The book

Structure

The 5 A.M. Club is a hybrid fiction/non-fiction self-improvement novel that’s centred around a cast of three characters. Two of them, the Entrepreneur and the Artist (no they don’t have actual names), happen to run into one another at a motivational talk of a third otherwise unnamed character called the Spellbinder thus setting off the plot. In another turn of events, they also run into a billionaire that masquerades as a homeless person and fortunately is a master pupil of the Spellbinder. In contrast to the other two, this character is actually given a name, Stone Riley, but is mostly referred to simply as the Billionaire.

The Billionaire decides to take the Entrepreneur and the Artist under his wings and gifts them a trip around the world during which he expounds the Spellbinder’s teachings in lush scenery like the Maledives or Rome. One central aspect of these teachings is to get up very early—at 5 A.M. to be exact (hence the title of the book)—and invest the valuable, distraction-free time in the early morning into activities that improve your own live and enable you to make an impact on the world. The titular 5 A.M. club is not an actual or fictional location but instead serves as a metaphor for the spiritual connection between the characters and, by extension, all people that follow this basic principle.

While some passages have illustrations, most of the non-fictional content is presented through dialogue between the characters.

Content

The main message of The 5 A.M. Club boils down to getting up at 5 A.M. and starting your day strong with a productive morning routine. Sharma indeed pulls no punches in promoting the life-changing qualities of the early bird lifestyle and goes as far as to call a set of ancillary principles The 4 Focuses of History-Makers (no less). The 4 Focuses are introduced throughout the book and may be summarized as follows.

1. Capitalization IQ: Work hard to improve whatever qualities you have.
2. Freedom from distraction: Eliminating distractions to work in a focused manner on important topics.
3. Personal mastery/practice: Invest time to develop yourself psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
4. Day stacking: Implement changes by making small improvements over time and leveraging their compound effect.

Sharma also provides some methods to implement these focuses. I.e.

• The habit installation protocol: Use the force of habits to gain consistency.
• The 20/20/20 Formula: Divide the first hour of your morning into sets of 20 minutes for exercise, reflection, and personal development respectively. This is said to be the core of the 5 A.M. routine.
• Other tactics like the 90/90/1 Rule (90 days spend the first 90minutes of your day on one pursuit without any distractions), the 60/10 Rule (work with utmost concentration for 60 minutes, take a a break for 10), Second Wind Workout (fight being tired in the evening with exercise), and others like the Tight Bubble of Total Focus (remove distractions and work in solitude in a conducive setting).

The good

To start with, the productivity boost that an early start to the day will yield as well as the methods explained in the 4 Focuses of History-Makers are, in my opinion, largely uncontroversial. Either by being common sense (like freedom from distractions) or by having been outlined in depth in some other book (like day stacking has been in Atomic Habits by James Clear). The 5 A.M. Club will, therefore, not contain a lot of confounding, novel ideas for most people. Since Sharma relentlessly tells you how great this lifestyle is, the book might also intrigue you enough to put the given advice into action.

Getting up early actually may make you more productive

The foundational concept of the book is, of course, is that if you start your day early—or, earlier—this will set free a lot of productive energy. (For people following a regular work schedule, this will most likely mean getting up one or two hours earlier.)

I tend to agree with this for the simple reason that early mornings are widely distraction-free and allow you to work in peace (without constant disruptive messages, noises, and the like). The morning time is, in my opinion, also a much better time slot to work on personal projects if you have a full work day ahead of you (as opposed to after work since you will likely have less energy after-work than before work). There is also no lack of reports on highly successful people that get up in the wee hours of the morning. (See this CNBC article, for example, or this Business Insider article.) Some of the more notable early birds include Tim Cook (CEO of Apple Inc.), Oprah Winfrey, and Michelle Obama as well as Richard Branson (founder of Virgin Group) and Jack Dorsey (co-founder and former CEO of Twitter).

Treatments on morning protocols are, moreover, somewhat common in the self-improvement literature genre. Two related entries are Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning and Benjamin Spall’s and Michael Xander’s My Morning Routine. Plus, there are podcasts from essential sources available on the topic of morning routines: for example, the following two Huberman Lab podcasts on the perfect morning protocol (backed by science) as well as the talk with Rick Rubin about his creativity boosting morning routine.

Not only does getting up earlier to win some undisturbed and productive hours make sense, it is also relatively easy to put into practice and proved very flexible to me. I did a test run of the 5 A.M. routine with some alterations that fit my personal needs better and it convinced me even though I wasn’t following the exact version described in the book. Essentially, I got up at 5 A.M. or a bit later, invested at least one hour into personal projects or my personal education (like piano practice—with headphones, of course, to not disturb my neighbours—or language learning) and followed this up with some physical training and a healthy breakfast.

The main reasons why I think that simple change to my day plan has a net benefit are the following:

• I am able to invest more uninterrupted and productive hours of the day into personal goals.
• A structured morning routine including some kind of athletic activity and proper nutrition gets the fundamental things for every day out of the way first. It also frees up some time in the evenings for winding down which in turn improves my sleep and thus my waking hours.
• Getting up before sunrise changes my outlook on the rest of the day. If I wake this early, most of my working hours shift to before noon. This means that it feels like I somehow managed to wrestle back some extra time in the afternoon—even though I actually don’t because I have to go to bed earlier to get a full night’s sleep.

I was also a surprised how natural it felt to get up that early after only a couple of days. Especially because my usual wake up time before trying the 5 A.M. routine was 7 A.M. A full two hours later!

