Transcription
Hi, it's Robin Sharma, and I'm delighted that you're here with me. In the 5 AM Club method, we are going to have a tremendous time together. You're going to learn all about the power of rising before the sun, becoming far more productive in what you do, enhancing your creativity, boosting your positivity, and that's so important in this world of volatility that we live in. And even heightening your spirituality, because I believe deep inside of us, we have a heroic side, and many of us have lost that relationship with our best selves. And so this course, this time we're going to share together, this journey from productivity to spirituality and creativity and positivity, is going to be deeply valuable for you. You're going to learn some fantastic and robust insights, and I know you're going to be inspired as well. So, welcome to the 5 AM Club method. I genuinely appreciate you being here with me and believing in my work. And from the outset, I want to celebrate you.
I believe that education is inoculation against disruption. I believe that leaders are the ones who learn the most. I believe that no matter where you come from, no matter what nation you're from, no matter what your background is, no matter what your current situation is, you can rise in productivity and prosperity and impact and the quality of your life, just by education and by learning. And of course, ideation without execution is delusion. Of course, so many of us want the rewards of world-class, but we're not willing to embrace the requirements of world-class. Of course, no idea is going to work unless you do the work. But the starting point, the foundation, is embracing education.
In my own life, I come from very humble beginnings. I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth. I faced a lot of difficulties as I was growing up. A lot of people didn't have a lot of faith in me. But what really got me through it, and what allowed me to realize my ethical ambitions, what allowed me to handcraft a life that I'm happy to live right now, and I'm not saying my life is perfect, and I'm certainly not saying I'm any kind of a guru, but I feel very grateful for what I've made and how I live and what I get to do. It's a great, a true privilege for me to serve. In large part, this is because of education. It's because of learning. If I didn't know something, I realized I could go to the library, I could read a book. And now I can listen to a podcast. Or if I want to go even deeper, I can register and invest in a course like the 5 AM Club method, as you've done.
And so, no matter where you are, even if you doubt that you can become an early riser, or even if you doubt that you can embrace exponential productivity, I'm going to show you through this course how to get more done in a day than most people get done in seven days. I'm going to show you how to multiply and accelerate your creativity so you come up with best-breed ideas that allow you to dominate your domain and do amazing things and be known as a virtuoso in what you do. I'm going to show you how to access your heart set, your mindset, your health set, your soul set, so that you not only find success, but you find significance and a sense of meaning in our lives.
I mentor a lot of billionaires and sports superstars and titans of industry. I've been blessed to work with organizations such as IBM, Watson, and Oracle, and Microsoft, and FedEx, and Nike, and Young Presidents Organization, and NASA, and a lot of the most successful people in the world as their mentor. And I'm delighted to share a lot of the ideas on morning routine with you through this time that we're going to spend together. But I've met a lot of people who have a lot of economic wealth, but they're lacking psychic wealth, and they're lacking joyful wealth, and they're lacking spiritual wealth, and they're lacking that true sense of abundance. So, we're going to cover a lot of this ground in our time together. But what I thought I'd do is take you into the backstory of the 5 AM Club and how I arrived at it, and how, uh, I got to where I'm now sharing the philosophy and the methodology with you.
So, in my 20s, I was struggling. I was a litigation lawyer. I was successful on the outside. I made a very good living. I had a lot of the material things that society sells us as the true measures of success. But I wasn't very happy inside. I didn't have a lot of energy. I didn't have a lot of inner peace. And by the way, one of the most valuable assets you can build is inner peace. You know, what's the point of having a lot of money and you wake up every morning full of fear and full of worry? And so I was struggling, and I said, "Look, I've done everything that I'm supposed to do to live a successful life. I've got a biology degree, and then a law degree, and then a Master of Law degree. And I worked at this amazing firm, and then I worked for the Justice Department, and I've done all these things that were supposedly going to make me feel happy and make me feel fulfilled. And I should have felt like a success. And yet, I'd wake up in the morning, and I'd look in the mirror, and I felt very empty, and I felt dispirited, and I felt discouraged."
And so I went on this odyssey because I, one thing my father always said to me, he said, "You know what? Invest in learning." And he always filled our home with books. And I believe that a home full of books is a fantastic home. And even now, in my home, if you were to visit me, you'd see pile after pile of books. My children, every Saturday morning, we go to the bookstore, and I'd say, "You know what? You can buy all the books that you want to buy." And I love books. I just, I adore the feeling of, you know, receiving a terrestrial book and going through the pages. And I love audiobooks.
So, in this state of struggle in my 20s as a lawyer, I decided to go on this odyssey, this odyssey of personal development. And I wanted to try to understand how the best of the best do it. Not only the people who have the highest impact, not only the people who are the most productive, not only people who are building these incredible companies and doing these fantastic things in the world, but I also wanted to deconstruct the lives, the mentalities, the routines of the world's happiest people, the world's most serene people, the world's most creative people. And so I started this search. And one of the key things, one of the golden threads that went through the greatest lives, was getting up at 5:00 AM.
I want to be very clear. Some of them got up at 4:00 AM, some of them got up at 5:30. But I just noticed the great women and men of the world, the great poets, the great sages, the great titans of industry, the great movement makers, a majority of them, I would suggest, got up before the sun. In India, and I want you to turn up the volume on this insight because I think it's very powerful. In India, there's an Ayurvedic philosophy that's been practiced for thousands and thousands of years, and it's called Brahma Muhurta, which is Sanskrit for Creator's Hour. And so, what I started realizing is the great pundits and the great sages and the people who really revolutionized their own lives understood that the time before sunrise was a very special time. If you were to talk to the great sages, they would say there's something about those early hours before 6 AM where the tithi and the position of the sun creates a situation that makes it excellent for you to create yourself. There's even been some good research on the pineal gland and what happens in those early hours in terms of what they release and what that does for your ability to rewire your mindset, to rewire the way that you feel, to rewire the way that you see the world.
