Book review: The 5AM Club, Robin Sharma

“Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life” is the tag line of this self-improvement book. It advocates for an early start (obviously, given the title), followed by a period of exercise, reflection (e.g. meditation, journaling) and growth (e.g., learning, reading). Read on for a full review…

The book is by Robin Sharma, a motivational speaker and “leadership expert”, perhaps better known for his book “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari“. The book kind of reminds me of The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim in that it is at face value a story, but the story is mostly a vehicle for a deeper underlying message.

The story starts with a depressed entrepreneur at the losing end of a corporate takeover. As she struggles in life, she attends a conference given by a charismatic speaker called “The Spellbinder” who “showed ordinary individuals how to succeed at the highest levels, yet reclaim the magic of a life richly lived”. There she meets a fellow attendee (“the artist”) and both get cornered by a ragged, strange old man (“Mr. Riley,”) who ends up taking them on journey of self-improvement. Honestly, the surface level story is real stretch and not likely to win any Pulitzers, but the underlying messages are sound, or at least thought provoking and motivating and without the “cover story”, the points in the book would likely be dry, and it works in making the book an easier read.

Growth and risk taking

The book starts by encouraging growth and risk taking.

Most people stay the same their entire lives. Too frightened to leave the way they operated yesterday. Married to the complacency of the ordinary and wedded to the shackles of conformity while resisting all opportunity for growth, evolution and personal elevation. Transformation isn’t an easy play. Yet, the life of the caterpillar must end for the glory of the butterfly to shine. The old ‘you’ must die before the best ‘you’ can be born. Great power is unleashed with a simple start.

The soreness of growth is so much less expensive than the devastating costs of regret.

20 years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.

(This last quote was attributed to Mark twain, although this suggested H. Jackson Brown, Jr. published it and credited his mother.)

And one of the keys to growth is a refined morning routine…

Morning Routine and 20/20/20

In this time of overwhelming distractions and overflowing schedules, getting up at 5 AM and running the morning regime is an antidote to average. There’s a reason so many of the great achievers of the world get up before the sun—it’s the most special part of the day. Solitude—the kind that you can access before the sun comes up—is a force multiplier around your power, expertise and connection to being human.

How do you develop a better morning routine? The book recommends using the hour after you get up (aka The Victory Hour), broken into three 20 minute sections…

1st 20 minutes: Move

Doing some sweaty exercise first thing every morning will improve the quality of your days.

By working out intensely, you’ll stimulate that natural pharmacy of mastery which will make you feel fundamentally different than when you first woke up. The way you feel when you first wake up really isn’t the way you’ll feel only twenty minutes later at 5:20 AM. Train harder. Live longer.

Every day’s just dramatically better with some exercise in it. Dial in your physical dimension so your brain is operating at its highest level of cognition and so your energy is igniting and so your stress is dissolving and so your joy is expanding.

2nd 20 minutes: Reflect

Next, the recommendation is a period of deep peace. Some quietude and solitude for yourself before the complexity starts arriving, (and your family needs your energy, and all your other responsibilities take over). Savor some stillness.

Suggestions include meditating, reflecting, journaling or planning. For example, consider writing a plan for your ideal day ahead.

3rd 20 minutes: Grow

For the final segment, invest time to grow. That may mean reading a book, an article, listening to an audiobook. Whatever the media, topics could include improving your professional growth, lifting your relationships, increase your finances etc.

Work on becoming more valuable. Private desire without personal development is like dreaming of having a gorgeous garden but not planting any seeds.

Learn, grow, and capitalize on your gifts and talents. Read, improve and feed curiosity.

Customize to suit

And of course the 20/20/20 approach is just a guide.

This morning routine isn’t written in stone. Make it yours. Customize it to fit your preferences and suit your lifestyle. In a culture of cyber-zombies, addicted to distraction and afflicted with interruption, the way to guarantee results is to install a world-class morning routine. Winning starts at your beginning. And your first hours are when heroes are made. Gargantuan results are much less about your inherited genetics and far more about your daily habits. And your morning ritual is by far the most essential one to calibrate.

Habits

Obviously building a good morning routine is all about building good habits.

Small, daily, seemingly insignificant improvements, when done consistently over time, yield staggering results. The true geniuses all started out as ordinary people. But they practiced building up their strength so much and so often that showing up at world-class became automated. Legendary performers practice being spectacular for so long that they no longer remember how to behave in non-spectacular ways.

And the book talks a lot about how to do that. For example:

The Trigger (e.g. an alarm clock) -> The Ritual (e.g. the 20/20/20 approach) -> The Reward (a snack, a book, a nap) -> The Repetition. It also talked about “The habit installation protocol” (Destruction, Installation, Integration).

But honestly, while the ideas are fine, and the intentions good, I think many of these topics were covered in a much better way in Atomic Habits, a book that I loved.

