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The Secret Life of Books, a Special Podcast Announcement, Millionaire Secrets, and More!
Matt Karamazov
August 08, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 21 minutes
YOUTUBE đź“š THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE đź“š PATREON
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It won’t be long now before my podcast episode with Eric Jorgenson comes out, and you’re going to love our conversation.
He’s a BIG, optimistic thinker like me, terribly excited for the future of humanity (and our part in it), and we really cover a lot of ground.
If you’re unfamiliar, Eric’s the author of both The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and The Anthology of Balaji, two of my favorite books of all time. Out of 1,300 books, which is really saying something!
I’m also working on a complete breakdown of The Anthology of Balaji, and that’ll be ready very soon as well.
In This Issue of The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
📖 What I’m Currently Reading
🧠Who I’m Learning From Right Now
đź“ś Conquering Your Body and Mind in the Gym
🎥 The 20 (Yes, 20!) Books I’m Reading This Month
âś… New Book Releases Coming Soon
📚 Tonight’s Five Main Book Recommendations
🏅 Earn Rewards for Referring This Newsletter
There’s a lot to get to, so let’s hit the books!
Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson: I’m about a tenth of the way through this biography of Musk and it’s excellent. It’s the first Walter Isaacson book I’ve ever read, and I can see what the big deal is! He’s a fantastic biographer and Elon’s story is like a novel unfolding in real time. Highly recommend!
No B.S. Guide to Trust-Based Marketing, by Dan Kennedy: My Dan Kennedy binge continues, with no sign of slowing down! I’m well on my way to reading every book he’s ever written.
Everyone I know who’s wildly successful in business has a huge Dan Kennedy collection in their library, and I’m keeping that tradition alive. This one’s about creating trust in an understandably untrusting world, and like every other Dan Kennedy book, this one’s phenomenal.
Retirement Money Secrets, by Steve Selengut: Steve’s been an investor for 44 years(!) and this book details his investment strategy that works whether the market is going up or down. I’m about halfway through this one right now, and I’m really enjoying it!
Kieran Drew: Kieran’s done more for my writing (and my writing income) than almost anybody alive today, and his course, High Impact Writing, is just phenomenal.
He’s also coming out with a new course called Magnetic Emails, and you just know it’s going to be good. If you’re a writer - or you want to be - I definitely recommend getting to know Kieran!
Enrico Incarnati: Rico’s one of the “good guys” of social media, someone who actually teaches social media, not the lazy, manipulative, and honestly just ineffective strategies you see most people using (and worse, teaching to others!)
He’s helped me grow my social media following the right way - as an actual person who legitimately wants to help other people - and so yeah, I definitely recommend following him as well if you’re looking to do the same thing.
Dan Henry: Dan’s one of the best digital marketers around today (I really want to read his book, but I haven’t yet!), and his business podcasts on YouTube are often the most valuable and enlightening 20-30 minutes I’ll spend there all day.
“If you have what it takes to conquer your psychology and your physiology, then you might just have what it takes to reach out into the world and conquer a whole lot more.
In short, the better you get at the fitness game, the better prepared you’ll be for every other game you might want to play.”
Well I don't know if it's actually possible for me to read 20 books in one month, but damn it, I'm gonna try!
At the time I recorded this video I had already finished one and started several others, and it IS my full-time job to read and review books, so...
You know what, I think I'm gonna make it!
In this video, I lay out what I plan to read this August - all 20 books - and offer a bunch of related recommendations that you might like as well.
Watch the Video: Is It Even POSSIBLE to Read 20 Books in 1 Month?
Revenge of the Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell: Twenty-five years after the publication of The Tipping Point, Gladwell’s returning to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time examining their dark side. Expected: Oct 1, 2024
The 5 Types of Wealth, by Sahil Bloom: It’s happening! It’s actually happening! Sahil Bloom is coming out with a book!
I’m really looking forward to this one, and it’s going to be about the 5 types of wealth - Time Wealth, Social Wealth, Mental Wealth, Physical Wealth, and Financial Wealth - that will lead to a durable satisfaction and happiness you can build and maintain across the seasons of your life. Expected: Feb 4, 2025
What’s Your Dream?, by Simon Squibb: Simon’s the founder of HelpBnk.com, and he started his first business when he was homeless at 16, later selling his agency for more money than he’ll ever need.
Now, he’s built up a massive social media audience by giving free help to aspiring entrepreneurs and asking them, “What’s your dream?” This is his first book and I am HERE for it! Expected: Jan 16, 2025
And now, here are my five main recommendations for tonight! They are…
I don’t want to keep you here all day (I’ve got reading to do), so let’s get right into it!
“Once I started to pay attention to books as things, I realized that you couldn’t talk about the book as an object without also talking about the different things that people did with books.