And so, when I saw so many people getting up before the sun, so many people who were rising at 5:00 AM and receiving these revolutionary results in terms of their productivity, their prosperity, their happiness, and their impact on society, I started embracing the morning routine myself. And I started calibrating it in my life. And I started noticing these extraordinary results in terms of the way that I felt, in terms of my optimism, in terms of my productivity. I started getting so much done in such a short period of time. I also felt more peaceful and more grounded because I had this morning routine that was almost like it was a lighthouse. While the rest of the world was asleep, I was getting up at 5:00 AM and I was spending the time meditating, or doing my affirmations, or writing in a journal, or exercising, or simply sitting in solitude so I could be with myself. And then I'd go out in the world, and it was a fundamentally different world because I had taken the time to reconnect with my best self. I had taken the time to do the interior work that makes you a stronger and more heroic and more centered and focused human being.
It makes me think of what the Spartan warriors used to say. They used to say, "Sweat more in training, and you'll bleed less in war." And isn't it interesting? We walk out into the world and we want to have these great days, but it's almost like we expect a great day to just show up. Well, that's like a great athlete expecting elite performance to just show up. What makes a great athlete is she or he takes the time to practice. Because the quality of your performance always reflects the caliber of your training.
Thanks to my 5 AM Club morning routine, I began to access a creativity that I had lost through the stresses of the world. So many of us as adults, we trade that sense of wonder and that sense of awe that we had as little kids when we dreamed and we had when we had such curiosity. We trade that in for worry. We trade that in for responsibility. We trade that in for being adults. And thanks to getting up early and spending that time communing with my highest self and my best self, remembering my dreams, remembering my lost gifts and talents, I started to access a creativity and an artistry that I'd lost. I started to reconnect with my hope again. I started to find this lost enthusiasm. And I decided to write a book, and the book was called "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari." And after that book went out and so many people embraced it from around the world, I started writing other books. And I started being invited into organizations to mentor them. And what also started to happen was billionaires and leaders of large corporations and world-class entrepreneurs and athletes and film stars and members of royalty started reaching out to my team and asking if I would mentor them. So they could not only scale their fortunes and scale their businesses, if they were business builders, but also handcraft better lives where they were happier, and where they had a greater sense of meaning, and where they were healthier, and had more love in their lives, and a greater sense of purpose. Because purpose is so incredibly important, isn't it? We all want to know that we're living for a cause that's larger than ourselves. We all want to know that at the end of our lives, we contributed in a way that made the world a better place. And so, that really allowed me to calibrate and optimize the morning routine as I did this mentorship.
And so, what I'm going to walk you through in the 5 AM Club method is the precise morning routine and the associated rituals and tactics that I have taught to my clients that have given them such spectacular results.
Okay, let me deconstruct for you the six benefits you will experience as you apply the 5 AM Club method.
Number one: Self-strengthening. Well, we live in a fascinating world right now. There is so much volatility, there's so much uncertainty right now. And the 5 AM Club method is going to give you a safe space, while most people are asleep, while everything is very quiet, while there's not a lot of digital distraction, for you to strengthen yourself. If you look at the great heroes of the world, a Nelson Mandela, a Mother Teresa, a Rosa Parks, if you look at a Martin Luther King Jr., if you look at the great warriors, these people all had one thing in common: they made the time to strengthen themselves. They made the time to use adversity and turn it into opportunity for themselves.
I would say the majority of people wake up in the morning and they chase the day. They live out the day. They are reactive versus strategic. They live their lives like a five-alarm fire. They just wake up, they drink their coffee, they watch the news, they walk out into the world, and everything is incoming. And then they wonder why they're exhausted. They wonder why they're deflated. They wonder why they don't their priorities don't happen. And the first benefit of getting up at 5:00 AM and giving yourself 60 minutes to work on yourself in this victory hour, you become a stronger human being. You see, I don't think heroism is something that you're born into. I think heroism is something that you develop. It's almost like a muscle. It's a skill. And yet, most people in the world don't take the time to develop themselves. And I truly believe the best time to work on your heroic nature, the best time to re-establish your relationship with your finest self, is at 5 AM.
There's great new science emerging that the brain has a mechanism that washes itself while you're sleeping. Isn't that interesting? While we're sleeping, your brain is actually washing itself so that in the morning, you wake up with a full well of focus. In the morning, you actually have even more willpower. But I think it's more than just you sleep and you have a brain that is clearer and more available to being rewired. I actually believe that while you're asleep, your heart set, your emotional side, is washed and freed from the residue of the previous day. I think while you're asleep, clearly, your health set, your physical dimension, is being repaired and renewed and washed so that you can embrace a new day. I truly believe that your soul set, your spiritual nature, while you sleep, is being washed so that when you wake up in the morning, it's like a blank slate, most available for you to reorder it, reprogram it, and strengthen it.
So, the first benefit of getting up at 5:00 AM and taking 60 minutes for yourself is you can become a stronger human being. And so when adversity and suffering and difficulty show up, you are more agile and you're more resilient. And I really do want you to think about this word: being resilient. Because world-class producers are all resilient. They're not victims, they're leaders, they're heroes. When a difficult time shows up, they constantly ask themselves, "What's the opportunity here? How can I take this difficulty and find the gold in it and turn it around to make something better?"
