5 am Club a book by Robin S. Sharma speaks about the benefits of waking up at 5 am every day before the rest of the world rises. The self-help book takes the form of a story where 2 people meet a homeless man at a conference in New York, the homeless man turns out to be a world eccentric business mogul and billionaire Stone Riley. Stone takes it upon himself to teach his new found friends the ways for the 5 am club as they travel the globe on his private jets learning they ways to bulletproof your life and achieve greatness through rising at 5 am.
The 5 am club speaks of the 20/20/20 concept where you wake at 5 am, perform 20 minutes of intense exercise, 20 minutes of self-reflection such as meditation or journaling and 20 minutes of growth through reading and learning, the idea of doing this at 5 am gives you 1hr of pure self-care without distraction before everyone else starts to begin their days. It also touches on subjects that we as humans are meant to rise with the sun like our ancestors of old and that the human mind and body is at the most productive at first light rather than burning the midnight oil before going to sleep.
The 5 am club doesn’t shy away from delivering hard truths, it bluntly states that most people lack the ability to rise at 5 am that the temptation is just too much to fall back onto the pillow and go back to sleep and that waking at 5 am is a true mind over matter battle that only the most dedicated can achieve. The books discuss issues on social media and our inability to escape news and current affairs keeping us in an endless trap glued to our smartphones scrolling through social media for a quick happiness fix when all it really does it leave us hungering for more.
The story of The 5 am Club itself following the three protagonists around is somewhat shallow, you can predict what going to happen next quite easily, although I do understand the story is only present to provide a framework for delivering a larger methodology I felt it quite corny at times.
Ironically my major takeaway from the book is not that waking at 5am will solve all of your problems but the fact that implementing small but good habits and sticking to them overtime can result in a great amount of self improvement and a level of increased happiness.
Favorite Quotes from The 5 am Club
“Limitation is nothing more than a mentality that too many good people practice daily until they believe it’s reality.” – Robin S. Sharma
“All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.” – Robin S. Sharma
“Limitation is nothing more than a mentality that too many good people practise daily until they believe it’s reality. It breaks my heart to see so many potentially powerful human beings stuck in a story about why they can’t be extraordinary, professionally and personally. You need to remember that your excuses are seducers, your fears are liars and your doubts are thieves.” ― Robin Sharma
Conclusions
I enjoyed the book, I might read another of the author’s publications in good time, but I won’t be rushing out to the pick it up straight away. If you have any interest in picking the book up yourself I would appreciate if you used my link here to give me a tiny kickback from Amazon.
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