Free AI web copilot to create summaries, insights and extended knowledge, download it at here

Abstract

And yet, we have absolutely no idea whether this happens over a week, month, year, or even longer. It’s written as though this happens on consecutive days, but the events themselves make that impossible. Readers are left to conclude this happens over a prolonged period of time but it’s a complete guess as to how long, and that raises other issues like what exactly is happening in the everyday private lives of these characters considering they’ve been whisked away on short notice to trot around the world.For an example of both this and the jerky narrative, there’s even a scene, quite early on, where the two students believe they’re being sent home. They begin to complain because they haven’t learned everything yet. They expected to be staying much longer, to learn all their new mentor has to teach them. In the very same passage, they’re told they aren’t going home, they’re just getting on a plane for the next lesson. So then they start to complain that they need to get home soon because they have things to do. Quite literally, in the span of a couple of sentences, they switch from not wanting to go home to absolutely needing to get home.Ultimately, the level of writing is basic and that’s a distraction, pulling the reader out of the story instead of into it. It probably says something that the most captivating and engrossing sections of the book are when the characters are sidelined and we get pages of tactics to implement in our own lives.Still think I’m being unfair? Here are a couple of excerpts:“…summed up the billionaire, wearing his fashionable shades, the kind the in-the-know Romans sport in their effortlessly stylish way that displays an “I don’t try too hard to look this phenomenally cool” kind of attitude. More seagulls flapped their wings and made those annoying sounds seagulls seem to enjoy making.”“Gnarly, right?” the billionaire spoke as he tap danced his way across the floor of the penthouse. Yes, he actually tap danced across the entire room. Next, he began flailing his arms manically and grooving intensely to his imagined music. Finally — get this — he started twerking. Yes, the illustrious industrialist who was worth over one billion dollars was twerking in that hotel suite.So the writing isn’t great and it’s a book you have to consciously push through. Should it, therefore, have been a blog post instead, as many reviewers attest?No.It’s true to say the main concepts could be distilled into a blog (and that blog would be very useful), but there’s a lot of incredibly valuable information throughout this book, which a blog would omit almost entirely.Take these pearls of wisdom, for example:“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’ve done w

Options

hatever it took to earn your rewards and passionately invested the effortful audacity to become your best.”“This kind of dedication to the optimization of expertise would now be labeled as ‘crazy’ by the majority in our modern world that spends huge amounts of their irreplaceable lifetime watching streams of selfies, the breakfasts of virtual friends and violent video games.”“Anyway, let me simply say that the place where your greatest discomfort lies is also the spot where your largest opportunity lives.”“The beliefs that disturb you, the feelings that threaten you, the projects that unnerve you and the unfoldments of your talents that the insecure part of you is resisting are precisely where you need to go to.”“When we see the icons in action, the forceful seduction sold to us by our civilization is to believe they were always that great. That they were born into their exceptionalism. That they won the fortunate DNA lottery. That their genius was inherited. Yet the truth is that we are watching them in their full blazing glory after years of following a process, one that involved ceaseless hours of practice. When we observe magnificent players in business, sport, science and the arts we are observing the earned results of a monomaniacal concentration around a single pursuit, astronomical focus on one skill, intensity of sacrifice applied to one aim, unusual levels of deep preparation and extreme amounts of solid patience. Remember, every professional was once an amateur, and every master started as a beginner. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary feats, once they’ve routinized the right habits.”“Because most of us alive today wish we had more time. Yet we waste the time we have. Thinking about dying brings what matters most into much sharper focus. You’ll stop allowing digital distraction, cyber diversions and online nuisances to steal the irreplaceable hours of the blessing called your life.”When I moved my highlighted sections to a document, it came to 19 pages. That’s not even including the actual framework and systems that critical reviewers say should be distilled into a blog post — which means that even if the pinnacle components of this book are removed, I found no less than 19 full pages of gems, which still makes it far too lengthy to be a blog post.In a nutshell, that’s my issue with the 1-star reviews. If you only read this book for the productivity models wondering what all the other words are for, you’re going to miss a lot of value. The dialogue — stunted as it may be — is packed full of wisdom and gems. Information that in its own right can be life changing, and which deserves every bit as much credit as the productivity models.Put another way, this book is great despite the way it’s written, unlike the seminal works of authors like Dickens, whose work is great because of the way it’s written.That’s the paradox of The 5am Club — it is a book of life-changing information, wrapped in a poor story that makes it hard to digest.If you can digest it, though, you’ll be absolutely glad you did.</article></body>

Book Review: The 5am Club: Own your morning, elevate your life

Robin Sharma’s “The 5am Club: Own your morning, elevate your life” is a curious read, and a difficult book to review while being both honest and fair.

On the one hand, there are a lot of reviews calling this book terrible, on Amazon, Goodreads and anywhere else people review it. They cite bad writing, call it insipid, uninspiring, too long, boring. One Goodreads reviewer called it a “ludicrously bad story” while another noted it was “poorly written and just plain annoying”.

And to be honest, they’re absolutely correct.

Other reviewers commented that the advice could be distilled into a blog post, and really, they’re correct too — to an extent, anyway. More on that shortly.

On the other hand, though, there’s a heap of amazing advice in this book. I read it during my undertaking of the 75Hard challenge, which requires reading 10 pages of a non-fiction book a day. Each morning I would read this over breakfast, and I found myself highlighting on my Kindle a lot. By the end, I discovered I had highlighted 175 separate passages. For a book that’s 312 pages, that’s a lot of highlighting.