The second benefit, or the second reward of getting up at 5:00 AM, is you have a period of time for you. How much time do you really have for yourself? You wake up in the morning, you're probably with your family or your loved ones. You go out into the world, you're commuting, perhaps. Then you get to the office, or even if you're working digitally, you're with your team, or you're with your clients, or you're with your suppliers. And then you have your errands to do. You come home, you're with your family again. So many people are depleted. But if you get up at 5:00 AM, or I should say, when you get up at 5:00 AM and you practice the victory hour concept, so you have 60 minutes for yourself. This is a period where you can renew. It's a period only for you. It's a period where you can honor yourself. And I truly believe that the gateway into self-love is self-care. And I'm going to repeat that again because it's so fundamentally important. The gateway into self-love, where you love yourself and you have faith in your dreams and you honor yourself and you respect yourself, self-love is so important. But the gateway into self-love is self-care. The more you learn to take care of yourself and do good things for yourself and nurture yourself, such as getting up at 5:00 AM and giving yourself a period to feed your mind, feed your body, feed your spirit, feed your emotions, that's how you promote self-love.
Which brings me to benefit number three of rising at 5:00 AM, and this is a huge one: it's enhanced productivity. So, we have millions of people currently in the 5 AM Club movement now, from across the planet. And one of the most common things I hear people saying is, "I now get more done in one day than I used to get done in at least a week, and probably in a few weeks." A lot of people say, "Just by getting up at 5:00 AM, I have such a huge head start on the day." In many ways, getting up at 5 AM gives you a primary psychological victory. It's the primary win of the day that gives you enormous momentum that you can carry through the rest of the day. It's almost like you climb your Mount Everest by getting up at 5:00 AM and running through your morning routine. The rest of the day is a piece of cake. You've done some of the heavy lifting first thing in the morning. That increases your psychological bravery. It gives you a sense of enthusiasm. It gives you some great momentum because you've done something hard first thing in the morning. And there is huge payoff in doing something difficult first thing in the morning. You start to recreate your self-identity. You feel better about yourself. And of course, your self-discipline grows as well.
So, the third benefit of joining the 5 AM Club and running through the 5 AM Club methodology is your productivity will accelerate tremendously because you've taken the time to get up at 5:00 AM, run through a calibrated morning routine, which is going to optimize your mindset, give you more energy, it's going to reconnect you with your priorities, and it's going to build your self-discipline. Then, once you start working, you are going to be so much more focused. You're not going to suffer from digital dementia. You will have a monomaniacal focus on your priorities. You'll have far more energy. Your discipline will start to grow. You will strip away all the trivialities and superficialities, and you will actually have more power to say no to the distractions which invade our days.
And here's a mission-critical point I want to offer to you: your mornings are your life in miniature. Your mornings are your life in miniature. As you start your day, so you live your day. And so, by getting up at 5:00 AM and running the morning routine I'm going to walk you through in this digital program, you are going to consistently experience world-class mornings. Well, if you have great mornings, you're going to have consistently great days. If you have consistently great days, you're going to have consistently great weeks, quarters, years, decades. And simply by running the 5 AM Club method, you are going to have a world-class life.
Now, no life is perfect. Of course, we all have doors shut in our face. We all experience difficulties. We all have adversity. That's just part of the human journey. But one thing I can promise you is by building an ironclad morning routine, the way that you will face hardship will fundamentally transform. You will become so much more resilient, so much more brave, so much more heroic, and move through the tough periods of a human life with so much more grace. Isn't grace a wonderful word? You'll be so much more graceful in the difficult times. And when you're in the times of sunshine, you will truly enjoy those even more.
Which brings me to the fourth benefit of getting up before the sun, which is greater energy and greater fitness and greater longevity. Part of the method I'm going to walk you through involves working on what I call your health set. We have four dimensions as a human being: your mindset, your heart set, your health set, and your soul set. Your mindset is your psychological life. Your heart set is your emotional life. Your health set is your physical life. And your soul set is your spiritual life. And the fourth benefit of getting up at 5:00 AM is you work on your physical dimension. And I'm going to explain how as we go through the program. But by working on your physical dimension through hydration and exercise and a lot of things I'm going to talk about, you will have a lot more energy. You're going to increase your metabolism. You're going to increase your fat-burning engine. You will also battle-proof your immune system and you will reduce inflammation, which is the real cause of disease, which will extend your life. And just imagine extending your life for years, years, or decades, or even more decades. You can spend more time with your loved ones. You can enjoy the journey of life even more. You can practice your craft so that you become even more expert at what you do. And you can increase your impact as well.
Benefit number five of joining the 5 AM Club is you will see significant gains in what I call your twin currencies: your income and your impact. Your income and your impact always reflects your self-identity. If you don't think very much of yourself, you're not going to seize opportunities. If you don't have an internal narrative that says you can do amazing things in the world, well, then you're not even going to take the first step of doing amazing things in the world. And so, by rising at 5:00 AM and working on your four interior empires of mindset, heart set, health set, and soul set, and running the method I'm going to talk about in this program, you are going to learn how to fundamentally rescript your self-identity. You're going to start to believe in your primal genius. You are going to start to develop greater intimacy and fluency with your native gifts and talents. In many ways, we're born into genius, but we betray ourselves. In many ways, when we're little kids, we dream. And as little kids, we have enthusiasm and we're positive. We want to be doctors and lawyers, and we want to be business builders and astronauts and poets and superheroes. And then the world starts to do its job on us. The people around us, whether it's our well-intentioned parents or teachers or peers or all the media, they start sending us this messaging of mediocrity. "Don't dream too big," they tell us. "Start to be more practical," they suggest to us. And so we forget our fundamental nature. We forget who we truly are. And then we wake up at 20 or 25 or 30 or 50, and we are living half lives. We are living lives that we're not dazzled by. We have given up on the dreams we had when we were children.
And this is one of the most powerful reasons to join the 5 AM Club and run the methodology surrounding it: it's you begin to remember who you are. You begin to reconnect and rebuild the relationship with your finest self. I mean, I think in many ways, personal mastery is not about transformation, it's about remembering. I'm going to repeat that because it's so important. You don't really have to transform. You really simply have to do the interior work to move through the layers of doubt, fear, disbelief that you've stacked over your genius and your heroism, so that you remember who you are.
