Book Review — 5am Club — Robin S. Sharma

“Living the same week a few thousand times and calling it a life. I need to tell you that too many among us die at thirty and are buried at eighty.” — Robin S. Sharma

5am Club a book by Robin S. Sharma speaks about the benefits of waking up at 5am everyday 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 5am club as the travel the globe on his private jets learning they ways to bulletproof your life and achieve greatness through rising at 5am.

The book speaks of the 20/20/20 concept where you wake at 5am, 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 5am 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.

“All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.” — Robin S. Sharma

The book doesn’t shy away from delivering hard truths, it bluntly states that most people lack the ability to rise at 5am that the temptation is just to much to fall back onto the pillow and go back to sleep and that waking at 5am is a true mind over matter battle that only the most dedicated can achieve. The books discusses issues on social media and our inability to escape news and current affairs keeping us in an endless trap glues to our smart phones scrolling though social media for a quick happiness fix when all it really does it leave us hungering for more.

“Limitation is nothing more than a mentality that too many good people practice daily until they believe it’s reality.” — Robin S. Sharma

The story 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 but 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.

I enjoyed the book, I might read another of the authors publications in time, but I won’t be rushing out to the pick it up straight away.

Originally published at http://pazikas.com on November 6, 2020.