Hey everyone!

I’ve got a brand new YouTube video in the works right now, and it’s all about the “10% Rule,” a strategy you can employ immediately that’s going to help you find great books to read much faster.

For all the new people who signed up for my newsletter in the last week, though, you may enjoy my last video, which is all about obsession, and how becoming deeply involved with a meaningful pursuit can add whole new depths of happiness and fulfillment to your life.

Watch that video right here.

Tonight, I’m also sharing my complete breakdown of Ayodeji Awosika’s book, Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement.

Totally free, and ready for you to read right now.

It’s about 12,000 words covering the key ideas and takeaways, and you can finish reading my breakdown in about 47 minutes.

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 get into Real Help!

This Book is For:

*Anyone who's been left wondering why they're stuck where they are in life, even though they've done everything they were "supposed" to do, and followed the path they were "expected" to follow.

*People who don't want to be force-fed fantasies about the possibility of becoming "digital nomads" or working on their laptop from some beach in Bali, but instead are ready to face the world as it really is, and do what it takes to actually achieve their career goals.

*Online business owners who want to escape the drudgery of their 9-5 and are willing to put in the work required, and who also want a clear path forward that will take them to where they want to go over the next 3-10 years.

*Everyone who simply needs clarity, direction, some accountability, and a little bit of "tough love" to push them onward and upward.

Summary:

This book isn't going to rescue you. For better or for worse, that's something you'll have to do for yourself.

The truth, however, is that facing the fact that no one is going to come save you is what's actually going to save you. And I can't think of too many people better qualified to deliver this critically important message than Ayodeji Awosika.

Awosika is one of the most popular writers on Medium.com ever, with nearly 100,000 followers, a TEDx speaker, a self-taught 3-time author, and a world-renowned personal development expert who reaches millions of readers per year with his message of radical personal responsibility and radical self-determination.

He accomplished all this with several different decks stacked against him, being a "victim" (he'd hate that word) of self-doubt, discrimination, lack of opportunity...the list goes on and on, but it's irrelevant because Ayodeji decided to ignore the nonsense that everyone else tried to feed him about success and instead set out to realize his own vision of success.

If some people are "born on third base," Ayodeji was born on the bench.

With all that in mind, his unique perspective as someone who has absorbed some of the worst of what this world can throw at a person and then transmuted it into something good - as someone who has taken the rocks that people threw at him and used them to build the foundations of a meaningful life - makes him someone worth paying attention to.

This is a book that tells you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. This is a book that tells you how the world actually works, not how you think it should work.

Not everyone will resonate with his somewhat harsher, more realistic style, but one thing that no one can ever say about his writing is that he's being inauthentic or dishonest. There may not be Absolute Truth in this world, but this book represents his hard-won truth, which is damn near close enough, as far as I can tell.

Read this book if you want to learn from the valuable experiences of someone who has actually achieved the kinds of results that most of us want in our own lives:

*The freedom to do work that excites you and stretches you creatively.

*The opportunity to make a great living doing what you love and what you're good at.

*The mental toughness necessary to thrive in an unfair world.

*The ability to build life-changing habits and execute them on auto-pilot (even if you’ve tried and failed before).

All of the advice in this book has been battle-tested in the real world. You and I live in the real world too, and if we want to succeed there, we have to learn how to be both optimistic and realistic at the exact same time.

We need to learn how to hold two different, contradictory, opposing viewpoints in our minds at the same time without retreating to the false comfort and safety of either one of them.

It's all about being able to say to yourself: "This thing is true, but also...that's part of it too."

Or, more specifically:

The point I'm driving at here is that Real Help doesn't contain a bunch of magical promises that the author couldn't possibly fulfill. It's a realistic book, but it's also reasonably optimistic. It will stretch you, but if you take its lessons to heart, the real world won't be able to break you.

In fact, I think that Awosika is being a little conservative here with respect to the claims he makes about his own book. It actually reminds me of the news anchor Dan Harris's claim that meditation made him about 10% Happier. For example, Awosika says that modest improvements of 3-10% are achievable, especially when most everyone else stays at zero. Having read the book myself, though, I think it could improve your life much more than just 10%.

In the Key Ideas ahead, we're going to stay firmly rooted in this real world of ours, and yet we're going to explore its manifold possibilities. We're going to work on setting the frame of our own existence and designing our lives with our own hands.