Years ago, I remember being in Thailand. I was doing a presentation on leadership for a well-known enterprise. And I heard about this Golden Buddha in Bangkok. And so, before the event, I had a day to prepare. And I took some time and I went over to this temple that stored the Golden Buddha. And I heard the story of the Golden Buddha, and I just want to share it with you because I think it's a powerful reminder about who you truly are. You see, years earlier, the Thai people had created this incredible monument, and it was a Golden Buddha, pure gold. And then they heard that there were foreign invaders coming to the territory. And so they said, "You know, if we don't do something, the invaders are going to take the Golden Buddha." So they hatched a plan, and the plan was this: they covered the Golden Buddha with layer and layer and layer of dirt and dust and soil, so it looked like this mountain of mud. And sure enough, when the invaders showed up, they thought it was nothing, and they passed right by it.
Well, years later, there was a young monk, and he was walking by this mountain of mud, and he saw this sparkle coming from the mountain of mud. And he said, "You know, I wonder what this is." So he dug a little bit, and he found there was a little bit of gold. And so he got the people around him and all the other monks to start digging. And every time they moved through a layer, they saw more gold. And they moved through more mud, and they saw more gold. And as they continued to dig, eventually they beheld this magnificent Golden Buddha. And you are just like that Golden Buddha. As you move through more layers of doubt and fear and disbelief, and perhaps pain that you've picked up as you've gone through life, as you move through more layers of forgiveness, you're going to experience more joy, more productivity, more trust in who you truly are, more courage, more creativity. And so, the fifth benefit of getting up at 5 AM really is, you can reorder your self-identity and you can rescript your story about who you truly are.
And here's a key insight I offer to you: your behavior always reflects your internal story. Everything that you do on the outside reflects the way you see yourself on the inside. If the way you see yourself on the inside is someone who is timid, then you're not going to be brave in the outer world. If on the inside, you see the world as a place of scarcity, well, then you're not going to create work that represents goodness and generosity. You're not going to give massive amounts of value to your customers because you think the world is a scared place. If you have inside, if you have a self-story that you really don't deserve world-class success, or you're really not good enough, and you haven't worked on that, well, then you're going to go out in the world and you're going to express the behavior of "not good enough." If you actually have an internal identity that you can't do world-class things, then you're not even going to embrace the morning routine of world-class, which is the 5 AM Club. It's the real work of a human being that wants to do amazing things in the world is to work on your interior story. And the greatest time to do that is while the rest of the world is asleep at 5:00 AM, when everything is still, everything is silent. There is a magic in the air at 5 AM that if you haven't experienced it, is one of the most marvelous things in the world.
And that brings me to the sixth benefit of getting up at 5:00 AM, which is you get to work on your spirituality. Yes, this program is very much about exponential productivity. Yes, this program is going to help you calibrate your prosperity. Yes, this program is very much about being a movement maker and having a huge impact. And yet, what's the point of worldly success without internal wisdom? What's the point of incredible prosperity with empty spirituality? Spirituality, as I use the term, is not about your religion. It's not about something heavenly. Spirituality to me is simply about getting to know that internal hero that lives within every human being. Your spirituality is simply the opposite of your egoism. I believe we have a heroic self, and this is our true self. And our heroic self is our bravery, and our wisdom, and our native compassion, and our goodness, and our benevolence. That is who we truly are before the world taught us to fear and to be selfish and to hoard and to use material things as badges of honor. But the more we work on ourselves in the quietude of the dawn's early light, the more we remember what life is all about and what success is all about. And then we start to reduce the volume of our egoic self, and we start to listen to the quieter whispers of our heroic self. And this is just a fundamental transformation. When you live in the world and you play the game, so to speak, in other words, you become productive, you achieve domain dominance, you release your magic to the marketplace, you create a beautiful life for your family, you love all the worldly things, but you realize it's just a game. And you realize that every human being and every human life is a short ride. And you start to develop this macro picture, which is, "I'm just a human being going through the paces of a human life, and I'm living in the world, and I'm doing great things in the world, but I'm not of the world." And so you get to a place where you're in the world, but you're not really of the world. And you get to a place where nothing can defeat you because you've reaccessed your most unconquerable self.
And I'm going to use a word that might not be very popular in productivity programs and elite performance programs, but soul. And that's really the sixth benefit of getting up at 5:00 AM. You can start to strip away the layers of ego and reconnect with your soul. And your soul is that eternal part of you, that part of you that no matter what happens in your outer world, it cannot be beaten, it cannot be conquered, it cannot be defeated. If you don't like the word soul, call it your inner hero. Call it your bedrock of unbeatability. But I do believe we have an immortal part of us. We have a mortal part of us, that's our humanity. It's a body. But the body eventually will fall to ashes, won't it? Every human life ends, and we then swim upstream to another place. And when the body ends, I believe we have a soul that continues. And that's just my philosophy. But I do believe that the sixth benefit of getting up at 5 AM is you get to reduce your ego, which is really that noise of "I don't have enough," "I'm not enough," "I need to compete," "There's not enough in the world," "I'm not successful," "I need more." And through your inner workings before daylight, you get to remember who you truly are. And just imagine, as a business builder and as an elite producer and as someone who wants to do amazing things in the world, imagine going out in the world with a strong relationship with your soul or your spirituality, your call it your best self, if you like, remembering that you want to do good things in the world, and remembering how strong you are, and remembering how loving you want to be, and remembering how kind you want to be, and remembering your fundamental priorities, so you can build these incredible monuments of mastery and productivity that not only honor your gifts and talents but do amazing things in the world.
