The 5 AM Club

Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2018
Format: Paperback
Pages: 314
Genres: Self-enrichment, leadership, motivation, business

Book Review

The 5 AM Club is a book written by Robin Sharma who is the author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. This book is sharing about the ways of improving yourself in managing time by practicing "wake up early" habit in your daily life. In this book, the writer will encourage 5 am will be the starting point of your new day to plan, organize and manage each tasks accurately and consistently. Meanwhile, the most important is, have a clear goal in your life so that this habit can bring benefits for you to manage each tasks effectively. 

Book Summary

Chapter 1 The dangerous deed

A girl with late thirties, she almost committed to suicide because of job failure. But she spots a ticket to personal optimization conference and with her self-indication, it is the time to rethink her opinion. Therefore, she decided to attend the conference.

Chapter 2 A daily philosophy on becoming legendary

Do not allow your fire to go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and then not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists. It is real. It is possible. It is yours. Ayn Band 

Keynotes of the chapter

• Life is too short to play small with your talents. You were born into the opportunity as well as the responsibility to become legendary. You have been built to achieve masterwork level projects, designed to realize unusually important pursuits and constructed to be a force for good on this tiny planet.

• You need to remember that your excuses are seducers, your fears are liars and your doubts are thieves

• No matter where you are on the pathway of your life, please don’t let the pain of an imperfect past hinder the glory of your fabulous future. You are so much more powerful than you may currently understand.

• Society has sold us a series of mistruths. World class begins where your comfort zone ends is a rule the successful, the influential and the happiest always remember.

• Hard is good. Real greatness and the realization of your inherent genius is meant to be a difficult sport. Only those devoted enough to go to the fiery edges of their highest limits will expand them. And the suffering that happens along the journey of materializing your special powers, strongest abilities and most inspiring ambitions is one of the largest sources of human satisfaction. A major key to happiness--- and internal peace--- is knowing you have done whatever it took to earn your rewards and passionately invested the effortful audacity to become you best.

Chapter 3 An unexpected encounter with a surprising stranger

“Do not live as if you have ten thousand years left. You fate hangs over you. While you are still living, while you still exist on this Earth, strive to become a genuinely great person.” Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor 

Chapter 4 Letting go of mediocrity and all that is ordinary

“Why, sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carrol, Alice in Wonderland

Keynotes of the chapter

• Adults are deteriorated children. When you were much younger, you understood how to live. Staring at stars filled you with delight. And chasing butterflies flooded you with joy. Then, as you grew up, you forgot how to be human. You forgot how to be bold and enthusiastic and loving and wildly alive. Your precious reservoirs of hope faded. Being ordinary became acceptable. The lamp of your creativity, your positivity and your intimacy with your greatness grew dim as you began to worry about fitting in, having more than others being popular.

• Take excellent care of the front end of your day, and the rest of your day will pretty much take care of itself. Own your morning. Elevate your life.

• Most of us in this age spend our most valuable hours being busy and busy. What is the point of spending your best mornings and potentially productive days climbing mountains that you realize were the wrong ones when you are frail and wrinkled? Very sad.

• The way you begin your day really does determine the extent of focus, energy, excitement and excellence you bring to it. Each early morning is a page in the story that become your legacy. 

Chapter 5 A Bizarre Adventure into Morning Mastery

“Everyone holds his fortune in his own hands, like a sculptor the raw material he will fashion into a figure… The skill to mold the material into what we want must be learned and attentively cultivated.” –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Keynotes of the chapter

Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the Second theory of Thermodynamics and Physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. Martin Luther

Chapter 6 A flight to Peak productivity, virtuosity and undefeatability

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma- which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” –Steve Job 

Keynotes of the chapter

Rule 1

An addiction to distraction is the end of your creative production.

Rule 2

Excuses breed no genius. Small daily improvements, when done consistently over time lead to stunning results

Rule 3

All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at end.

Rule 4

To have the results The top 5 % of producers have, you must start doing what 95 % of people are unwilling to do. As you start to live like this, the majority will call you crazy. Remember that being labelled a freak is the price of greatness

Rule 5

When you feel like surrendering, continue. Triumph loves the relentless

 

Chapter 7 Preparation for a transformation begins in Paradise

“A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It is only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.” – Steven Pressfield

Keynotes of the chapter

The 2x3x mind set: To double your income and impact, triple your investment in two core areas—your personal mastery and your professional capability. 

