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

by Robin Sharma

“The great ones all spent a lot of time alone,” offered the billionaire. “Solitude—the kind that you can access before the sun comes up—is a force multiplier around your power, expertise and connection to being human. And your escalation requires your isolation. See, you can be in the world all day long chatting endlessly on your phone about one thousand senseless things or you can change the world by exploiting your talent, refining your skills and being a light of upliftment that raises us all. But you can’t do both. Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir has used the term ‘cognitive bandwidth’ to explain the point that we have a limited amount of mental capacity when we rise each morning. And as we give our attention to numerous influences—ranging from the news, messages and online platforms to our families, our work, our fitness and our spiritual lives—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 sugg...