The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.
Robin Sharma, 2018
A guru collapses right on stage, and a vagrant from the audience turns out to be a billionaire who flies two listeners off to his island. Robin Sharma tells a parable to pass on a method: how to spend the hour from five to six in the morning, protect your attention and lock in a habit over sixty-six days. Inside: the “20/20/20” formula, the “90/90/1” rule and an explanation of why there is no growth without rest.
Who it is for
For anyone who never has enough time, reaches for the phone first thing in the morning and wants to find time for themselves, for exercise and for the work they love.
All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.
The guru falls on stage
Picture a huge conference hall. A famous business guru known as the Spellbinder, already past eighty, promises to reveal the secret of happiness and prosperity. In the middle of his talk he gives his main practical advice: start getting up at five in the morning. A few minutes later he clutches his throat and collapses right on stage. The conference is called off, and people are asked to leave the hall.
Three people are left in an emptied row. The entrepreneur, whose investors are taking away the tech company she founded, is going through the worst year of her life. The artist hasn't been able to finish a single painting for several years. And a vagrant in rags boasts about his billions and his private jet. By the next morning it turns out he wasn't lying: this is Stone Riley, the Spellbinder's student and one of the richest people in the world. He takes the two of them to his island to teach them a morning routine.
All these people were invented by Robin Sharma, a writer on leadership known for “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”. His book is written as a parable: a journey across four continents, with dolphins, a shootout and a wedding. We'll leave the plot aside here. Underneath it lies a method, and that method is what we retell.
Sharma's main idea is this: greatness isn't handed out at birth, it is grown by habits, and it begins with the first hour of the day. Ahead are six parts of the method: where mastery really comes from, why details decide everything, what steals your attention, how to spend the hour from five to six, how to lock in a new habit and why all of it falls apart without rest. Let's begin.
Every master was once a beginner
The artist secretly recorded the Spellbinder's talk on his phone, and after the conference the three of them listen to it again. The guru says what the artist needs to hear most: inborn genius doesn't exist, it's an illusion. We only come to know great people at the height of their fame and have no idea what came before it.
And before it, according to the Spellbinder, came enormous effort, focus on a single goal and patience, with most attempts ending in failure. Darwin spent eight years studying barnacles before he formulated the theory of evolution. Before his first book, Stephen King taught children English and worked part-time in a laundry, and once, in despair, he threw his manuscripts into the trash. They were fished out by his wife Tabitha, who believed in his talent.
Later Riley draws on the psychologist James Flynn and his idea, which the book calls the capitalization of intelligence. The point is that what matters is not so much talent as what a person does with it. Talent, Riley says, is just a seed, and a tree still has to be grown from it. In his observation, a great gift can even let you down: a gifted person feels that talent will do all the work for them.
Hence the mistake the author sees in most people. An old record keeps playing in their head: you'll never achieve anything outstanding, don't even try. A person believes it and chooses a life that fits their modest powers, without knowing their real ones. Sharma calls this a self-fulfilling prophecy: we behave the way we're used to thinking of ourselves, and much of that self-image came to us from parents and teachers.
What can you do about it? Riley's answer: every time you make a brave choice in spite of fear, your personal story is rewritten little by little. And his first step is entirely ordinary: get up earlier than usual and spend that time on yourself, not on other people's messages.
About the author
Robin Sharma writes books on leadership and personal effectiveness and is known for the parable “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”. His books have been translated into dozens of languages, and with his own money he founded a charity that helps children from low-income families.
All books by this author: Robin Sharma
Terms from the book
- Cortisol
- Darwin
- King
- Flynn
- Challenger
- calibration
- limbic system
- amygdala
- prefrontal cortex
- Edison
- BDNF
- supercompensation
- Spellbinder: A fictional character in the book, a famous business guru and the founder of the 5AM Club in Sharma's parable. Mentor to the billionaire Stone Riley.
- Riley: Stone Riley, a fictional character in the book, a billionaire and the Spellbinder's student. He teaches the two main characters the morning routine himself.
- Tabitha: Tabitha King, a writer and Stephen King's wife.
- granularity: A term from the book, coined by the Spellbinder: the habit of going into every detail of your work. It is the author's image, not a scientific concept.
- GCA: Gargantuan Competitive Advantage, the Spellbinder's phrase in the book: the edge a person gains by paying more attention to their work than others do.
- Moncler: A fashion house known for expensive down jackets. It was founded in France and is now headquartered in Italy.
- Shafir: Eldar Shafir, a psychologist at Princeton University who studies how a shortage of resources and time narrows a person's attention.
- Leroy: Sophie Leroy, an American researcher in organizational behaviour. She introduced the idea of “attention residue”: after a switch, part of your mind is still busy with the previous task.
- Menlo Park: A small town in New Jersey where Thomas Edison set up his research laboratory. In the book it is the name for a place to work without distractions.
- Taj Mahal: A white marble mausoleum in the Indian city of Agra, built in the 17th century on the orders of the emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife.
- Gray: Albert Gray, an employee of an American insurance company. His speech to insurance agents was published as the booklet “The Common Denominator of Success”.
- Robben: An island near Cape Town in South Africa where, during apartheid, there was a prison for political prisoners.
- Nelson Mandela: A South African politician and fighter against apartheid who spent 27 years in prison, became South Africa's first Black president and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
All terms
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