Another important idea that we'll cover is the omnipresence of incentives, and how "following the money" and other valuable resources will lead you to some strangely liberating realizations about why the rest of society doesn't benefit from your becoming free.

While you do have a tremendous amount of personal power and agency, there are still huge obstacles standing in the middle of our individual paths to freedom, and some rather intimidating forces stacked against us. No conspiracy theories here, by the way, if that's what you're thinking. Nope, just incentives. They're powerful! You'll see.

We'll then move on to discuss the critical importance of knowing the rules of the game so that you can play the game better. It takes immense courage to resist the downward pull of "cultural gravity" and the opinions of average people who want you to live average lives just like them, but when you realize that the 99% of people who think differently than you don't actually have the life that you want, it all gets a lot more manageable.

There are very few guarantees in life, and you know this already. But one of them is that your existence can become an incredible adventure, once you choose to see it that way. And, crucially, once you decide once and for all to take action to shape your own future.

The real world has broken untold masses of people before our time, but it doesn't have to break us. You can break the pattern and break free. You have personal power and agency, and now you also have this book.

READ THE FULL BOOK BREAKDOWN HERE

Key Ideas:

#1: Set the Frame for Your Own Existence

No one is going to die your death for you, so why should you let other people dictate how you're going to live your life?

Stop letting other people set the limits of your own life. Yes, there are certain "facts of life" that we can't escape, but there is also a tremendous personal freedom that comes with the knowledge that many of the things we were taught were "rules" are actually guidelines, even simply suggestions.

We need to control the frame of our own existence if we want to be free. And by "frame" I mean the boundaries or paradigm within which we operate. The "rules of our game," so to speak. The rules and standards that we set for ourselves that guide our behaviors and shape our lives.

For an example of "frame," consider the following:

In conversation with others, when we allow them to lead the conversation, we're letting them control the frame. We're talking about what they want to talk about, we're answering their questions, and so on.

Of course, not everything in life is about "control," but the issue becomes a lot more serious when we're talking about your actual life. We let other people tell us what kind of goals we should strive for, how we should speak, and how we should think. We let other people dictate how it's acceptable to should show up in the world, and even what "success" actually looks like.

We're letting other people control the frame of our existence, under the tacit assumption that they know how to live our lives better than we do.

Again, you'll notice that in most conversations, those who are "high status" tend to control the frame. They steer the conversation in a direction that serves them, making the other participants respond to them, and prove themselves, always reacting to what's being said instead of leading the conversation themselves.

In a wider context, those who are "high status" in life set their own frame as well. They ruthlessly curate their own reality, and never blindly let external forces dictate to them what's meaningful in life, how they should live, or what's worth doing.

Yes, we can all learn from others and take hints and cues from the wider culture about what's acceptable - absolutely we can - but the ultimate responsibility for setting our own frame lies with us.

But how do you even start? Especially if you've been blindly following the carrots that have been dangled in front of you your whole life?

The first step is detachment; it's the development of thoughtfulness, cultivated in solitude, and established by your own thoughts that is going to move you towards the answers. Every so often you have to disengage from all the inputs you're getting from the outside world and decide for yourself what you think.

It's an ongoing, life-long, even daily process. External forces will never stop trying to influence us to think and behave in ways that are actually contrary to our own interests. "Frame battles" as I like to call them are going on all the time.

People are always going to try and change you from the outside in, but you have to create yourself from the inside out.

With this comes a change in your paradigm, your mental operating system that tells you what's normal for you, possible for you, and desirable for you. If your paradigm is that you are happy and healthy, rich, free, resourceful, vibrant, alive, active, and loved, then you can't listen to anyone who tries to tell you that they know more about how to live your life than you do. Because who are they?

Raise your standards, and establish your own frame!

Consciously decide what's meaningful to you in life, what is and is not an excellent use of your time and energy, and move accordingly!

The alternative is a life spent being whipped around by the whims of others, many of whom absolutely do not have your best interests at heart.

If you don't set the frame of your own existence, someone else will try to.

