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These Famous Essays Will Make You Smarter
Matt Karamazov
September 17, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 13 minutes
The main book that I’m going to recommend tonight is a little bit more challenging…but I know you can handle it.
In fact, one of the books I finished recently, The Expectation Effect, explores research that says we can dramatically increase our intelligence, our health, our happiness - even how long we live - by recalibrating our expectations.
Meaning, if we believe that we possess the internal resources to be able to focus for longer and to maintain concentration, we will.
If we believe that we can handle stress and that it won’t negatively affect our health, it won’t.
If we believe that we can, in fact, read and understand harder, more challenging books, that’s exactly what’s likely to happen.
It’s not magic or anything, either. It’s merely a function of how our brains evolved, and how they work to process reality as it unfolds before our very eyes.
But The Expectation Effect is not tonight’s book.
It’s a book (well, a collection of essays), that came out in 1580(!), where the mayor of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne, basically invented the modern essay.
Yes, it’s a little more challenging than most other books, but again, you can handle it. And it’s worth it, too, for reasons I’ll get into below.
I want to encourage you a little bit, though, because I’ve found that many of the best books do require you to stretch yourself a little bit. As David Robson points out in The Expectation Effect, the sensation that learning is difficult means that you’re learning.
If it didn’t feel challenging at all, then you wouldn’t be learning.
At the risk of rambling a little bit, it’s the same thing with working out at the gym, too. If you keep lifting the same weights, week after week, and never go any heavier, you’re not challenging yourself, and your muscles aren’t going to grow.
Anyway…
The Essays are extraordinary, you’re more than capable of reading them, and now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
“If we’re trying to encourage someone to do better, do we really think that telling them (ourselves) that they’re awful and stupid and worthless is going to motivate them? Then why do we do it to ourselves?”
“Remember, do more of what works. What we do every time we come into a new company to help them scale, we streamline, systemize, and scale the top marketing channel. Usually there is a big opportunity to 2-4x the number of leads that come from a top channel.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
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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 exactly 1,414 books, including 62 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“If you walk on stilts, you’re still walking on your feet. If you sit on the highest throne in the world, you’re still sitting on your ass.”
Michel de Montaigne was a French statesman and one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, who published the Essays in 1580 as an attempt to record “some traits of my character and of my humors,” which doesn’t sound like it’d be too interesting, right?
What’s astonishing about the Essays, though - and why they’ve endured for hundreds of years, influencing everyone from Shakespeare, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Eric Hoffer - is that he explored his own nature with ruthless honesty and good faith, earnestly trying to find out more about the nature of the Self, what’s honorable and true, and how a good person should show up in the world.
Nothing was off limits, and nothing he discovered about himself was “bad news.” It was all just information and insight, and he laid everything bare, right on the page for the whole world to see. It’s his keen insight into human nature that’s been a good part of the reason why the Essays have survived for so long and generated so much interest.
And imagine, he wrote them thinking that nobody would be interested!
The Essays cover so much ground that you could probably save time by listing what’s not explored by Montaigne. The answer is…not much. If it concerned humanity, humans, and what being alive was like for all of us, it’s pretty much covered by one or more of his essays.
I made the mistake of reading this book on my iPhone, which ended up being more than 32,000 iPhone pages long(!), but I don’t regret it one bit. Other than having to swipe left 32,000 times, stopping dozens and dozens of times to record some fascinating insight or quotation that Montaigne would hit me with out of nowhere.
Since Montaigne came to believe that human nature was finite and truth was infinite, and therefore we could never hope to rise above our limited means and grasp Ultimate Reality, he doesn’t arrive at a whole lot of solid answers.
But man, does he ask some epic questions!
“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
“Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve.”
“An honest and prudent man will acknowledge that only to be a true victory which shall be obtained saving his own good faith and dignity.”
“We are training not a soul, not a body, but a man; and we ought not to divide the two.”
“I care not so much what I am in the opinions of others, as what I am in my own; I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing."
“The principal use of reading to me is, that by various objects it rouses my reason, and employs my judgement, not my memory."
“Do nothing that you will later be forced to conceal.”
“When small, the danger is difficult to perceive, and when grown up, the remedy is equally difficult to find.”
“It’s dishonorable to be honored by dishonorable people.”
“Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it.”
“I study myself more than any other subject.”
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”
“In proportion as the possession of life is more short, I must make it so much deeper and fuller.”
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OK, that’s it for now…
I’ve got plenty more excellent book recommendations coming your way soon though!
There’s also my YouTube channel, where I publish book reviews, reading updates, and more each week.
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:
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