Hi friends,
Here’s something we noticed while pulling this month’s most-imported books.
Half of this list is people learning how to move other people. Offers, negotiation, brand stories, leverage. The other half is people learning how to sit still with what won’t move at all. Stoics, a shepherd chasing an omen, a Navy SEAL in the snow.
Read them together and the seam between the two halves is the whole argument:
You control the offer. You don’t control the answer.
Alex Hormozi opens with an offer so good it can’t be compared. Chris Voss follows by questioning the assumptions everyone else takes on faith. Then Ryan Holiday shows up twice in a row to say the quiet part: direct your actions properly, and willingly accept what’s outside your control. Morgan Housel prices that same idea in dollars. Paulo Coelho’s most-underlined line calls the loss of control the world’s greatest lie. By the time Gary Keller closes the list with one thing at a time, the argument has come all the way around. Do the work that’s yours. Release the rest.
As always, we’re not just sharing what got imported. For every book, we’re showing you the single line that the most readers stopped to highlight, what we call Reader Consensus. It’s the closest thing we have to a room full of strangers nodding at the same sentence.
One more thing before we start. Only two books carried over from June’s list, and both of them brought back the exact same sentence, with more readers behind it than before. Consensus, it turns out, is sticky.
Here are July’s top 10.
1. $100M Offers
Alex Hormozi, gym-owner-turned-investor who wrote the playbook for pricing what you sell far above what it costs you to deliver.
“The Grand Slam Offer only becomes valuable once the prospect perceives the increase in likelihood of achievement, perceives the decrease in time delay, and perceives the decrease in effort and sacrifice.”
Reader Consensus: 24 of 86 highlighters (28%), tied with his definition of the Grand Slam Offer itself. July’s most-imported book by a clear margin.
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
2. Never Split the Difference
Chris Voss, former lead FBI hostage negotiator who brought tactical empathy from life-or-death standoffs to the boardroom.
“Great negotiators are able to question the assumptions that the rest of the involved players accept on faith or in arrogance, and thus remain more emotionally open to all possibilities, and more intellectually agile to a fluid situation.”
Reader Consensus: 23 of 58 highlighters (40%). The same line June’s list surfaced, now with six more readers underneath it.
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
3. The Daily Stoic
Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, who turned Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca into a page a day and put Stoicism back on the bestseller list.
“Control your perceptions. Direct your actions properly. Willingly accept what’s outside your control.”
Reader Consensus: 16 of 57 highlighters (28%).
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (5) · Español (5)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
4. The Obstacle Is the Way
Ryan Holiday, back for a second appearance in as many entries, this time with the book that made an ancient idea sound like a training manual.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Reader Consensus: 22 of 48 highlighters (46%), the second-highest agreement on this list.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Português (5)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
5. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Eric Jorgenson, who distilled a decade of Naval Ravikant‘s tweets, interviews, and essays into a free guide to wealth and happiness.
“Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”
Reader Consensus: 29 of 75 highlighters (39%). The other line that carried over from June, four readers stronger than it was then.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (26)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
6. The Psychology of Money
Morgan Housel, partner at Collaborative Fund, who argues that doing well with money is a behavior problem long before it is a math problem.
“There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need.”
Reader Consensus: 21 of 60 highlighters (35%).
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (9) · Español (9) · Português (7)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
7. The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian novelist whose shepherd boy has sent more people looking for their own omens than any self-help book on this list.
“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
Reader Consensus: 8 of 21 highlighters (38%), tied with a second line about how clearly we see everyone’s life but our own. The only novel in this month’s top 10.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (18)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
8. Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari, historian who explained our species by arguing that the thing we’re best at is believing in things that aren’t there.
“There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”
Reader Consensus: 16 of 62 highlighters (26%), tied with the passage on living in a dual reality. Fitting, for a list this full of people selling stories.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (17) · Español (12) · Português (7)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
9. Can’t Hurt Me
David Goggins, retired Navy SEAL who turned a childhood he should not have survived into an argument that the limit you feel is a suggestion.
“Everything in life is a mind game! Whenever we get swept under by life’s dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end.”
Reader Consensus: 9 of 38 highlighters (24%). The most spread-out book on the list. Goggins readers underline everything, and rarely the same thing.
🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Italiano (5)
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
10. The ONE Thing
Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, who took a single question, “what’s the one thing I can do such that everything else gets easier,” and built a method around it.
“Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”
Reader Consensus: 17 of 35 highlighters (49%), the highest agreement of any book on this list. Nearly half of everyone who highlighted this book stopped at the same paragraph, and it’s the one that says the cycle only pays if you stay in it.
📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp
📈 Discovered in July
The top 10 measures volume. This section measures momentum: books whose July arrivals make up an outsized share of everyone who has ever imported them. The first one sits at #7 above. The other two never had the volume for the list, but a third or more of their entire readership showed up this month.
The Alchemist: 6 of its 21 all-time importers (29%) arrived in July. A 1988 novel outrunning most of the business books around it.
How to Know a Person: 4 of 11 all-time importers (36%). David Brooks on the skill of actually seeing someone, quietly the counterweight to a list this focused on persuading them.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces: 3 of 6 all-time importers (50%). Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, showing up in the same month that Sapiens and a brand-story book both made the top 10. Somebody out there is building a narrative.
❤️ Before you go
Every line above came from someone who took the time to mark it. That’s the whole idea: when you highlight on Glasp, you’re not just saving a sentence for yourself. You’re leaving it for the next reader.
If any of these books are on your shelf, import your highlights and add your own underline to the count. Next month’s consensus is being written right now.
See you in the margins,
The Glasp Team
–
Partner With Glasp
We currently offer newsletter sponsorships. If you have a product, event, or service you’d like to share with our community of learning enthusiasts, sponsor an edition of our newsletter to reach engaged readers.
The number that stopped me this month: 17 of the 35 people who highlighted The ONE Thing stopped at the exact same paragraph. That's 49%, the highest agreement we've measured on this list so far. At the other end is Can't Hurt Me at 24%: Goggins readers underline everything, and rarely the same thing.
If one of these books is on your shelf, your highlights can join next month's count. Import takes about a minute: open your book in Kindle Cloud Reader with the Glasp extension on, and your highlights sync in.
Which of the ten is on your shelf? I'll go first: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and my most-marked line is not the consensus one.
No Substack account? Join us on Reddit instead: https://www.reddit.com/r/glasp/