If there is a void where your Self should be, someone else will rush in and try to fill it with their frame, and with their priorities. As the great psychologist Carl Jung once wrote:

#2: Know the Game

The happiest, most successful, most high-flourishing people in the world aren't necessarily smarter than you are, more intellectually gifted, or anything like that. They simply see the world more clearly than you do.

They have better mental models - ways of seeing the world, and how everything all fits together.

Their worldview is clear(er) and more accurate, at least when it comes to what it will take to achieve their goals, and they simply refuse to lie to themselves about what is actually going on. About what's real.

They are under no illusions that the world is fair, that everyone wants the best for them, or that the good guys always win. We're going to talk about this in the next Key Idea, but they also follow the incentives, and they reject comfort and complacency in favor of receiving the cold hard truth about the way the world turns.

You've got to do this yourself if you want to survive and thrive in the modern world. You need to know the game.

Furthermore, you can't afford to waste any more time complaining about the way the world should work when instead, every single minute you spend doing so could be much better spent investigating how the world actually does work. Every single minute you waste complaining, criticizing, and being outraged at the unfairness of it all, is another minute that you're never going to get back and that you could have used to improve. To come up with a plan of action to help you deal with reality as it is.

The balance to strike here is between being aware that bad things happen to good people and that the people who are supposed to win don't always come away victorious, while simultaneously being aware that you hold complete and total responsibility for how your life turns out.

In The 10 Pillars of Wealth, Alex Becker uses the example of a drunk driver crashing into your car and seriously injuring you for the rest of your life. Now, no reasonable person would tell you that being hit by that idiot is your fault, but what's done is done. The facts are the facts. That being said, it's now your responsibility to move forward and get on with your actual life.

The world is malleable. You have agency here, and you have the tremendous personal power to direct your own thoughts and chart your own course for the future. You can, quite literally, curate your own reality, such that you only surround yourself with winners - with people who make you better. The world is also negotiable, and, within reason, you can bend circumstances to your will.

But your power is not unlimited, and you're still playing a rigged game.

Again, know the game. Learn to differentiate between what's negotiable and what's not, and step into your full personal responsibility. This is how you free yourself. As Ayoedji writes:

#3: Follow the Incentives

Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's business partner (it's a shame that he's usually introduced like that - he's plenty impressive on his own!), and he also said that you should never, ever think about something else, when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.

Who stands to gain from this happening? Who benefits if I take this specific action as opposed to something else? Who's the big winner here? These are the types of questions you need to be asking when you set out to try to understand the world.

The following quote is fairly cynical, but it's pretty f***ing accurate too:

Sorry for "almost" swearing up there, but I feel very strongly about this stuff. I hate to see people getting lied to, and being told that the world is in much worse shape than it actually is, just so the media companies can keep people hooked to negativity and sell more advertising.

But alright, let's bring this back to the power of incentives. Due to the nature of the human mind, bad news is much more salient - memorable, exciting, vivid - than good news. Being told that everything is pretty good and that even better times are probably coming up ahead just doesn't drag eyeballs to the front of television sets as effectively as telling people that the whole world is going to shit.

It's bad news - savagery, war, death, destruction - that makes people pay attention, and it's advertising that keeps the lights on at the television studios. You can see the connection forming already! Don't get ahead of me now!

But you're right: the media companies cherrypick the worst shit that's going on and they feed it to the poor saps who are dumb enough to believe that the world is actually going to shit and that we've never had it this bad.

In fact, however, if newspapers printed the truth about the state of the world...

But again, that doesn't sell advertising. So they'll focus on the things that went horribly today, and the things that could maybe go wrong and kill us all in the future, and present them as the only truth. The advertisers make money, the media companies make money, the prescription drug pushers make money, the liquor stores make money - everyone benefits except YOU.

This is the power of incentives. This what you should keep in mind at all times.

However, as Ayodeji writes in Real Help:

It's all incentives. We like to think that we're better people than that, but odds are, if we ran the media companies and had shareholders that we had to answer to and friends and neighbors we had to compete with and make more money than, then we'd probably give up at least some of our principles too.

Maybe not, hopefully not, but thus is the power of incentives. So you really do have to ask yourself on a more or less regular basis, "Who benefits from the actions I take each day? Who stands to gain if I make this choice as opposed to some other choice?" Because you're probably being manipulated by someone.

Follow the incentives, and train yourself to look for them. You'll find them everywhere, because they are everywhere.