Chapter 8 The 5 am method: The Morning Routine of World Builders

“It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth and wisdom.” –Aristotle

Keynotes of the chapter

20/20/20 Formula- arranging your first 60 minutes in exercising, planning and learning

• Spend your first 20 minutes in intense exercise

• Spend your next 20 minutes in reviewing your annual plan and reflect deeply on your quarterly goal

• Invest the final 20 minutes on learning 

Chapter 9 A framework for the expression of Greatness

The men who are great live with that which is substantial, they do not stay with that which is superficial, they abide with realities, they remain not with what is showy. The one they discard, the other they hold.” –Lao Tzu

Keynotes of the chapter

The 3 Step Success Formula 

• The beginning of transformation is the increase of perception. As you see more you can materialize more. And once you know better you can achieve better.

• The grade of the work you offer to the world reflects the strength of the respect you have for yourself. Those with unfathomable personal esteem would not dare send out anything average. It would diminish them too much.

• Commit to being a highly unusual human being instead of one of those timid souls who behave like everyone else, living a sloppy life instead of a magnificent one, a derivation life instead of original one.

• Developing high awareness around the things that we do and having a painstaking approach to making our work perfect. Refining the details. Sweating the little points. Producing with precision rather than being unprofessional and careless. Underpromising and overdelivering. Taking immense pride in our craft. Going deep and embracing to use your words—granularity versus superficiality.

• Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. Half-heartedness does not reach majesty. 

Chapter 10 The 4 Focuses of History- Makers

“The life given us, by nature is short, but the memory of well-spent life is eternal.” –Cicero

The 4 Focuses of History Maker

1. Capitalization IQ
2. Freedom from Distraction 
3. Personal Mastery Practice 
4. Day Stacking 

History-Maker Focus #1: Capitalization IQ

• To makes a legendary performer so good is not the amount of natural talent they are born into but the extent of the potential they actualize—and capitalize. Dedication and discipline beats brilliance and giftedness every day of this week. And A-Players don’t get lucky. They make lucky. Each time you resist a temptation and pursue an optimization you invigorate your heroism. Every instant you do that which you know to be right over the thing that you feel would be easy, you facilitate your entry into the hall of fame of epic achievers.

• Victims have big TVs. Leaders own large libraries. 

History-Maker Focus #2: Freedom from distraction

• An addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production.

• Filling valuable hours with meaningless moves is the drug of choice for most people.
• An intense concentration only on what matters most is how the pros realize victory. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

• Stop managing your time and start managing your focus 

History-Maker Focus #3: Personal Mastery Practice

Sweat more in practice, blood less in war

The 4 interior empires:

• It is your life. Do what fits you best and feels right to you.

• Your past is a place to be learned from, not a home to be lived in

• All four of these interior empires must be polished beautifully through morning practice for you to know the awe-inspiring power that lurks within you.

• Mindset is all about your psychology and Heartset is all about your emotionality, and Healthset relates to your physiology, Soulset is refers to your spirituality. 

History-Maker Focus #4: Day Stacking

Small daily, seemingly insignificant improvements, when done consistently over time, yield staggering results

Chapter 11 Navigating the tides of life

The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.—Helen Keller

Chapter 12 The 5 am Club Discovers the Habit Installation Protocol

“I hated every minute of training. But I said, “Don’t quit, Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” –Muhammad Ali

• Albert Einstein wrote “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.

• The hero does not become great during periods of comfort. The illustrious and noble souls of our world became strong, brave and moral whilst standing resolutely in the storms of adversity, difficulty, and doubt. It is the moment we face your deepest weakness that you receive the change to forge your greatest strength. Real power, then comes not from a life of ease but one of intense effort, devoted discipline and demanding action in the direction of what you supreme self knows to be right. To continue at a time when you ache to stop. To advance when you long to quit. To persist in the instant when you feel like giving up is to claim your membership among the great warriors and honourable characters who led humanity to a better place through their earned invincibility.

The 5-3-1 Creed of the Willpower Warrior 

The 5 Scientific Truth Behind Excellent Habits

Truth #1: World-class willpower is not an inborn strength, but a skill developed through relentless practice. Getting up at dawn is perfect self-control training.

Truth #2: Personal discipline is a muscle. The more you stretch it, the stronger it grows. Therefore, the samurais of self regulation actively create conditions of hardship to build their natural power

Truth #3: Like other muscles, willpower weakens when tired. Recovery is, therefore, absolutely necessary for the expression of mastery. And to manage decision fatigue.

