The REAL Count of Monte Cristo

YOUTUBE  📚 THE READING LIFE  📚  PATREON

Read on The Competitive Advantage.com | Read Time: ~3 Minutes

📚 Hey, good morning! Time to win.

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas has a strange hold on me, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since I finished it…last February.

Seriously, if you’re in the mood for a 1,200-page classic French adventure novel from 1844, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Every time I post about it on Instagram I get a wave of people saying that it’s one of their favorite novels too.

But it’s more than that.

It’s based partly on fact, more specifically the life of Dumas’ father, the REAL Count of Monte Cristo.

Well, THIS book came today too:

It’s the STORY of his father (and his father), and it just got me thinking - again - that a precious few of us ever think of our OWN lives as grand, panoramic, larger-than-life adventure stories, but they damn well could be.

They could be, if we made the conscious choice to chase adventure, to chase excitement and wonder, to go out and think 100 times bigger…if we dared to do that thing.

Now, I’m no stranger to this kind of life. But it wasn’t an accident. My adventures have often been intentional. I never waited for adventure and danger to just “find” me. It was never going to. I had to go out and create it.

From getting my nose broken in heavyweight boxing fights in Russia, taking Ayahuasca in the jungles of Costa Rica with 40 of my closest friends, to getting kicked out of India (story for another time), I have lived a life worthy of an enduring classic.

But it’s also not static. You and I can never rest. We can’t just have an adventure once or twice - or a dozen times - and just rest on our memories.

If we want an epic life, for as long as we are able, we have to keep recreating it, putting ourselves in the way of magic and suspense and glory…

It’s not just going to “happen.” We have to make it happen, we have to will it to happen, we have to give up our “ordinary” lives for it. FOR that epic life.

It’s true: Your epic life will cost you your old one.

As always, at the bottom of this email I’ll lay out everything I did today to move closer to my Ultimate Vision. This is to keep me accountable and to show you that I’m working as hard as I’m encouraging you to work…

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Woke Up: 12:00PM

Sleep Quality: 71%

Pages Read: 40

Workout: Back + Biceps

Lat Pulldowns - 65lbs, 60lbs, 55lbs, 55lbs (12 reps, last set to failure)

BB Rows - 135lbs, 135lbs, 135lbs, 125lbs (8 reps, last set to failure)

Cable Rows - 80lbs, 75lbs, 75lbs, 75lbs (8 reps, last set to failure)

I did a few sets of barbell curls and dumbbell curls after this, but I didn’t track them. I’m still feeling a bit of that soreness and tightness in my left bicep, and I’m wondering if I shouldn’t reduce the number of sets I’m doing right now for biceps. I think I’ll try it and see if it helps things. Legs tomorrow though, and those are getting STRONG.

Work Completed:

Worked on Skool Sales Page

Outlined New Author Marketing Sales Page

Scripted Some New Videos

Posted to Instagram Stories

Posted 1x on Instagram

Great day in some respects, but not the best in terms of productivity. I’m actually going to bed way early because I have to wake UP early for a meeting with a new client at 7am my time. Considering it’s 2:06am right now, I’m going to sign off now.

Until next time…happy reading!

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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