So, those are the six benefits that you will receive by being a member in good standing of the 5 AM Club. And I do want to mention as well, if you don't get up one day at 5:00 AM, it's not the end of the world. We're human beings, we're all works in progress. I have a little secret to confess to you: I don't get up at 5:00 AM every single day. I run my life by a series of cycles. I've got my high excellence cycle. That's when I might be working on a book, or shooting a course, or doing a leadership tour where I speak to organizations across the world. That's my high excellence cycle, where I am running my morning routine and my pre-sleep ritual and my daily routines at world-class, or as best as I can run those routines. And then I drop into my deep recovery cycle. And you can see the model on the screen in front of you of the twin cycles of elite performance. And so, when I'm in my high excellence cycle, I'm very, very strong about my 5:00 AM Club morning routine. And then when I drop into the deep recovery cycle, I give myself permission to rest a little bit more. And so I want you to remember that there is great power of consistency. What makes world-class performance is not what you do once a month or once a year, it's what you do every single day. Having said that, if you feel tired on a Friday morning or a Saturday morning, please listen to your tiredness. Your body is telling you you need rest. The 5 AM Club method is not something I want you to do in a rigid way. I want you to do it consistently. But having said that, it's okay even to take a weekend off. Some people who are running the 5 AM Club method, they do it Monday to Friday, and then they go out Friday night and they socialize, they rest a little bit more on Saturday, they rest a little bit more on Sunday. That is absolutely okay. If you want to take Wednesday and Thursday off, that is absolutely okay. If you've had a hard workout, your body tells you you need a little bit more sleep, that's absolutely okay. So, really, it's running the morning routine with a delicate touch. Do it most mornings, but also give yourself permission to rest when you need to rest. If you want to go out with your friends on a Friday night or a Saturday night, that's okay as well.
Okay, let's go through the four major mistruths of the 5 AM Club. The first mistruth or myth is that the 5 AM Club is not for everyone. There is some research out there that says some people are just hardwired as night owls, and other people are just hardwired as early risers. So, if I'm not one of those early risers, I can't join the 5 AM Club. I believe that is a myth. I believe that any man, woman, or child has the ability to get up at 5:00 AM. As human beings, one of the things that makes us most human is our ability to grow. One of the things that we all have deeply hardwired within us is this gift of neuroplasticity, which speaks to the human brain's ability to grow and adapt to changing conditions. You look at someone, for example, who is going through athletic training, and through practice, even though they weren't early risers, they over time get up at 5:00 AM to do their training effortlessly. You look at some of the people who go into the military, they weren't early risers, but they have to get up at 5:00 AM to do their drills, to do their exercises, to do their runs, and over time, they simply cannot not get up at 5:00 AM. You look at a lot of the world's greatest religions, tens, hundreds, and hundreds of millions, of course, billions of people in these religions, what do they do? They get up before the sun to do their prayers, to do their rituals. So, I believe that any human being has the ability to join the 5 AM Club and get up consistently before the sun to do the morning routine that will get you world-class results.
The second mistruth is, "Well, I'm not the kind of person who could stay with it. I might be able to do it for a week, I might be able to do it for two weeks, but I won't be able to stay in the 5 AM Club over the rest of my lifetime." I truly believe you can. As a matter of fact, what makes a habit a habit is you'll get to a place where it becomes easier to do the new habit than not to do the new habit. Researchers call this the point of automaticity. If you look at the research of University College London, they found that you do anything for 66 days in a row, even though it was hard at the beginning, you will reach a point of automaticity where it becomes easier to do the new routine or the new habit or the new skill than not to do it. It's a powerful insight. You can stay with a new habit. If you talk to any good neuroscientist, they will tell you that brain cells that fire together, wire together. So, as you start embracing the 5 AM Club method, you start doing the morning routine over and over and over again, the brain cells that are responsible for this new neural pathway of early rising will start to fire together. The neural pathway will get stronger. The more you do it, the more it'll get deeper and deeper as the days, weeks, and months go by. Then something interesting happens: a fatty tissue called myelin starts to wrap around that new neural pathway for getting up at 5:00 AM, and you start to do it more effortlessly than ever before. Let me give you a metaphor. It's almost like the mountain meadow metaphor. There's this huge mountain meadow, it's all green, and then you start to walk through it, and at first, you make this little pathway. But you keep on taking the same pathway every day. It gets deeper, and the pathway becomes a trail. And then you do it every day, it the trail becomes a road. And you keep on doing it after months and months, the road becomes a highway. And then you keep on doing it year after year after year, and that once mountain meadow that you've walked on over the same grooves becomes a superhighway. Well, that's why a habit is. As a matter of fact, the brain has a component or an area called the basal ganglia. And the whole idea about a basal ganglia is it creates habits for you. So you do a certain practice like the 5 AM Club, and the basal ganglia stores the habit. And what starts to happen, one of the key things to remember about a human brain is the brain consumes a lot of energy. So whenever there is the ability to habituate or ritualize any behavior, the brain will do it through the basal ganglia because then it will use less energy. That's why the brain creates a habit because a time will come where once the habit is installed, the brain doesn't have to use all of this energy because the behavior has been habituated or routinized, and it just uses a lot less energy in your brain as well as in your body. So, what I'm suggesting to you, and point number two, is yes, you can sustain it because human beings are built to build new habits. It's the same for exercise. A lot of people were not exercisers. They start doing it day after day, week after month, year after year, they cannot not exercise. It's the same thing for doing amazing work. You want to practice being spectacular so much that non-spectacularity has no place in your orbit. That's what we do as human beings. We practice certain things to the point where we simply cannot not do those new habits. The thing is, too many people have actually routinized bad habits. So they watch so much TV that they simply cannot not watch TV when they come home at the end of the day. They've played with their digital devices for so many days, weeks, months, and years that they become virtuoso level at playing with their devices and becoming addicted to distraction. So, point number two, in terms of a fundamental mistruth, it is a mistruth that you can't sustain being a member of the 5 AM Club. As a matter of fact, everything that you now find easy, you once found hard. As a matter of fact, the very nature of a great habit means it's going to be messy in the beginning, but it's going to be easy once you eventually wire it in as a habit.