Truth #4: Installing any great habit successfully follows a distinct four-part pattern for automation of the routine. Follow it explicitly for lasting results.

Truth #5: Increasing self-control in one area of your life elevated self-control in all areas of your life. This is why joining the 5 AM Club is the game changing habit that will lift everything else that you can do. 

The 3 Values of Heroic Habit-Makers

Value #1: Victory demands consistency and persistency

Value #2: Following through on what is started determines the size of personal respect that will be generated

Value #3: The way you practice in private is precisely the way you will perform once you are in public 

The 1 General Theory of Self-Discipline Spartans

To regularly do that which is hard but important when it feels most uncomfortable is how warriors are born.   

The Habit Installation Protocol

1. Destruction- Removing old bad habit
2. Installation- Forming a new habit
3. Integration-New habit formed 
4. Continue at all costs. Persistency sits at the threshold of mastery.

When faced with a choice, always choose the one that pushes you the most, increase your growth and promotes the unfoldment of your gifts, talent and personal prowess

#1 To make a habit last, never install it alone

#2 The teacher learns the most

#3 When you most feel like quitting is the time you must continue advancing

• Persistency is necessary for all forms of mastery. In that moment you feel you cannot go further lies an enormous opportunity to forge an opportunity to forge an entirely new level of willpower. When you feel you can’t continue, progress a little longer. Your self-discipline muscle will be amplified considerably. And the degree of your self-respect will increase vastly.

• Any solid achievement must, of necessity, take years of humble apprenticeship and estrangement from most of society.

• Do not betray the powers that sleep within you by staying too late in a soft bed that keeps you sedated. The great men and women of the world became so not because they lounged glamorously under the covers, but because they set sublime ambitions that they then proceeded to do—even as the majority called them crazy.  

Chapter 13 The 5 AM Club Learns The 20/20/20 Formula

“Early in the morning, when you are reluctant in your laziness to get up, let this through be at hand: “ I am rising to do the work of a human being.” –Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor

Keynote of the Chapter

20/20/20 Formula is dividing the time into three phrase to manage your time effectively and efficiently in the morning. The suggested framework is as follow:

• The first twenty minute pocket of The 20/20/20 Formula requires that you Move. Simply put, doing some sweaty exercise first thing every morning will revolutionize the quality of your days. The second pocket encourages you to Reflect for twenty minutes. This segment is designed to help you reaccess your natural power, boost self-awareness, dissolve your stress, fuel your happiness and restore your inner peace in an era of acute over-stimulation and excessive activity. And you will around out his sixty-minute Victory Hour of personal fortification with twenty minutes centered around ensuring you Grow, whether that investing some time reading a book that will improve your understanding of how the best lives were made or an article that will refine your professional prowess or listening to an audio session on how the virtuosos accomplish their unusual results or watching an educational video that will show you how to lift your relationship or increase your finances or deepen spirituality
• Private desire without personal development is like dreaming of having a gorgeous garden but not planting any seeds. 

The Journaling Habit: Deconstruction

Chapter 14 The 5 AM Club Grasps the Essentialness of Sleep

“You cannot imagine the craving for rest I feel- a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive, and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady.” –H.G Wells 

The Amazing Day: Deconstruction:

Chapter 15

The 5 AM Club Is Mentored on The 10 Tactics of Lifelong Genius

“If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius”

--Michelangelo

The 10 Tactics of Lifelong Genius:

1. The Tight Bubble of Total Focus 
2. The 90/90/1 Rule 
3. The 60/10 Method
4. The Daily 5 Concept 
5. The Second Wind Workout
6. The 2 massage protocol
7. Traffic University
8. The Dream Team technique
9. The Weekly Design System
10. The 60 Minute Student

Tactic #1: The Tight Bubble of Total Focus (TBTF)

The Insight: An addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production. Your attraction to digital interruption is costing you your fortune-financially, cognitively, energetically, physically and spiritually

The Implementation: The Tight Bubble of Total Focus strategy preserves your focus as well as your primal brilliance by giving you long stretches of time free from trivial fascinations and any influence that dissolve your inspiration—and deteriorate you’re A-game. 

Tactic #2: The 90/90/1

The Insight: Legendary achievers concentrate all their attention and effort on one core project at a time so they harness the fullness of their cognitive capacity and their precious energy on releasing glorious products that turn their industry on their head.

The Implementation: For the next ninety days, schedule yourself to invest the first ninety minutes of your workday on the one activity that, when completed at world class, will cause you to own your field.