Still, again, some of the motivational points are useful:

All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end. The smallest of implementations is always worth more than the grandest of intentions.

Focus

A key part of the recommended morning routine is focus.

So many potentially outstanding people are suffering from ‘broken focus syndrome’ because they’ve filled their lives with gadgets, interruptions and cybernoise. Instead, strip away all the layers of complexity from your days. Simplify. Streamline. Become a purist.

And a key part of focus is avoiding electronic distractions. Stop checking your devices first thing in the morning, last thing at night and continuously in between. The book also recommends not keeping any electronic devices in your bedroom, an idea I like a lot. All the messages, notifications and ads are overwhelming. I particularly like this quote:

“Victims love entertainment. Victors adore education.”

 

So the book recommends a “Focus Bubble”, a metaphorical moat, or a porous membrane, where you decide what enters your orbit, giving you periods “free from influences that dissolve your inspiration—and deteriorate your A-game.”

An addiction to distraction is the end of your creative production. Stop being a cyber-zombie relentlessly attracted to digital devices.

That is, put down your devices, and focus.

And without devices and distractions, and in the right conditions, your brain can enter into an altered state of consciousness which the book calls “transient hypofrontality”. Some similar concepts might be “flow” or “runners high”

When you’re up early and all alone, away from the overstimulation and technology, the part of your brain responsible for rational thinking (and worrying)—actually shuts off for a short time. You give yourself the gift of some morning peace, allowing your brain to access the realm of pure genius.

And a key part of focus is focusing on the now, what is in front of you, not the past:

Do not allow past pains and present frustrations to diminish your glory, stifle your invincibility and choke the unlimited possibilitarian that lurks within the supreme part of you. In a world that seeks to keep you down, build yourself up.

Tactics

The book also talks about tactics that “will quicken your momentum in both your professional and your private lives”.

Those include

• The 60/10 Method is a sixty-minute productivity sprint followed by ten minutes of refueling. Basically, a timeboxing method similar to the Pomodoro Technique.
• The Daily 5 Concept, where you list the five tiny targets you wish to accomplish over the day ahead for you to feel it was one well-spent. 
• The 2nd Wind Workout (2WW) where you schedule a second workout at the end of your workday to give you a second wind for a great evening.
• Traffic University, which means leveraging your commute time to actually learn something, rather than doom scrolling.
• The Dream Team Technique, meaning outsource all activities except those within the realm of your mastery (similar to the 4 hour work week idea, I think, although I haven’t read that book yet).

Mindset

And with a better morning routine and habits, you should develop a better mindset.

Your thinking forms your reality (similar to the Liam Neeson voiced line of “Your focus determines your reality” from Star Wars) and by improving your mind, you’ll improve your life. 

If you’re running a mental narrative that says that you don’t have what it takes to be a leader, or an acclaimed expert of your craft, then you won’t even start the adventure of getting there. And world-class is a process, not an event. Your daily behavior is a function of your deepest beliefs. You’ll never rise higher than your personal story.

Psychologists call the way we embrace a story about who we are and what we can achieve and then behave in a way that makes that fantasy actually come true ‘The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.’ Each one of us holds a profound capacity for leadership within us. Fulfill your opportunity to make history, in your own original way. If you are alive today, you have the ability to lead without a title and make your mark on the world.

We always perform in a way that is aligned with the way we see ourselves. And so, our thinking creates our results.”

German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, ‘Most people take the limits of their vision to be the limits of the world. A few do not. Join them.’

 

 

Serve

Finally, what is the point of developing these habits, morning routines, and mindset changes? There are many, but the author argues improving to serve others is key; “A better self should be a giver, not just a taker”; move on from a “community where the majority shops for nice shoes and acquires expensive things yet rarely invests in a better self.”

One of the primary aims of a wonderfully crafted life is contribution. Impact. Usefulness. Helpfulness. To lead is to serve. Raise the joy of others and you’ll get even more joy. Increase the state of your fellow human beings and, naturally, your own state of being ascends. Generosity —not scarcity—is the trait of all of the great men and women who have upgraded our world.

The true reason to be in the game is to be helpful to society, to serve. Money, power and prestige are just the inevitable by-products.

I also particularly like this part, about sticking to the goals you set yourself:

Let go of the destructive habit of breaking the commitments you make to yourself. Failing to keep self-promises is one of the many reasons so many of us don’t love ourselves.

Overall

Overall, a good book that challenges you to do more with your day through early rising, exercise, focus, clarity of mind, and setting and sticking to clear goals. There is some drama in the book that adds very little, if anything, to the story, and the writing style can be a little much. For example, the book has a lot of phrases such as “You would have been most impressed if you saw it.”, “You would have been astonished to watch him”, and “You would have been exceedingly impressed if you were standing there”, which can get old. But despite that, the underlying points are good, so I recommend it.

 

Tags: 2024, bookreviews, books, reading