The third mistruth of the 5 AM Club is that it involves sleep deprivation. I've heard some people say that they go, "Well, I'd love to join the 5 AM Club. I'd love to be an exponential producer and do amazing things and just have a lot more life in my days. But I don't want to be sleep deprived." Well, that is not the 5 AM Club method. As a matter of fact, part of the methodology you're going to learn in this program is the power of a world-class pre-sleep routine. One of the key ways to get up early feeling refreshed and strong and energetic and focused is having a great pre-sleep ritual. One of the great ways to get up early easily is doing the right things before you go to sleep. And so, the third mistruth is that the 5 AM Club and rising before the sun and becoming an early riser involves sleep deprivation. As a matter of fact, what the science says is the number one way to cut your life short is to cut back on your sleep. And good researchers say that to sleep well, or the proper amount of sleep, is about six to eight hours of sleep every single night. And so, I'm in no way encouraging you to get up early and to burn the candle at both ends and to go to sleep late. As a matter of fact, what I'm encouraging you is to adopt the philosophy of the farmer: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a human being happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise." So, the 5 AM Club is not about sleep deprivation at all. I want you to get six to eight hours of sleep so when you wake up, you feel strong, and your moods are high, and your focus is great, and you don't suffer from ego depletion, which means you don't have any willpower through the day ahead.
And the final mistruth, number four, is that the 5:00 AM Club and getting up early is unfun. Actually, it's just the opposite. Once you wire in the 5 AM Club early rising ritual so that you've got that to that point of automaticity, it'll be easy. And what you're going to experience is an upward spiral of success. I'm going to repeat that term again: an upward spiral of success. What will happen to you as you practice the 5 AM Club method over and over and over over the coming weeks, months, and years, you will get up early easily. It will be automatic. It will be effortless. That's what a habit is. You get to a certain place where it's easy. It's not hard when you brush your teeth every morning, is it? It's not hard when you do all your usual habits because they're habits. And sooner versus later, I promise you, you're going to get to a place where you'll get up at 5:00 AM and you're going to feel it's the easiest thing in your life. And then what starts to happen is you do the exercise, and you do the journaling, and you do the gratitude practice, and you do the hydration, and all the things I'm going to go into greater depth in as we move through this program together, and you are going to feel more positive, and you're going to feel more grateful, and you're going to feel better about your life. And when you're feeling positive and grateful and more confident and happier, you're going to do even better work. And just imagine, you start doing better work, which means you're going to have more peer recognition, you're going to have more respect in your industry, you're going to make more money because your income is a reflection of the value that you add to the marketplace. And the more you start pushing magic, the more you're going to feel better about yourself. Well, that's going to give you even more energy. So now you come home, and rather than playing with your devices or checking social media or just flaking out on the sofa, you're going to spend more time with your loved ones. You're going to be more present, which is going to make you feel even better about yourself. And your self-identity will start to be reordered. And you are going to set up this positive self-fulfilling prophecy. The positive psychologists talk about this concept called the self-fulfilling prophecy, which is the things we do actually define the way we see ourselves. And so, as we start doing positive steps, we start seeing positive results. And the positive results set up a self-fulfilling prophecy where we actually start to see ourselves as the kind of people who do amazing things. And it becomes this positive cycle or this positive feedback loop where through our morning routine, we start creating these better results. The better results make us feel better about ourselves, and so we grow in self-concept.
We grow in our self-identity and so we create this upward spiral of success that really feeds on itself. As we see more benefits, we feel even stronger and braver and more confident. We have even more energy. We start to create even more momentum, which makes us continue to get up at 5:00 a.m. and go deeper into the morning ritual and produce even better results as we go through our days.
It's this upward spiral of success which just makes us braver, more positive, more energized, more productive, more effective, more heroic human beings. So it is a mistruth that the 5 a.m. club method is unfun. When I talk to my clients, they say it's incredibly fun. "I love it. I I don't want to I don't want to miss my morning routine because it just makes me feel so good."
What I'd like to do right now is to share with you the five maxims of majestic growth. If you were to ask me, "What is life all about?" as a producer, as a creator, as a person, as a movement maker, as a human being, I would say it's really all about growth. Everything else is just a superficiality and a triviality. In so many ways, I think we are most fulfilled, we become most happy, we come most alive when we're growing as human beings. I think so many people are suffering from anxiety or depression or ambient suffering because they have just given up on growth. And that's why I'm so happy and so honoring of you being here with me in the 5 a.m. Club method program. I mean, you are a hero to be here. You want to learn how to hardwire in one of the greatest of all routines, a world-class morning routine that millions of people are currently using for amazing results called the 5 a.m. Club method.
And you know, growth is a dangerous game. It's very easy for you or I to spend the rest of our lives watching television in a subdivision. It's very easy to just play with our digital devices and spend the best hours of our best days watching videos or what other people are doing on social media. It's very easy to get up late in the morning and just show up at work and sort of just mail it in versus bring it on. It's very easy to give up on growth because it just growth can be tough. And yet, the discomfort of growth, or I put it to you this way, with great respect, the, um, the discomfort of growth is always so much less than the tragedy of regret. And what I mean by that is, yes, growth can be uncomfortable, but the pain or suffering in that is so much less than getting to the end of this coming year, or the end of the next decade, or the end of a lifetime, and surveying your life and saying, "You know what? I just wasted my time. I just got caught up in superficialities and I was busy being busy, and I never caught a glimpse of my heroic nature. I never got a sense of my gifts and my talents. I never did amazing work. I never served people. I never lived the life I wanted to live."