There are ways to improve your life even if you get up late

The 5 A.M. Club also promotes concepts that are impactful and largely unrelated to what time you wake up, i.e. the 4 Focuses of History-Makers (capitalization IQ, freedom from distraction, personal mastery/practice, and day stacking). So, even if you don’t manage to channel your inner early bird, there will be some take aways for you.

I feel like capitalization IQ—or, working to improve your innate qualities and talents—is uncontroversial to the point that it does not really merit any in-depth discussion. I mean, who doesn’t want to capitalize on their good qualities? You might, of course, also conversely want to put effort into reducing your bad qualities and, moreover, work on things that don’t come easy to you. But, using and improving your strengths seems like a no-brainer.

Freedom from distraction on the other hand deserves a bit more of attention, in my opinion, because it is not that easy to implement. We may not notice it, but a lot of us unwittingly fall prey to somewhat established and inconspicuous distractions like our smartphones. This Nature article, for example, reports that the mere presence of a smart phone lowers cognitive metrics like working memory. Consequently, the Tight Bubble of Total Focus (a time and space without distractions) that is talked about in The 5 A.M. Club seems like a very good practice that may have substantial benefits on your productivity.

Moreover, the idea of day stacking—incremental improvements every day have a compound effect in the long run—is also very important. As mentioned earlier, Atomic Habits by James Clear makes a compelling case for why continuously making small steps to improve yourself is much better than trying to do big leaps. Consistency is king. I think that a lot of people often disregard this, because they don’t believe in the power of incremental change and because it means putting in consistent effort. It, therefore, doesn’t hurt that Sharma also introduces this concept to the reader.

Lastly, personal mastery (developing yourself psychologically, physically, emotionally, and spiritually) again seems rather obvious. It is, for example, well established that there is a correlation between physical fitness and mental well-being. E.g. this mental health study of over one million Americans published in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet in 2018 found that people who exercised regularly had 43.2% less days of poor mental health. Also, it seems rather intuitive that physical training also boots general energy levels and can either get you out of a rut or prevent it in the first place.

I’m divided on how useful the tools are, especially the 20/20/20 Formula, but they seem to have a somewhat tenuous relation to the 4 Focuses anyway and you should just pick whatever works for you.

The bad

Yet, while there is a lot of useful content in The 5 A.M. Club. It also has quite a few short-comings. For example, it doesn’t really address fundamental questions like:

1. How do you actually get up at 5 A.M. (if you have trouble getting up early in the first place) and why is 5 A.M. the best time to get up?
2. What is the underlying reason that any of the concepts in the book work?

If you have questions like these, you won’t have a lot of answers after you turned the last page of the The 5 A.M. Club. Additionally, the noise-to-signal ratio is pretty high meaning that you will have to work through a lot of pages of filler content to get to the actual message.

Don’t look for proof, you will be disappointed

Part of the problem is that Sharma never really tries to mount a convincing argument in favor of the 5 A.M. morning routine and instead relies heavily on biographical anecdotes of famous people like Nelson Mandela or Benjamin Franklin. Not only is that a classic appeal to authority argument, but it also only supports the opposite statement (if anything): famous people often followed a lifestyle similar to that presented in The 5 A.M. Club. This doesn’t rule out, however that a lot of people following this routine exist, that never became highly successful and famous.

Unsurprisingly, if you visit Sharma’s website, you will find similar claims to fame—like “celebrated leadership expert”—that are also unsubstantiated. And while I don’t have reason to doubt Sharma’s self description, it is also very telling that visitors to the website are asked to humor everything without proof. Reading is believing, I guess.

Similarly, The 5 A.M. Club is a book that proposes concepts and practices that make sense and I don’t necessarily doubt. But, it doesn’t provide enough rational arguments to convince a sceptic.

This could have been a simple blog post

Additionally, to get to the approximately 10 pages of actual—albeit unsubstantiated—content, you will have to force yourself through 312 pages (Kindle version) of writing that seems the author went back in time and drafted their 12 year old self as ghost writer. Not only is this book the literary equivalent of a meeting that could have been an e-mail (or, indeed, a book that could have been a blog post); but, the quality of writing is subpar and, the 5 A.M. Club’s plot is full of ludicrous moments that seem like Sharma thought, “Hey, you know what would be cool?” and then wrote down whatever came to mind first.

Here’s one excerpt that is particularly egregious. (The context is not that important but it’s after a pivotal moment in the story.)

“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.

Get this! The completely made up billionaire, who I don’t believe has any basis in reality in the first place, twerked. I wouldn’t have believed it, hadn’t Robin Sharma convinced me, by telling me it is true. Truly magnificent writing! /s

This is just an example, but it serves to show how ridiculous some of the writing in The 5 A.M. Club is. It heavily distracts from the actually interesting non-fiction content of the book to the extent that you will likely question why the story has to be there in the first place.

The Verdict

The 5 A.M. Club has a lot of good advice for people looking to improve their productivity and personal development by establishing a solid morning routine. I would argue that the concepts are sound but there is very little that will convince you to follow this lifestyle if you are not already sympathetic towards it.

The fictional parts of the book are long-winded and have the potential to distract heavily from the non-fiction elements. People that have little time to spare are probably better off reading a blog post or a summary of the book. If you are interested in a morning routine that actually has some scientific backing and is economical with your time, take a look at the first Huberman Lab clip I linked above.

If you have a lot of time and are not thrown off by bad writing, The 5 A.M. Club might at least be more entertaining to you than most introductions to morning protocols.