Victory Hour Rules From 5AM Club: Robin Sharma’s Groundbreaking One- Hour Routine For a Successful Life
The Only Equation You Will Ever Need to Follow
Good ideas are everywhere. Between a floundering motivational Youtuber and a successful personal advisor, there is very little to choose in the lessons they offer. “Live the day”, “forget the past”, “follow your passion”; you know what the mundane list throws at you. Top leadership advisor and eminent humanitarian Robin Sharma, is no different. He isn’t some fancy avatar with a bag full of unheard wisdom; neither is he a mystic holding a panacea to solve all your problems with a single magic bullet.
At the core of his advice lies messages that we have already heard. Still, from his pen, they leave a lingering impression on our senses, for he, amongst the best in the business, uses such powerful language to go along with concrete, actionable steps; an irresistible combination that galvanizes even the laziest person into action.
And by powerful language, I don’t mean he shows off his vocabulary, or ends up teaching you half a dozen new words in each page. Still, there is an uncanny employment of common words, weaving them into an impactful combination that nails his points with powerful hammer strokes. Watch this sentence to see what I mean.
“And should anyone call me strange, as they often do, I will smile with blatant wisdom stuck deep in my heart that it’s only the misfits, oddballs and eccentrics that change our world.”
Nothing about it screams “that’s new”, no word stands out and shouts “look at me”, yet they align with the vibrations of your mind. The paragraph involving the above sentence is something I use as my daily antidote to mediocracy. I recite them in the morning to prepare me in good stead for a day of possibilities. It is from one of Mr Sharma’s more successful books: The 5 AM Club.
The Victory Hour
In the book, Robin Sharma unfolds his lessons through the characters of an entrepreneur, an artist, a billionaire and a motivational speaker. The first two represent the reader, waiting in the wings for receiving the treasured secrets to untangle their chaotic life, and the other two, are voices of Sharma himself. He let his ideas flow through those characters, adding a bit of flavour to their mannerisms to make it enjoyable. The artist and the entrepreneur are ever eager, full empty vessels, raring to learn the billionaire’s life-changing tricks. The titan and the speaker sit comfortably at the other end of the spectrum, having hacked the algorithm to a fruitful life.
The central theme that runs through his 300 plus page book is to wake at 5 AM and be a part of the achievers 5 AM club. The subtitle of the book “Own your morning, elevate your life” sums it up. But the benefits of early rise are not unknown to us.
Growing up, I had heard enough advice(enough to hate the idea of waking early) to get up before the morning sun arrives, listen to the chirping of birds, take a stroll in the park and revel in the pleasures and longtime benefits of the routine. “It’s even more enjoyable to sleep in the early morning” was how I mostly replied.
Mr Sharma though doesn’t simply stick a piece of advice on your face. He creates this eccentric and influential billionaire, who can have three meals of his day in three different countries across the globe, with a dream-like house on a sunny beach, armed security guards with choppers to keep him safe and all the best amenities money can buy. The author makes you drool over the tycoon’s command and authority, his poise and light-heartedness, and keep the two learners in constant awe of his personality. And so does the reader. Finally, when he spells out that all he achieved stemmed from installing a simple morning routine, we are raring to copy that model. You see why my elder’s words failed to make me coil my alarm for 5 AM. They were not billionaires!
So can waking up at 5 AM produce world-class results? Could it be so simple? What do we do after rising at 5? The author has all the answers; in fact, he has the entire 1-hour routine laid out, which I am going to walk you through. He fondly calls the period between 5 AM and 6 AM as the victory hour.
20/20/20 Formula
Robin Sharma breaks your first hour of the day into three chunks of twenty minutes each. Every partition comes with its own set of rules and tasks. He also leaves some freedom in its implementation, letting the readers do some customization to suit their routine.
“Take all I’m sharing and make it yours. Customize it to fit your preferences,” he tells us.
The First Twenty: 5 AM to 5 20 AM
So how do you begin your day? Do you ease your way up with a warm coffee, soak in the early sunrise and get off the mark like a car leaving for a family trip, or do you jump out of bed in full passion, like a sports car in a race? A sports car it is!
Start your day with an exercise regime that gets your body sweating profusely. Be it spinning, sprinting, weight lifting or simple aerobics, get moving.
Mr Sharma enumerates the various benefits of this workout regime. This, for him, is the ‘Moving session’ where your body is being set up for a productive day. A starter kit of 20 minutes (from 5 AM to 5 20 AM) for a productive 16 hours or so.
Exercise in the morning activates BDNF(Brain Derived Neutrophic Factor), increases the level of serotonin(hormone that contributes to wellbeing and happiness) and dopamine( the feel-good neurotransmitter), while reducing levels of cortisol(the stress hormone). Your brain is now set for increased focus, allowing little stress to take its attention away. He sums up it all as the ‘neurobiology of greatness’.
I have installed a customized version(my running session lasts for 40 minutes) of his schedule to my life, and here is why I think it’s working for me.
