Book: The 5am Club by Robin Sharma
This book was recommended to me by someone whose success in business and trading made them someone I want to learn from. I want to learn personal mastery strategies that I can implement in my life to create good habits.
The 5am club was a great read. The central theme is that achieving greatness in your field and in your life is not about luck, circumstances, genetics, or natural talent that some of us posses and others don’t. Anyone can elevate their life and reach their potential if they’re willing to put in the work. The title of the book, the 5am Club, is derived from what the author explains is the most important part of the day to calibrate to begin to become the Master of your life. He quotes Warren Buffet when he said, “The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money”. All leaders and industry disruptors have this in common. Commitment to excellence, focus on one master project at a time, failing often and learning from what went wrong, are values held by all the top 5 percenters.
Mr. Sharma tells a story of two fictional professionals that are different in almost every way, but are the same in that they have lost their way in their respective industries. Distraction, procrastination, worry, and fear have set them both off course. They meet at a motivational speaking event, and are taken under the wing of an eccentric billionaire entrepreneur who happens to be in attendance. Over the next few weeks the two professionals are caught up in an adventure that changes their lives forever, traveling all over the world learning how to unlock their greatest potential and leave their mark on the world.
Through a series of lessons the billionaire shows the pair that the great leaders of the world aren’t built differently than everyone else. They just create better habits. Willpower isn’t an inborn strength, but a skill developed by practice. And like a muscle, the more you work it the stronger it gets.
What I like about this book is that the steps for building these good habits shared by successful people everywhere are laid out in detail. I’ve read many books that claim that changing your life is easy and that it’s all in your mind. Not so here. In fact the exact opposite is repeated throughout the story. Change is hard. But the daily discomfort of growth is the price of enduring success.
Through the lessons I learned specific strategies to implement daily that are hard at first, messy in the middle, and beautiful in the end. By the end, a change that was hard becomes automatic, expanding capacity to implement a new change, that will also become a habit, and so on and so on. It is this process of always working on change and creating new healthy habits that the top 5% have in common.
The 5am club has already had an impact on my future success in the way that I structure my days. I focus on my mind, my heart, my health, and my soul each day, and get more work done in one morning than I used to get done in a week. When I do the math over the next year of incarceration, those are some pretty significant numbers!