Not all incentives are bad, of course, and you can use them for good! Both in your own life and in society at large. Morally good incentives lead to morally good outcomes. The concept of incentives, however, is neutral. How we manipulate them is up to us.

READ 5 MORE KEY IDEAS HERE

Book Notes:

READ 32 MORE 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: Choose Someone to Be Strong For

In the Key Ideas above, we covered the fact that self-help is not self-ish. We need to be strong for others, because many people alive today desperately need our help - they need us to be strong for them. So the first Action Step here is to choose someone you are going to show up for, someone who needs you to be strong.

It doesn't have to be someone you know personally, but think of how many people there are in the world that could really use your help! If you still resist the idea of getting rich for yourself (in every sense of that term), then at least do it for them.

Think about this person - or this group of people - who needs your help and keep recalling them to your mind every single day. Multiple times per day! Before every one of your challenging tasks, before starting work on every difficult project, every time you're tempted to give up.

Think about who you've committed to being strong for, and allow the love you feel for that person or those people to sustain you, to keep you going.

Just like in Plato's Symposium, where he says that an army of lovers could never be defeated, when you're doing what you do for someone else, you can survive and persist through much more than you ever could if you were simply trying to succeed by yourself and for yourself.

#2: Curate Your Own Reality

The people and ideas you surround yourself with influence your worldview, for better or for worse, and their beliefs, standards, and opinions will help set the frame of your own existence.

Knowing this to be the case, consciously expand your social circle to include the kinds of winners who want similar things in life that you do. People that encourage you to become better, to rise higher.

Block out everyone who doesn't believe in the vision you've created for how you want to live your one and only life.

No, don't blind yourself to constructive criticism or other valid ways of viewing the world, but also realize that everything you see, hear, or otherwise experience is constantly informing your worldview and shaping your paradigm.

So instead of letting someone else decide what's shaping your mind and your life's trajectory, curate your own reality, and start being extremely selective about who and what you allow to own real estate inside your mind. It all matters.

#3: Line Up a Few 10% Gains

Where you start out in life doesn't have to be where you end up. Sure, there are limits to what one person can achieve in a single, finite human lifetime, but the history of humanity is the story of people selling themselves short.

As Ayodeji Awosika says in this book, realistically, everyone is capable of achieving 10% gains in their quality of life. So in this Action Step, I want you to get very clear about what, exactly, a 10% gain would look like for you. What would happen? How would your life change?

A simple example would be the case of your financial situation. What would a 10% gain look like here, and how could you make it happen?

If you earn $50,000 a year, then a 10% improvement here would be you earning $55,000 by the end of the year, which is "only" an extra $416 per month. Now the question becomes, how could you earn an extra $416 per month?

That's a question that books like this can help you determine for yourself, but what I'd like you to do for now is to start tracking your progress with respect to these 10% gains, or whatever number you come up with. Set a goal to improve your finances or your physique or whatever else by 10% a year, and then develop a plan of action to help you get there.

READ 2 MORE ACTION STEPS HERE

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

-Tony Robbins

About the Author:

Ayodeji is a three-time author, TEDx Speaker, and top writer on Medium.com with close to 100,000 followers. His words reach hundreds of thousands of readers each month and millions per year.

Additional Resources:

Ayo-the-Author.com | Main Website

Ayodeji Awosika on Medium.com | Best Writing

The Future Belongs to the Imposters | TEDx Talk

This Book on Amazon:

Real Help: An Honest Guide to Self-Improvement, by Ayodeji Awosika

If You Liked This Book:

The Destiny Formula, by Ayodeji Awosika

You 2.0, by Ayodeji Awosika

Hell Yeah or No, by Derek Sivers

Doing the Impossible, by Patrick Bet-David

Personal Development for Smart People, by Steve Pavlina

The Gap and the Gain, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy

The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg

Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be, by Steven Pressfield

The Personal MBA, by Josh Kaufman

Excellent Sheep, by William Deresiewicz

Ok, that’s it for now!

Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free, 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.

There’s lots more for you 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 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!

2. I've released 50 complete, in-depth book breakdowns on the Stairway to Wisdom that respect both your time AND your intelligence and will help you become the person you've always known you were capable of being. Read them for free here.

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