want to start your own business, crippling debt is the last thing you need.

#2: Seek Out Ways to Deliver Value

Every problem is also a business opportunity. Nobody’s life is perfect, and until everyone’s life is perfect, we’ll still need entrepreneurs, businesses, and solutions to life’s inevitable problems. Entrepreneurs provide those valuable solutions, and to the extent that you can add value to people’s lives, you will be rewarded financially (and in many other ways).

So, constantly be on the lookout for problems you can solve, and for ways that you can make the lives of the people around you better. There is a business opportunity hidden within every difficulty, and a customer within every sufferer.

#3: Develop Economically Valuable Skills

If you recall the five core processes of every business (Key Idea #1), you’ll see that the people who can make each of those processes run more smoothly and efficiently possess economically valuable skills that the market will reward them for deploying.

Operating within the value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and financial processes making up every company are the highest-paid earners in our economy. They have developed economically valuable skills - talents and abilities that the market desperately needs - and so they are paid more than most people.

You can develop these skills too. You don’t need to develop all five at once, but if you have at least one of them, or maybe even some unique combination of two or more, then you will be rewarded extremely well.

READ ALL THE ACTION STEPS HERE

This Book on Amazon:

The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman

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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 160,000+ 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

P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are two more ways I can help you:

1. Content Creators: Book a 1:1 call and I’ll help you hit $5K/month with a plan tailored to your business (If the link works, I can still fit you in this month).

2. Join Creator Launch Academy, my mastermind for educational content creators building real revenue and real freedom.