Tactic #3: The 60/10 Method

The Insight: Learn to work in a balance—and cycle awesome output with times to refuel their assets of genius so they don’t deplete them

The Implementation: Train yourself not to move. Just concentrate. And create the highest results you can possible make. After your sixty-minute productivity sprint is done, refuel for ten minutes.

Tactics #4: The daily 5 concept

The Insight: Small daily achievements, when done consistently overtime, definitely do lead to stunning results

The Implementation: During the second pocket of your victory hour, list the five tiny targets you wish to accomplish over the day ahead of for you to feel it was one well-spent. 

Tactic #5: The 2^nd Wind Workout (2WW)

The Insight:  Moving the body regularly lifts your concentration, speeds up the processing potency of your brain as well as accelerating its learning capacity, raises your energy, elevates your optimism, helps you sleep better via the production of more melatonin and promotes longevity through the release of human growth hormone (HGH), along with the lengthening of your telomeres.

The Implementation: To execute the 2WW practice, schedule a second workout at the end of your workday to give you a second wind for a great evening. 

Tactic #6: The 2 Massage Protocol (2MP)

To apply the 2MP Protocol, lock two ninety-minute messages onto your weekly schedule

Tactic #7: Traffic University

Participating in Traffic University is all about leveraging your traveling time—to learn, expanding your professional prowess and personal knowledge. Specific ideas to help you do so include listening to audiobooks and consuming valuable podcasts. 

Tactic #8: The Dream Team Technique

The Insight: Super producers outsource and then automate all activities except those within the realm of their mastery, allowing for purity of focus and freeing up huge amount of time.

The Implementation: Specific members of your dream team could include a fitness trainer who do your work with regularly, a nutritionist, a massage therapist, a financial coach to fortify your fortune, a relationship adviser to help you maintain rich bonds with the important people in your life and a spiritual counselor to assist you in staying grounded on the eternal laws of a life well-lived.

Tactic #9: The Weekly Design System (MDS)

Carve out and then ritualize thirty minutes early each Sunday morning to create your “Blueprint for a Beautiful Week.” 

Tactic #10: The 60 Minute Student

The Insight: The more you know, the better you will do. Legendary leaders all have boundless curiosity and a limitless appetite to grow into their greatest selves.  

The Implementation: For at least sixty minutes a day, study. Learning daily will raise your acumen, deepen your wisdom and incite a blazing fire that strokes your grandeur. 

Chapter 16 The 5 AM Club Embraces The Twin Cycles of Elite Performance

“With freedom, books, flower, and the moon, who could not be happy?” – Oscar Wilde

The Twin Cycles of Elite Performance 

PROTECTION OF THE 5 ASSETS OF GENIUS

Becoming Legendary in your industry is all about sustainability. It means that we must learn how to balance working intensely and brilliantly with deep rest and recovery so that we can remain fresh and strong over a long career.

THE LEGENDARY PERFORMANCE EQUATION:

PRESSURE x REFUELING = GROWTH + ENDURANCE

Pressure is a must, so that it can expand our capacity.

Adults are deteriorated children. Heaven on Earth shows up naturally in your heart when you have the brilliance and bravery to start opening it up again. Like you did when you were little.

The Billionaire’s Maxim #1

To create Magic in the world, Own the Magic within Yourself

“All of the humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Release your need for complexity and immerse yourself in the stillness only the early morning can provide so you get to know yourself again. Because a flight from solitude really is an escape from freedom.

Long stretches spend in noiseless contemplation is one of the secrets of the advance mind. 

The Billionaire’s Maxim #2

Collect Miraculous Experiences over Material Things

The world has burdened and hardened you. As a child, your instinct showed you how to spot the miraculousness of a snowflake, find fortune in a spider’s web and adore the splendour of falling leaves on a colourful autumn morning. The pursuit wasn’t about acquiring things. It was about exploring life.

Every ending marks a new beginning. All we experience happens for a helpful reasons. And when one door closes, another will always open for you. Trust—always—that life has your back—even if what is unfolding makes no sense.

The Billionaire’s Maxim #3

Failure Inflates Fearlessness

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default

Start saying yes more often in your life. Courage is an exquisite weapon to defeat the armies of regret that tear away at lives meekly lived.

