The 5 am Club is the end of intelligent writing

My review and why I hate “The 5am Club” by Robin Sharma

by Corrine Byrd

I recently attempted to listen to the 5 am Club by Robin Sharma. Sharma is a best-selling Self-Help author who wrote another really popular series called “The Monk who Sold his Ferrari.” I have not read that one and I am sad I started with what I found out is Sharma’s worst book of all-time instead. I had heard about the book on an app I use called Blinkist, which summarizes non-fiction books into 15 minute summaries. After hearing the summary I thought I’d like to listen to the whole book because it is an allegorical story and might be entertaining while reinforcing the concepts.

However, after about 1 hour of listening I realized that this entire book is much better as a 15 minute summary and extremely dreadful as an 11 hour audio book. I was bored to tears after 1 hour, but pushed myself another 3 before I resigned to the fact that this book was going no where with no body. Unlike the amazing Beatles song which is now stuck in my head.. “he’s a real nowhere man…living in a no where land.” Wow those lyrics are 100x more profound than anything in Sharma’s book. Let me explain.

I really really wanted to like this book and be inspired by it, but it is honestly one of the worst self-help books I’ve ever tried to read or listen to. As mentioned it’s an “allegory” if you can call it that, along the lines of Pilgrim’s Promise, except with zero symbolism or plot. It uses the guise of a story of two people struggling in their career to spoon-feed and then force feed you endless “inspirational” cliques through the 3 main characters never-ending dialogue. The plot is so thin that really the story summarized is deceptively more entertaining. A man called “the artist” and a woman called “the entrepreneur” are at an inspirational seminar when a strange homeless man approaches them. At first they are confused and a little annoyed by him until he speaks with such *wisdom* (read inspirational quotes from cat posters), but they notice he has a nice watch and so they listen to him. He says he is rich and invites them to come to his private island estate, as long as they agree to meet at 5 am each day and learn about how to be successful from him. Does this sound cheesy to you at all? Well it is even cheesier than you would assume. The books continues with pretty much just describing little pieces of “action,” such as the characters seeing the pretty palm trees and grabbing coffee before meeting the homeless guy/billionaire, and then going into long monologues of the homeless guy just spouting self-help cliche’s as the other two characters interject now and then with really thoughtful dialogue such as “Wow! I never realized that by waking up early I could change my whole life!”

Its 11 hours of boring “nuggets of wisdom,” ala your most vomit worthy Hallmark card, after another. The concepts are not necessarily bad here it’s the way it’s written and presented, and the way that none of them are explained or supported with any sort of fact or further detail. It’s like Sharma forgot 5th grade where we were taught to give a statement, argument or fact in the first sentence of the paragraph and then follow it up with at least 3 or more sentences to support your statement. Instead Sharma writes like a 4th grader who just gives statement after statement with nothing, not even a fake anecdotal story to illustrate the points.

Ironically it is ALL a fake story, but it fails at all meaningful story elements like character development, conflict, character growth, symbolism, intrigue and I don’t know, name a thing stories should have, and it either misses it completely or attempts, but fails miserably.

The entire book feels like everything someone who hates self-help books would claim are the worst things about them. Cliche’, just a ploy to get money from the masses of sheeple, boring, unoriginal, a waste of time when you could be taking real action, not helpful, and a bunch of obvious material you learned by the time you were 13. This is an opinion coming from me, someone who has pretty much exclusively read and loved self-help books since age 9. I guess that’s my problem because maybe the people giving this book high ratings never read a self-help before. Maybe they have never talked to anyone about success tips or even listened to any sort of podcast or watched a youtube video, or read an article before. Other than that I can’t imagine how they would find being told “wake up and 5 am and change your life” over and over in a book with no further points to share would be “life changing” as many seem to be saying. But if you look at the Amazon reviews you will see though most are 5 stars, there are a huge growing number of 1 star reviews. It seems you either hate this book or love it. How is that possible?