And I want to look at you right now directly and say, for being here in this program with me, you are a hero because you've invested in this information. But of course, it's not just the information, it's the work that needs to be done to wire in the 5 a.m. Club ritual and then to practice it every day until you do reach that point of automaticity. Sometimes people say, "Robin, you know, thank you so much. Through your digital courses or through your books, you changed my life." And I often say to them, I say, "I didn't change your life. You changed your life. Don't give me your power. Take your power back." And you are the one who's going to. I'm offering you the information, but you're the one who is going to take this powerful methodology and do the work around it to get your results. And so I think you're a hero for that because growth is dangerous.
So what I want to do in this module is I want to walk you through the five maxims of majestic growth so you really understand how does growth happen, what are the insights of key growth. And I want to get right into it right now. The first maxim is: Your personal story really is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our daily behavior always reflects our deepest beliefs. So I could watch you. If I was mentoring you in real time, live, if I watched even one of your days, I could detect your deepest beliefs. I I was looking at a a man the other day in an interview. It was an online interview, and he said, "You know, everything in business is changing. Everything is transforming. Someone should help me in my business. I need help right now." And it made me think, you know, the very nature of business is we need to be entrepreneurial. We need to be leaders. We can't be like victims. The very nature of a good entrepreneur is no matter what the world sends you, no matter what the economy looks like, no matter what disruption is happening with the industry, you're paid to provide solutions. That's what makes a great leader. There's a problem, and you say, "Well, here's the possibility. Here's the opportunity. Here's where we need to pivot."
What I'm saying is, when I saw that man, I saw him behaving as a victim. And you just look at so many people. I'm not judging, I'm just reporting. But it's, "World, give me a job. World, make it easier for me. World, help me do something." As human beings, we have agency. And a victim has given away their agency or their sense of of human power so much, they don't think they have any. And so they say to the world or other people, "Help me." And I think, you know, one of the things I so believe is the power of the human spirit. You, me, every human being alive today, we have a sense of agency over our lives. We do have power. And so when you see a victim in action, you look, you can look at their behavior, and that'll show you their beliefs. You you see their behavior where it's they're they're just it's like they've given up. They don't get up early. They don't work hard. They don't invent. They don't create. They don't learn every day. They don't say, "Every day is a platform for me to get better." They just, every day is the same day. Please don't get into the snare of living the same day 10,000 times and calling it a life.
So the first maxim I really want you to remember is that your personal story does become a self-fulfilling prophecy because your daily behavior really does reflect your deepest beliefs. And so your your internal narrative, your psychological story, is going to set up the self-fulfilling prophecy. Your beliefs are going to represent your deeds, and then your deeds, or your results, will set up that self-fulfilling prophecy. So part of the value of the 5 a.m. Club method and that one hour, that victory hour from 5 to 6:00 a.m., is you get to rewire and reorder your self-concept. And your self-concept is everything because your daily performance really reflects the way you see yourself psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Okay, let me get to the second maxim for majestic growth, and it's this: Lazy people work twice as hard. Lazy people work twice as hard. It's such a myth to think, "Well, look, if I just don't work that hard, if I sleep in, if I just get by, if I'm not very productive, if I don't learn a lot, life will be easier." Actually, here's a key point to remember: Doing hard things creates an easier life. Doing hard things makes you stronger. People sometimes say, "Robin, how do I change?" You do hard things. When you f wake up first thing in the morning, do something hard. That's how you take your power back. Well, Robin, you know, how do I become a braver person? H, how do I develop better habits? How do I develop more self-discipline? You consistently do hard things every single day. And by doing that, you become more confident. You you become stronger, and you sharpen yourself. You become a more heroic human being.
So the second maxim to remember is that lazy people work twice as hard because if you are lazy, if you sleep in, if you don't have a strong morning routine, if you don't have world-class daytime rituals, if you don't have an amazing pre-sleep ritual, you're going to have to work twice as hard because you won't love your job, you won't love your life, you won't have any energy, you won't have any positivity, you'll lose that spark. You're going to have to work twice as hard.
Third maxim for majestic growth, and this is right out of the 5 a.m. Club book, and people all around the world, it's it's become a big mantra for millions of people. Let's virtually hold hands and say it together, which is: All change is hard at first. It's messy in the middle, and it's gorgeous at the end. All change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and it's gorgeous at the end. And that's really important to remember. All change, if it's good change, it's going to be hard at first. You want to be a chess virtuoso? Starting off is really hard. But remember, please, every master was once a beginner. Every professional was once an amateur. You've got to start somewhere. There's there's great power in starting for you right now to say, if you're not a member of the 5 a.m. Club, to say, "I'm going to start, and I'm going to stay with it, even though it's hard." That is the beginning of a process. When I mentor the great NBA players, one thing I all always notice: they have fallen in love with the process. They are not impatient people. Patience is an incredible virtue of mastery. Patience is an incredible virtue of world-class. You've got to love the process. The great athletes all have one thing in common: they have embraced mundanity. Mundanity is a term for accepting the doing of mundane things like practicing every single day.
So all change is hard at first. When you're starting any new habit, it's going to be hard because you are giving up your old way of being, you're embracing something new. It's hard. But everything that you once found hard in your life, or let me put it to you this way, everything that you now find easy, let me ask you, it was once hard, wasn't it? Maybe it was a relationship. At the beginning of the relationship, you didn't have a lot of relationship skills. It was hard. You and your partner were having a lot of conflict. But as you navigated it, as you built understanding, standing, as you took courses on relationship building, as you worked at it, it got easier. Maybe you played tennis. Maybe you are a skier. Maybe you're a swimmer. I don't know what sports you might like. It was hard at first. You had to learn the skill. You were, let's say, riding a bicycle. You were falling off the bicycle, and then you stayed with it, and you developed more skills, and maybe you read some books, or maybe you had a good mentor. I'd like to be a world-class mentor for you. You, and it got easier.