Reading was one of those things, of course, and people’s readings left their own traces on books. But reading was only one of the things that people did with books, and not always the most important.
Reading is often thought of as something done in private, but books also had a public life, and they demanded to be understood in relation to the wider world. And people used books alongside other objects, so they couldn’t be understood in isolation from the rest of the material culture of bookishness.
I had been taught to ignore the book itself in favor of the text it contained, but once I stopped looking through it and started looking at it, its secret life was revealed.”
“Books about books” are some of my favorites, and in this one, professor Tom Mole goes beyond the words on the page, past books as merely “objects,” and into what we do with them, what they say about us and for us, how we relate to them, keep them, share them, display them…just on and on.
It’s very easy to make a book like this stuffy and inaccessible, but he does a fantastic job of, well, not doing that. In that sense it’s much more conversational, easy, and free than some academic discussion of “texts” and “discourses.”
If you’re the type of person who loves the feel of a physical book in your hand, who owns way more books than you could possibly count, and still feels compelled to buy more, this is for you.
"By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but for his own joy? Your work, the material the earth offers you, and what you make of it, is the meaning of life."
The Fountainhead is one of my favorite books of all time (even though Ayn Rand is a pretty bad fiction writer, all things considered), and I’ll never be able to do it proper justice in just a few short words, but here we go…
It’s the story of this visionary architect, Howard Roark (based on Frank Lloyd Wright), who defies convention when he refuses to compromise on the clear vision he maintains in his mind concerning his life, his work, and his values, which, for him, ultimately amount to the same thing.
The book has sold more than 9,000,000 copies since its initial publication and while it's not a "perfect" book by any means, its portrayal of the strong individual against the fearful collective, "the struggle for integrity of Roark's creative work against every form of social opposition," and the need for an unshakeable vision by which to orient one's life makes it an absolutely transformative book for the right person at the right time.
Maybe the "right time" to read The Fountainhead is when you're young, when you still believe that you can take on the world and win, before you allow the natural (but not inevitable) calcification of old age to set in and you lose your will to fight. That is to say, you should read this book before it's too late.
“The most important factor in achieving great financial success is not the money. It is the kind of person you have to become to earn that money and then hold on to it.”
I don’t believe that anyone is “self-made.” We exist in a community of others, and literally every single person who has ever achieved anything has had help. From parents, friends, their fans, the world at large.
That being said, some people are absolutely more self-made than others, and it turns out they actually do have different habits, exhibit different behaviors, and think different thoughts than people who are less successful.
This book examines what those “more” self-made individuals have in common, and Brian Tracy wrote it, so you know pretty much what you’re getting. Tracy’s been with me for a decade, and I owe him a lot with respect to the level of success I’ve been able to achieve so far.
He knows what he’s talking about, he’s made the study of successful people his life’s work, and there’s a ton of great stuff in here about how you can give yourself the best chance of success as well.
“Attention is the game. More specifically, underpriced attention is the opportunity.”
This is one of those more tactical, and also timely books from which I didn’t take too many notes, but I did apply a tremendous amount of things that never would have made it into my notes anyway.
What I mean is that it’s a book very much “of its time,” and it may not be relevant even a few years hence.
It’s about succeeding on social media, and specifically, profiting in the “attention economy” by going where it’s currently “underpriced.”
By that, Gary means that in terms of building brand on social media, you want to constantly observe where the attention is going, where people (and specifically the people who make up your target market) are spending their time, and you want to make sure you’re there too.
For example, even if TikTok gets banned in the U.S. (which it might, at the time I’m writing this), that attention has to go somewhere.
I mean, I’d love it if all those people would just pick up a book instead, but in all likelihood they’ll probably just move their attention to a different social media app. Which one? Do you have a presence there? Do you have a plan to capture that incoming attention and turn it into profits?
That’s what this book will help you do.
“Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist, you don't have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves."
Just because you're old doesn't mean that you automatically have much valuable wisdom to share. Some people haven't really lived 10,000 days, they've just lived the same day 10,000 times. Kevin Kelly, however, is an exception, and it turns out that the brilliant and insightful tech innovator gives excellent life advice.
For anyone hearing about Kelly for the first time, he is the co-founder of Wired magazine and a highly-praised futurist and author whose optimistic outlook on the next chapter of human history has inspired a generation to think bigger and to advance confidently into the next stage of human evolution.
The book is a collection of 450 aphorisms on living well, dealing with a range of subjects as wide and deep as life itself, and so you'll find here in these pages advice about setting ambitious goals, cultivating peace of mind and equanimity, dealing with loss, organizing your life around adventure and spontaneity, dispelling anger and sadness, minimizing regret, and so much more.
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
And if you’d like me to buy you a new book every month, (and rapidly scale your personal brand while earning more money in your business), click to join us inside The Competitive Advantage - we’d love to have you!
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
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you:
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