- The Reading Life
- Posts
- This Book Will Make You Stronger Than You Were Yesterday
This Book Will Make You Stronger Than You Were Yesterday
Matt Karamazov
October 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes
I honestly couldn’t tell you which one changed my life more: reading books, or getting fit.
If I had to pick just one…
I couldn’t. I almost literally couldn’t. Maybe if you pressed me, I’d say books?
Reading books helped me live 1,000+ lives before I turned 30, for starters. They helped me launch and grow the successful business I have now, the one that affords me a level of lifestyle freedom that I couldn’t even imagine having to give up.
Books have allowed me to download the thoughts and ideas of the most brilliant men and women who have ever walked the planet, directly into my brain - hundreds, thousands of life-changing ideas, virtually for free.
Alright so maybe (hopefully) you share my passion for reading already. But fitness! Oh man, if you’re lucky enough to be able to do both, to read books and work out?
You’re among the wealthiest and most fortunate people alive today. Key word: alive!
The gym and the library have both been transformational, massively positive influences in my life, and I’ll never, ever stop pushing library cards and gym memberships into people’s hands for as long as I live.
To that end…
Tonight’s featured book recommendation is called Stronger Than Yesterday, by Michael Matthews, someone who’s changed my life twice with books of his own, this book being one of them. (Here’s his other one that I also loved).
It’s a wonderfully funny, helpful, and wise encouragement to take control of your mind, body, and health, packed with excellent advice on how to do exactly that, and you’ll find my full summary as well as all of my notes and takeaways below.
Now, before our coffees get cold, let’s hit the books!
 |  |  |
“Still, in spite of the marvels of the computer age, the book remains a major tool for learning, especially in skills that are primarily cognitive.
If a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words, then perhaps a moving picture is worth 10,000 words.
But it’s also true that one good paragraph sometimes has more power to change the individual and the world than any number of pictures.”
“The key to unit economics is finding out what it costs you to make a sale - which will require you to invest money in paid ads to buy that data. Use that data to price your program efficiently in order to generate a profit.
If you are unable to charge a high enough price on the front-end - which means for your primary product - then add a back-end product or service, also called an up-sell. This is a second, optional purchase that someone can make after becoming a customer.”
Inside my private business mastermind, Creator Launch Academy, we’re tackling one nonfiction book per month and implementing its lessons inside our businesses.
This month’s book is How To: $10M, by William Brown, a great business book that contains everything you need to know about scaling a coaching and/or e-learning business to more than $10,000,000 in revenue.
Click here to claim your free trial, and join our business book club for educational content creators!
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 1,423 books, including 69 books so far this year, and if you’re interested, here’s my full Reading List.
“You aren’t stuck with the body you have. You can make it better, even if you’ve mishandled it, and it’s far simpler than many people believe. Even better, once you start changing your body, you’ll realize that you also have the power to change your life.”
Personal trainers inspire even less trust these days than personal injury lawyers, and people on social media are rightly suspicious of fitness “experts” slinging supplements with less muscle-building power than soy sauce.
Which is why when people like Michael Matthews come along, we appreciate them even more. He’s the real deal.
Stronger Than Yesterday is a super-practical daily reader, containing 169 insights for transforming your body, mind, and motivation, and Matthews stands out as someone who actually wants you to succeed and knows exactly how to help you do that.
He has that perfect combination of unconditional support and encouragement, balanced with the recognition that no one goes through life at 100% every single day, and perfection is the dream of people who never got started in the first place.
The book contains simple, evidence-based techniques and tactics for improving your physique, reducing your risk of disease and dysfunction, slowing aging, and more.
Matthews realizes that 100% compliance is probably never going to happen, but he doesn’t let you get away with anything, least of all getting away with doing less than your best.
What you’ll realize is that when you start taking control of what happens inside the gym, you’ll start gaining more control over what happens in your life outside the gym too.
You don’t have to be perfect, but you do have to try. You will likely never reach perfection, but on any given day, you can be stronger than yesterday.
“If you’re unsure whether you should eat, drink, or do something, ask yourself, ‘Is this good for my body or bad?’ If you can consistently answer that question with knowledge and love (for yourself, your friends and family, and your fate), you can build a body you can be proud of.”
“What you do every day is far more important than what you do every so often.”
“Don’t let anyone convince you that a commitment to your fitness is a flavor of narcissism rather than self-love.”
“Appreciate the fleeting moments of perfection, but don’t calibrate your expectations by them. Instead, demand something else from yourself - something mundane, but also achievable and sustainable. That something else is consistency.”
“Getting fit is like doing anything that most people fail at: It’s harder than we think it’ll be. It takes longer than we think it’ll take. We make more mistakes than we think we’ll make. We can’t fail unless we give up.”
“Consider my own fitness journey: Twenty-one years now and countless mistakes made. The one I didn’t make, though? I never stopped.
So don’t overestimate what’s possible in thirty days and underestimate what’s possible in 365 days. You may be able to establish a habit in a few weeks, but it takes at least a few months to start creating a lifestyle.
No single workout can change your body or life. But a bunch of them can.”
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
“Obesity is a problem you can literally run from.”
“There’s always someone who looks better, lifts more weight, and has more of whatever you want. The deck is stacked. You can’t win. So turn your gaze inward instead, looking only at who you were, are, and hope to become.”
“Walking is the absolute easiest way to speed up fat loss, incorporate active recovery into your lifestyle, and even reduce the risk of death.
According to scientists at Semnan University of Medical Sciences who analyzed the results of seven studies involving 28,141 participants, all-cause mortality (death from all causes) dropped by about 12 percent for every 1,000 steps people took every day.
When the researchers compared the people with the highest and lowest daily step counts, they found that walking 16,000 steps per day was associated with a 66 percent reduction in all-cause mortality compared to walking just 2,700 steps per day.”
“View any attempts to make you feel hopeless and afraid as emotional assaults on your well-being. Protect your mind against these psychological pathogens as you would your body against physical ones.”
“Give the gate to anyone who says eating any individual food or macronutrient ruins or restores your health or body composition. These ninnies are just as confused as people who believe strippers are actually into them.”
“The fact that you don’t want to go to the gym today is a sign that you need to make sure you go to the gym today.”
“In many competitions, you don’t have to be the best to win - you just have to be the hardest to destroy.”
“So many things can start to change the moment you decide to become the type of person who keeps the promises you make to yourself. Like going to the gym when you’d rather go to dinner with Jeffrey Dahmer.
In this way, the workouts you do when you really don’t want to do them are the ones that matter the most.
If you can do one of those workouts, you can do another. And if you can do another, you can do more. And if you can do more, one day, you’re going to look back and think, ‘Wow, all of those little improvements really did add up.’”
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
If you were sent this newsletter, click here to subscribe.
To read past editions of The Reading Life, click here.
Click here to recommend The Reading Life on Twitter (X).
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 170,000+ 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:
Creators: Book a 1-1 strategy call with me and I’ll show you how to reach $5K/month in revenue by following a custom plan that we’ll build together.
Join Creator Launch Academy, my private business mastermind for educational content creators who want to stand out in their niche, build multiple revenue streams, and go full-time with their creative passions.
Reply