Well my friends I will tell you my theory. Robin Sharma is a rich successful business man, his business is inspiration. Yes he may seem like he is pure and perfect because his books are inspiring, but writing helpful books that do good for others is not a self-less art. It’s actually a business strategy. And whether Sharma is doing this for pure intentions or out of love of the craft of…writ…no sorry can’t say it, he definitely does not write out of a love of writing or he would stop so the craft can maintain some dignity. I digress. the point is whether Sharma is writing for a “greater” purpose or not, he still is a wealthy man trying to maintain his wealth and status in the self-help world. There is nothing wrong with that at all, but I think consumers like to put writers on pedestals and act like these books are cures for diseases rather than a product the author aims to sell for a profit. With that said I believe it is highly likely, that Sharma wrote this book with a set formula of what makes a self-help book that sells. Mainly the title and the promise behind it, not necessairly the quality of writing. And my oh my did he take that seriously because the quality of writing is terrible. But beyond that I believe he marketed the heck out of this. The best ways to do that with a book, I would assume, are to get it into the hands of as many influential leaders and influencers as possible and have them give you a 5 star review. These people would be “paid” to market the book and expected to review highly as every sale likely gives them a higher percentage of income as well. Even the person recording the audiobook would be incentivized to get all his friends to review the book because he makes money off each sale too. So with Sharma’s vast network and reputation it would be easy to get 1,000s maybe even 100,000s of great reviews for his book the moment or even before its released.

Coincidentally, I did not hear about this book from a friend who loved it, but from an app I use. I later heard about it again on a podcast, recommended by you guessed it, an influencer. I trusted these sources and by doing so I fell prey to the system. And thus I finally get to what I mean by the title of this piece. How is this book ruining intelligent writing as we know it? Well, surprise surprise its not this book alone, but the power of books like this to bring wealth to writers like Sharma whether or not the content is quality.

All one needs today is to be promoted on social media by influencers and have a reputation, which again could be purchased through social media influencers. I am not saying it’s easy, or cheap, or that anyone could do it, but I am saying that its cheapening the quality of today’s literature. Since Amazon gave anyone the freedom to publish a book its no surprise that the market of books, especially e-books has been flooded with absolute trash. But when well known authors come out with garbage books for seemingly no reason other than to make money, it does even more damage. When other authors see that even a well known appreciated author like Sharma can get away with releasing terribly written books and somehow make a living doing it, well who wouldn’t want to jump on that gravy train. Goodbye high standards, if they were even still here. I was going to make a Twilight reference here, but then I realized Twilight is a golden masterpiece classic of a work compared to “The 5 am Club”.

The author could have saved us all 11 hours by just saying

“Hey my name is Robin, I practiced waking up at 5 am and even though I have no scientific or compelling evidence to show why that would also work for you, I think it would because when I did it I felt better, had more energy and accomplished so many things that now I am a millionaire.”

That actually would have been more compelling than this entire book.

In conclusion whether you think 5 am is a great time for waking or not, this book will not help you do it. It will take 5 hours of listening to a boring story before you even get to the so called magical plan this book recommends. Which let me save you some time… he wants you to wake up…at…5..am. There. Save your money and time because if you think he is going to give compelling and interesting facts or even just anecdotal evidence, he is not. If you think the story will be entertaining and what a fun way to learn while hearing a fictional story, it isn’t. You will learn waaaay more about life from reading Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time. Any fantasy book really does a way better job of teaching about life without shoving it down your throats or boring you to tears or making you want to tear your eyes out if that obnoxious billionaire says “groovy dudes” one more time.

Epilogue:

Here’s a quote from early on in the book so you can see the quality of the writing. Also I feel like this quote where a character is describing “life” could easily be applied to this book.

“It sucks. And a lot of people suck, too, man. I’m not anti-social. I’m just anti-moron. Too many dumb people around these days. Taking stupid fashion pictures of themselves with pouty lips in clothes they can’t afford. Hanging out with people (or reading books) they don’t even like.”

Also if you really really need a book to inspire you to wake up early then read “The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod its way shorter, more entertaining, better written and more useful. And if you aren’t sure whether waking up at 5 am is for you, but want to learn to have a better schedule for your needs than read “The Power of When” by Dr. Michael Breus, unlike the 5 am Club there will be actual scientific evidence and convincing anecdotal stories in these two books.