The Billionaire’s Maxim #4

Proper Use of Your Primal Power Creates Your Personal Utopia

To enter the magic of your life, you must become aware of the four creative tools that turn each of your desires into your visible results. These four resources that will allow you to materialize miracles in the world are your thoughts, your feelings, your words, and your deeds. 

The Billionaire’s Maxim #5

Avoid Bad People 

The Billionaire’s Maxim #6

Money is the Fruit of Generosity, Not Scarcity

Four practices have helped me make my financial fortune, and so I gift them to you: positive expectancy, active faith, ever-increasing gratitude and extreme value delivery.

The Billionaire’s Maxim #7

Optimal Heath Maximizes Your Power to Produce Magic

Exercising first thing in the morning gets the primary win of taking care of your health out of the way. This all-important activity is now done, leaving your cognition, energy, physiology and spirit primed to create wonders within your day. 

The Billionaire’s Maxim #8

Continue Raising Your Life Standards Toward Absolute World-Class

Learn to constantly increase your personal standards and raise the quality of your life. Make each quarter better than the last, and each year better than the previous one. 

The Billionaire’s Maxim #9

Deep Love Yields Unconquerable Joy

Any chance you get, show people love. A quote often attributed to William Penn has guided most of my life and served me wonderfully. It goes, “I expect to pass through life but once. If, therefore, there can be any kindness I can show, or any good thing that I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not to defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.

The Billionaire’s Maxim #10

Heaven on Earth Is a State, Not a Place

Take daily voyages into awe and regular adventures into wonder. Wonder is such a potent source of happiness and a key skill in the promotion of your ever-increasing genius. All the great women and men of the world learned how to relax into the magic of a day enchantingly spent.

The Billionaire’s Maxim #11

Tomorrow Is a Bonus, Not a Right

Tomorrow is a promise, not a fact. Enjoy every morning and appreciate each day have on Earth. Take bold risks yet hedge them with common sense. Balance living like there is no tomorrow with behaving you will live forever. So that when the end does come, you will know you lived your life as a majestic testimony to the capacity for legendary that every human being carries inside of them.

Chapter 17

The 5 AM Club Members Become Heroes of Their Lives

“Live like a hero. That’s what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?” – J.M Coetzee

This very moment, deserves and demands your commitment to become sublimely creative, pristinely productive, decadently decent and of service to many. Please stop postponing your mastery. No longer resist your primal power. Refrain from allowing the shadow forces of fear, rejection, doubt and disappointment to dim the light of your luminous self. This is your time. And now is your day: to make your leap, in your original way, into the rare-air of the finest leaders who have ever lived. And to enter the universe of the true masters, eminent virtuosos and authentic heroes who have been responsible for all progress of civilization. 

To lead is to inspire others by the way that you live. To lead is to walk through the fires of your hardest times to step into forgiveness. To lead is to remove any form of mediocrity from infiltrating the quarters of your life in a dazzling celebration of the majesty that is your birthright. To lead is to turn your terrors into triumphs and translate each of your heartbreaks into heroism. And more than all else, to lead is to be a force for good on this tiny planet of ours. Today, you get to accept this grand call to raise the standard by which you live out the remainder of your life. 

My thoughts:

After I read this book, I realize that joining 5 am club can complete many tasks and increase productivity between work and personal life. This is because we can identify what to do after next hour based on our planned schedule. For example, we can implement 20/20/20 formula to complete each tasks by using 20 minutes, practice 90/90/1 to achieve one target within 3 months, and form a dream team as advisors to improve our lifestyle, job skills, and heathy level. Moreover, while I reading this book, one of the valuable message delivered by the writer is "focus on the works that can push you more," this sentence light up my mind because only do the works that we love and passion about can expand our talent if we are willing to do it as compared to the person that keep finding excuses to limit themselves to do something different which can change their life. 

Frankly, joining 5 am club is not practicable for every person especially those are working night shift and we should use the formula mentioned in the book and then try to improve it become flexible in order to make it fit into our daily life to improve our life quality. For example, we cannot wake up at 5 am but we can wake up at 6 am or 7 am as body and mind restoration. Overall, we should use our time wisely because time can prove everything if we are using the time invest in the right tasks and matters. 

Recommendation

To me, I strongly recommend this book for people who are facing huge workload problems in work, starting to lead new team in the workplace, managing time, and self improvement.

For those who are interested in this book, you can click this link: 

https://www.amazon.com/AM-Club-Morning-Elevate-Life/dp/1443456624

Robin Sharma Official YouTube Channel: 

https://www.youtube.com/user/sharmaleadership