The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.

by Robin Sharma

RULE #1 An addiction to distraction is the end of your creative production. Empire-makers and history-creators take one hour for themselves before dawn, in the serenity that lies beyond the clutches of complexity, to prepare themselves for a world-class day. RULE #2 Excuses breed no genius. Just because you haven’t installed the early-rising habit before doesn’t mean you can’t do it now. Release your rationalizations and remember that 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 the end. Everything you now find easy you first found difficult. With consistent practice, getting up with the sun will become your new normal. And automatic. 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 labeled a freak is the price of greatness. RULE #5 When you feel like surrendering, continue.Triumph loves the relentless.

“Dedication and discipline beats brilliance and giftedness

because your daily behavior is always a function of your deepest beliefs, that very perception of your inability to realize victory becomes real,”

there’s a staggering difference between being busy and being productive. “High-impact performers and genuine world-builders aren’t very available to whoever seeks their attention and demands their time. They’re hard to reach, waste few moments and are far more focused on doing real work versus artificial work—so they deliver the breathtaking results

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

“Intellectually we know we shouldn’t be wasting time on zero-value activities, but emotionally we just can’t beat the temptation. We just can’t fight the hook.

as you near your highest talents and most luminous gifts, the scared side of you will rear its ugly head and try to mess up the masterpieces you’ve been creating by pursuing every distraction and escape route possible to avoid finishing, you can manage that self-destructive behavior. You can step outside of it. You can disempower it, simply by watching its attempts to denounce your mastery.”

I haven’t gotten over some of my exes because it’s so easy to watch their lives on social media.

One of the fascinating traits of our ancient brain is its negativity bias. To keep us safe, it’s far less interested in what’s positive in our environment and significantly more invested in letting us know what’s bad.

have the guts to push past the alarm bells of our ancient brains pleading with us not to reach for our brilliance.”

great men and women of the world avoided complexity was by incorporating tranquility and serenity into the front part of their days. This beautiful discipline gave them absolutely essential time away from overstimulation to savor life itself, replenish their creative reservoirs, develop their supreme selves, count their blessings and ground the virtues that they would then live out their days under.

we leave bits of our focus on each activity we pursue. Massively important insight to consider. No wonder most of us have trouble concentrating on important tasks by noon. We’ve spent our bandwidth. Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Minnesota, calls the concentration we deposit on distraction and other stimuli ‘attention residue.’ She’s found that people are far less productive when they are constantly interrupting themselves by shifting from one task to another throughout the day because they leave valuable pieces of their attention on too many different pursuits. The solution is exactly what I’m suggesting: work on one high-value activity at a time instead of relentlessly multitasking—and do so in a quiet environment.

if you lack faith in your ability to get your ambitions done, you’ll never achieve them. If you don’t feel deserving of abundance, you’ll never do what’s required to realize it. And if your drive to capitalize on your genius is weak, your fire to train is dim and your stamina to optimize is low, it’s clear you’ll never take flight into the rare-air of outright mastery.

your past is a place to be learned from, not a home to be lived in.”