5am Club | What it is and what it isn’t.

5am club. It’s that mysterious club that will magically set up your life for the day;

“Take excellent care of the front end of your day, and the rest of your day will pretty much take care of itself. Own your morning. Elevate your life,”

as Robin Sharma states in his book, ‘The 5am Club’.

Or is it?

I’m not here to give you a review of the book per se, because quite frankly I haven’t finished it and might never will. You see it’s a bit different than other books. It tells the ‘5am Club’ idea as a story between a highly successful business person, an entrepreneur and and artist. That wasn’t what I was expecting as I pinged it into into my Kindle downloads. Was I expecting the answer to all my life’s problems?

Absolutely.

Who reads a book aimed at revolutionising your life and mindset and not expect it to do just that? Imagine my disappointment when what I got was a slow story between two people, who suddenly started holding hands and being emotionally connected. I was like, whoa, wait a minute, where’s the build-up? Where’s the connection? Where’s the tension? I found it like reading a holiday romance, well without the romance. And do you know how much of the planet they must have destroyed, creating their beautiful lifestyles?

I didn’t buy it to read how:

“Dedication and discipline beats brilliance and giftedness every day of the week. And A-Players don’t get lucky. They make lucky. Each time you resist a temptation and pursue an optimization you invigorate your heroism. Every instant you do that which you know to be right over the thing that you feel would be easy, you facilitate your entry into the hall of fame of epic achievers.”

I feel like I’m being shouted at by a YouTuber with an agenda. I’m a realist. That paragraph and many more like it make me feel, well, unaccomplished, useless and I MUST BE A HERO OR I WILL FAIL AT LIFE.

This is hustle game.

And it’s the kind of thinking that has burnt out many people and will continue to do so, as long as we keep telling the story of ‘up your game, because you’re a failure if you don’t.’ ‘You must be better than you are or you aren’t worthy of calling yourself successful.’ ‘You must evidence your success.’

Now I get what you are thinking, but the message of ‘taking care of your own destiny’ (for want of a better word) is lost in this idea of ‘do or die’, ‘evidence or perish’.

I mean I get it. Who doesn’t want to be a better person? Who doesn’t want to create more? Help more? Inspire more? We all do. But should I feel like a failure because I don’t?

I’m a parent and I’m doing a PhD. There isn’t much wiggle room in my life. And I’m probably autistic too. So I need to give myself a break. Reading (most of) 5am Club left me feeling with a sense of ‘I CAN DO THIS! @:^% YEAH!’ But then I get home after work, have to put a tired and grumpy four-nager to bed and there is nothing left in the tank. Aaah Netflix; ‘what have you got for me this evening?’ I’ve failed, again. And the same the next day, and the next day, and the next day.

OK, so the tail end of the day is a disaster, lets take on the advice of this book. Lets try the front end of the day instead, after all, the 5am Club promises that the rest of the day will follow beautifully. I can see that plaque in the Hall of Fame now, and the granite statue, it’s truly breath-taking!

But there’s just one major cog in the work for me.

5am might be great to get up at and I do get lots done in the time especially at the weekend, when everyone is even later. Oh it’s bliss. I can have two hours of creative me time, to churn out wonderful blogs like this(!)

BUT, and that’s a big BUT. Once my daughter gets up it’s chaos. It’s like all that creative energy and setting up for the day is sapped through a giant leech and I’m back to zero on the tank. Getting up at 5am, doesn’t set up my day, it just gives me an hour or two of me time, working at a time I’m awake, in a quiet household.

I do try to get up at 5am most days with maybe a lie in until 7am, once a week. It’s the time when the family are still in bed. An hour or two in the morning, spent writing and ideating is like heaven on Earth. And yes I do put out a lot of my creative and business-related work at this time. It is my time to work on my own projects as it were.

The reality is, I don’t see it as work, but it is. I’m essentially working from 5.30am (you don’t think that ‘getting up’ at 5am means getting up at 5am do you?) until 7am. It’s there so I don’t get frustrated with the rest of my day, because it’s real me time.

And don’t think that means you can magically go to bed at the same time. No. To get the lovely 8 hours of sleep, one has to go to bed at 9pm if my calculations are correct.

Do I go to bed at 9pm? Generally no, bacuase I also need wind down time at the end of the day to make sure I sleep properly. So I end up with a sleep deficit, which of course is a great start to the day. But that’s where coffee comes in isn’t it? Lets turn to drugs instead to get us through. Balance is restored.

So what is 5am club really? It’s when I take drugs and hustle. And what it’s not? It’s not going to take care of the rest of my day. Will it ‘elevate my life?’ Maybe, but it’ll take years at this rate.