And so this third maxim is so important: All change is hard at first. It's not like there's something wrong when you get up at 5:00 a.m. and you say, "This is hard." It's supposed to be hard because you're building a new habit. Change is hard at first. And then it's messy in the middle. You're in that middle point, you're confused, you might be tired. There's nothing wrong. The problem is, most people in the messy middle, they give up. They say, "Well, I can't get up at 5 a.m. It's messy. I'm confused. I'm feeling tired. It should be easier. I feel like giving up. I guess I can't be an early riser and a card-carrying member of the 5 a.m. Club." And I'm here to tell you, with great love and respect, it's supposed to be messy in the middle because you are wiring in those new neural pathways. You are rescripting your emotional architecture. You're building a lifetime habit. Stay with the process. Most people could live world-class lives. They give up too easily. They give up when it's hard at first, or they give up in the messy middle.
And then the final part of maxim number three is: It's gorgeous at the end. You've reached automaticity. You've stayed with the process. Even if it's the early part of a lifetime habit, it gets easier. Everything gets easier with practice, doesn't it? So all change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous at the end. You wire it in so it's easy now. You get up at 5:00 a.m. You run the 202020 formula that I'm going to teach you about fairly soon in this course. You get all the benefits. You start feeling better, and you enjoy that upward spiral of success.
Maximum number four of majestic growth is a great one. It's a great brain tattoo, which is: Excuses are hypnotizers and complaints are seducers. Now, you're saying, "Robin, what are you talking about?" Well, I want to remind you of the fact that your excuses are simply your fears coming to get you. And a lot of us, what we do is we have been rehearsing and reciting our excuses for so many years, we've actually hypnotized ourselves into thinking they are true. Let me ask you right now, what are the excuses that you make every day or every morning that have imprisoned you? What are the excuses that you tell your family or your loved ones or your teammates or your friends? And you say them all the time because you've actually recited those excuses so many times, you've made them into entrenched beliefs. You've made them into your personal truths. This is a very powerful question: What are your excuses that you think are actually reality? We see the world not as it is, we see the world as we are. Your excuses have been taught to you by someone, and you've trained yourself and programmed yourself psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually to say, "You know, hey, here's why I can't do this." And they are hypnotizers. They are seducers.
So I want you to think deeply about your excuses, especially for not getting up early or not staying in the 5:00 a.m. Club. Your excuses might be, "Well, I'm in a busy time of my life right now. I don't have the time to wire in the 5:00 a.m. Club method." Maybe your excuse is, "Well, I have my family and I have to take care of my family, so I can't get up early." Well, if you have a family, it's even more important to get up at 5:00 a.m. and give yourself the victory hour for some self-care and to work out and to meditate and pray and journal and set yourself up for an amazing day. Maybe your excuse is you're going through a difficult time of your life, and so you just need a lot more rest. And I'm not saying that rest is not important. I'm simply saying that what could be more important than getting up early and giving yourself an hour in solitude to process through your pain? Maybe by praying or journaling or or meditating, or simply feeling through the feelings so they don't get trapped and repressed within your vast subconscious. I don't know what your excuses are. A lot of people say, "I don't have enough time," or "I'm too busy." That's a big one. And yet, you watch them, and they're spending most of their finest hours doing trivial things. They're playing with their devices, they're stuck in entertainment, they're just escaping doing real work or living a real life because deep inside, they don't think they can live majestic lives.
And that brings me to the fifth maxim I really want you to embrace, and I really want you to think about, and perhaps even meditate on or journal about, which is: Micro wins are the keys to macro triumphs. Micro wins are the keys to macro triumphs. And I've been teaching this philosophy for over two decades. Another way to language the brain tattoo is this: Small, daily, seemingly insignificant victories, when performed with consistency over time, lead to huge wins. Small, daily, seemingly insignificant victories, when practiced over time, lead to huge triumphs. So one of the reasons we don't start, whether it's getting up at 5:00 a.m. or launching a new business, or finding a new love, or scaling a fortune, or getting on a spiritual path, is the task or the venture seems so large, we feel overwhelmed. What I've learned, and what I've taught for over two decades, is the key to mastery is the tiny triumphs that seem so small that we don't even do them. So I've called them in my work, if you've read my books over the years, I've called them the 1% wins, or I've called them micro victories. It's those little gains that you can do every single morning and every single day. They seem so small, we don't even bother doing them. But it's those 1% wins that, when done consistently over time, stack into higher and greater and greater results that over time lead to revolutionary gains. It's so easy to fall into the false assumption of thinking that the only way to increase your productivity in a massive way, or increase your your business success, or increase your financial life, or increase your personal life, is to do one singular act of transformation. But I think the real key to transformation and revolution is evolution. It's those small, little daily triumphs, when done consistently over time, lead to a tsunami of results. Please remember that. It's the 1% wins. You get up every morning. You do the 202020 formula. It's it's easy to think, "Well, it's not going to make a difference." Every morning you get up and run the 2020 formula has a payoff. Every act of bravery and self-discipline and boldness and heroism fundamentally changes you, even at a neurological level. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "A mind once confronted by a new idea never returns to its original dimensions." And what I would suggest to you is, even getting up once at 5:00 a.m. and running the morning routine that I'm walking you through makes you fundamentally different. And so it's those little daily wins that make all the difference in the world. The way you change your life is not revolution, it's evolution. Incremental, accretive, accelerative, tiny triumphs, when done consistently over time, will lead you to revolutionary results because those little 1% wins develop momentum. They develop energy. And so it's almost like if you're an investor, you're investing, investing, investing in different asset classes, and it looks like those little investments don't make a difference. But over time, you start to develop this incremental improvements, and they keep on growing and growing into a t into a tsunami of growth where you develop some exponential gains over time. It's the same thing with your morning routine.