Why does this work? (My experience)
Life is all about decision making. From deciding when to get out of your bed to when to get out of a relationship, the total of micro and macro decisions we make daily determines the results of our lives. And our brain is evolutionarily hardwired to do things easy, to put our mind and body through the least amount of strain.
For instance, when all the forces in the world conspire to keep you in bed on a cozy early morning, why on earth would you want to leave the warmth of your blanket? It’s just counter-intuitive! People who thus stay in the bubble of comfort, though, will eventually find that comfort itself is a bubble that’s easily burst. Ergo, willpower is the buzzword of all successful people on earth, and influential people are invariably early birds.
I cannot imagine a better way to begin a day than opening it with a workout, flexing our muscles of willpower, stamping our authority on it, beating the crap out of your biggest temptation(to sleep more) and kick-starting the day at high frequency. We begin the day, countering our biggest foe and there can’t be a better start.
In the past 40 days or so, I have stuck to the early morning run, and the whole package has proven beneficial. The routine has helped me develop grit, determination and focus on other areas of my life too.
The Second Twenty (5 20 AM to 5 40 AM)
Having shaken your body into vigorous action, Mr Sharma recommends the second chunk of the victory hour for a twenty-minute session of ‘reflection’. After a heart-pumping beginning, this is a period of tranquillity, where you collect your thoughts and plans for the day or in other words, it’s time to journal.
Get your diary and pen, start creating the blueprint of a perfect day. Have a clear cut vision on what you need to achieve by sunset. Enumerate your targets, but ideally limit them to less than five or so. Before coming across this book, I made the mistake of adding as many bullet points as possible to my list of goals. I felt I had to push myself harder, but invariably found out with ten plus goals on a list, I could only strike less than four by the end of the day. Under-five targets in a day, I realized my focus on each job is sharper, and there was a distinct improvement in the quality of the output. Less is indeed more.
You don’t need 20 minutes to conjure an outline for a day, so use the rest of this pocket to contemplate(meditation maybe), or pray, or write a gratitude journal; whatever that keeps your boat sailing serenely.
Sharma says the habit of journaling will improve our clarity and awareness while allowing a safe vent to our emotions. But here is why I found this practice rewarding.
Why does this work? (My experience)
I bet everyone reading this article has heard about the importance of producing content daily. It is a habit that I desperately wanted to adopt. Still, somehow I kept chasing an elusive dose of inspiration, a magic stroke of Writing Gods to wake me into production. All writers would know that such epiphanic moments are the stuff of dreams. With journaling and planning a part of my victory hour routine, it ensured that I was using my writing tools early in the day.
Before I began sitting with a cup of coffee for my formal writing hour, here, I was frisking through my apple pencil and Ipad, trying to bring some poetry into an otherwise mundane task. I was creating some piece of literary work, even though it was just a daily diary entry. I believe this exercise gave my neurons some direction, to fire along the right path to help me produce more content. If ever there was a memory for writing muscles, I was building it.
And finally, when it was about to call upon my skills for the work that mattered, I found that I could ease into it a lot smoother. Besides, who is to say that someday I am not turning out to be a world-class influencer and my diary will be a subject of many theses! Twenty years from now, the title of a Medium article might read “Six Pearls of Wisdom Found from Aravind Balakrishnan’s Diary”!!!
The Third Twenty: 5 40 AM to 06 00 AM
The third chunk of victory hour is something that Sharma calls the period of ‘growth’, and rightly so. He advocates us to take reading as a habit during this time, to enrich our knowledge, and fill our reservoirs of motivation.
“We are all totally into reading, improving and feeding our limitless curiosity,” says the billionaire to drive home the point.
Contrary to what I thought, Sharma lets you have a touch of technology in this session. He allows room for podcasts or audiobooks here or even to watch documentaries; anything that enriches your knowledge.
Why does this work? (My experience)
I always had the habit of reading newspapers in the morning. I believe it works just as fine in deepening our knowledge while helping us stay up to date about the pressing affairs of the world. But after reading the 5 AM club, I replaced newspapers with a few pages of motivational books every morning.
Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Swami Vivekananda, Robert T Kiyosaki, Mark Manson and a host of other influential writers soon opened a whole new world of wisdom before me. And with such profound wisdom comes great topics for new articles on Medium. Again, Robin Sharma’s victory hour rules provide me with an advantage that he perhaps never intended. In the days to come, I am hoping to convert a lot of the ideas I read into a readworthy house of words on Medium.
Here is a picture you can use to easily remember the victory hour rules.
To sum up, If you haven’t read 5 AM club, I would recommend you to go ahead and do it, especially if you are struggling to organize your life. There are a lot more, a lot of lot more that he talks about and you could very well benefit from some of his other insights. But remember, the smallest of efforts is always better than the greatest of intentions, and you would only help yourself if you go the distance to implement his program into your daily life.
I already feel the progress, I feel the calmness around, as I sit here and look at my alarm clock next to my bed. No prizes for guessing where the alarm needle is pointing to.