And that sums up the problem. It isn’t a page turner, it doesn’t invite you to want to pick it up repeatedly, but there’s genuinely life-changing content in it. For me, the content overrides the delivery — when we’re on a path of self-improvement, we have to be prepared to find the beneficial information in places that aren’t always inspiring. Life isn’t about doing only what we find pleasurable, so pushing through a reasonably short book to extract hugely beneficial information doesn’t seem like a big ask.

With that said, let’s dive into the review itself.

I’ll start with the negatives. Being the only book I’ve read by Robin Sharma, this review isn’t a comment on him as an author — his other books may be sublime in every way. “The 5am Club”, though, is not an enjoyable read. Not only do I completely understand why many reviewers gave up before they finished it, I very nearly didn’t buy the full book after finishing the Kindle free trial.

Is it harsh to say it’s not enjoyable, the writing is terrible, insipid, uninspiring?

No. Not if you’re the least bit accustomed to a decent standard of writing. Non-fiction has far more margin for error when it comes to being dry and less captivating than fiction, because these books are read for knowledge. Even so, Sharma’s effort here has no flow, the narrative is jerky, and there is no sense of time. The first two points make it difficult to follow and enjoy, while the third makes it downright confusing. The book is centred around three characters, and a lot happens to them. They travel to different locations, relationships change, and while I can’t give much away for fear of spoilers, suffice it to say there are major developments for the people.

And yet, we have absolutely no idea whether this happens over a week, month, year, or even longer. It’s written as though this happens on consecutive days, but the events themselves make that impossible. Readers are left to conclude this happens over a prolonged period of time but it’s a complete guess as to how long, and that raises other issues like what exactly is happening in the everyday private lives of these characters considering they’ve been whisked away on short notice to trot around the world.

For an example of both this and the jerky narrative, there’s even a scene, quite early on, where the two students believe they’re being sent home. They begin to complain because they haven’t learned everything yet. They expected to be staying much longer, to learn all their new mentor has to teach them. In the very same passage, they’re told they aren’t going home, they’re just getting on a plane for the next lesson. So then they start to complain that they need to get home soon because they have things to do. Quite literally, in the span of a couple of sentences, they switch from not wanting to go home to absolutely needing to get home.

Ultimately, the level of writing is basic and that’s a distraction, pulling the reader out of the story instead of into it. It probably says something that the most captivating and engrossing sections of the book are when the characters are sidelined and we get pages of tactics to implement in our own lives.

Still think I’m being unfair? Here are a couple of excerpts:

“…summed up the billionaire, wearing his fashionable shades, the kind the in-the-know Romans sport in their effortlessly stylish way that displays an “I don’t try too hard to look this phenomenally cool” kind of attitude. More seagulls flapped their wings and made those annoying sounds seagulls seem to enjoy making.”

“Gnarly, right?” the billionaire spoke as he tap danced his way across the floor of the penthouse. Yes, he actually tap danced across the entire room. Next, he began flailing his arms manically and grooving intensely to his imagined music. Finally — get this — he started twerking. Yes, the illustrious industrialist who was worth over one billion dollars was twerking in that hotel suite.

So the writing isn’t great and it’s a book you have to consciously push through. Should it, therefore, have been a blog post instead, as many reviewers attest?

No.

It’s true to say the main concepts could be distilled into a blog (and that blog would be very useful), but there’s a lot of incredibly valuable information throughout this book, which a blog would omit almost entirely.

Take these pearls of wisdom, for example:

“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’ve done whatever it took to earn your rewards and passionately invested the effortful audacity to become your best.”

“This kind of dedication to the optimization of expertise would now be labeled as ‘crazy’ by the majority in our modern world that spends huge amounts of their irreplaceable lifetime watching streams of selfies, the breakfasts of virtual friends and violent video games.”

“Anyway, let me simply say that the place where your greatest discomfort lies is also the spot where your largest opportunity lives.”

“The beliefs that disturb you, the feelings that threaten you, the projects that unnerve you and the unfoldments of your talents that the insecure part of you is resisting are precisely where you need to go to.”

“When we see the icons in action, the forceful seduction sold to us by our civilization is to believe they were always that great. That they were born into their exceptionalism. That they won the fortunate DNA lottery. That their genius was inherited. Yet the truth is that we are watching them in their full blazing glory after years of following a process, one that involved ceaseless hours of practice. When we observe magnificent players in business, sport, science and the arts we are observing the earned results of a monomaniacal concentration around a single pursuit, astronomical focus on one skill, intensity of sacrifice applied to one aim, unusual levels of deep preparation and extreme amounts of solid patience. Remember, every professional was once an amateur, and every master started as a beginner. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary feats, once they’ve routinized the right habits.”

“Because most of us alive today wish we had more time. Yet we waste the time we have. Thinking about dying brings what matters most into much sharper focus. You’ll stop allowing digital distraction, cyber diversions and online nuisances to steal the irreplaceable hours of the blessing called your life.”

When I moved my highlighted sections to a document, it came to 19 pages. That’s not even including the actual framework and systems that critical reviewers say should be distilled into a blog post — which means that even if the pinnacle components of this book are removed, I found no less than 19 full pages of gems, which still makes it far too lengthy to be a blog post.

In a nutshell, that’s my issue with the 1-star reviews. If you only read this book for the productivity models wondering what all the other words are for, you’re going to miss a lot of value. The dialogue — stunted as it may be — is packed full of wisdom and gems. Information that in its own right can be life changing, and which deserves every bit as much credit as the productivity models.

Put another way, this book is great despite the way it’s written, unlike the seminal works of authors like Dickens, whose work is great because of the way it’s written.

That’s the paradox of The 5am Club — it is a book of life-changing information, wrapped in a poor story that makes it hard to digest.

If you can digest it, though, you’ll be absolutely glad you did.