This was the 7th book I read in 2020.
Words are not enough to describe how well-written this book. Each and every sentence written in this book is so thorough that I had to read most of the sentences twice when I was reading this book. That might be one of the reasons why I took a long time to finish this book. Also, I had to take notes while reading this book, so that I don’t miss any teaching by one of the most influential orators of the modern times.
I am sure I cannot put the summary of this book in just one blog post, but I would try to mention some of the learnings I got to experience while reading this book. Trust me, it was very hard to put this together and it took me almost a couple weeks to write this blog post.
So, here we go.
Best thing about the book
The best thing of this book is that it gives you the access to the exclusive “5AM Club”. Though this club is non-existent and truly fictional, you still can’t fathom the brilliance of the motivational author Robin Sharma. The other best thing about the book is that instead of telling us what to do when we start our day, the author puts forth this learning in a conversation style, which makes you feel included and you start paying more attention; instead of reading it as an advice from the author directly.
I remember reading the book and imagining Mr. Riley, the entrepreneur, the artist, and the spellbinder standing with each other and going through the secrets of the 5AM club. Picturing each member and their dialogues made them stick with me throughout the book and I think that’s one of the reasons I could remember what the author was really trying to say!
Small & Steady wins the Race
The race of life, we are saying. I don’t think about death too much, but it is the only inevitable in our life. You are born to die, so instead of ignoring the one inevitable fact of your life, I think, after reading this book, we should all focus on the fact that we are going to die one day and should think about it. The author, very cleverly, mentions this fact in the book and it doesn’t come across as a stigma. He has mentioned in the book that the goal is not to skip the death (which you can’t do. PERIOD!), the goal is to delay the death as much as you can. You can delay with inevitable truth/fact by waking up early and following the 20/20/20 formula.
Step outside your comfort zone
For me, personally, this was the biggest learning from this book. Through this book, the author, I don’t know how many times, has mentioned to the entrepreneur and the artist through the billionaire to step outside their comfort zone.
The author went through the depths of advantages of stepping out of your comfort zone. Through the billionaire, giving his own examples as to how he multiplied his net worth just by stepping out of his comfort zone and making sure the decisions he took were well studied and thorough.
Stepping out of your comfort zone has not only the financial, but the physical gains too. With the kind of activities that you can do with your body, the billionaire mentioned that he does 1,000 push-ups everyday. This is definitely like stepping out of your comfort zone and pushing it through the rigor of physical activities such as push-ups, sit-ups, burpees, etc. If you just follow this one rule, you would just surprise yourselves with the shocking positive results.
The four internal pillars to SUCCESS – Mindset, Heartset, Healthset, Soulset
This was an interesting find for me. I never knew there was something more than the Mindset. While reading all the other books and online articles on personality development, every single author had talked about how important your Mindset is to achieve something in your life. I am a firm believer of the thought – “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it”. That was one of the biggest mantras for me to land in the US and live the kind of life that I wanted and grew up imagining.
Until I read this book.
Mr. Sharma mentioned your Mindset is important, but there are other “sets” too which are equally important and those are – Heartset, Healthset, and Soulset.
The author mentioned if we want to win and live a successful life, we must work *daily* on strengthening the four pillars of success, tying back to the above point Small & Steady wins the race. He mentioned if a small effort done consistently over a period of time, leads to incredible efforts.
I will try to put these four pillars in a few words. Hope I could do justice to the depths the author had gone through while trying to explain the benefits of these pillars.
Mindset – Waking up early *everyday* (before 5AM) strengthen your mind and gives it the fuel that it needs to lead a healthy and strong life
Heartset – Waking up early *everyday* helps you strengthen your heart and gives you immense appreciation of small and trivial things in your life
Healthset – Waking up early *everyday* and working on your physical health gives you an added advantage, which you can use to live longer. You will die one day, but the waking up early helps you delay that inevitable
Soulset – Waking up early *everyday* and taking care of your morning routine, gives you enough time to spend with the family and friends and lead and live a life that others can only dream of
The gist of the book – 20/20/20 strategy
What a game changing method to revolutionize your life.
I will not mention my thoughts here and quote literally the author, because, I don’t want to collude author’s work and try to overshadow the importance of the message.
The author has mentioned roughly for 200 pages the secret to living a healthy, wealthy, free, and educated life is to utilize your victory hour everyday for the rest of your life and the victory hour that he mentioned is the period between 5AM and 6AM.
After mentioning that countless times, I, like every reader, got anxious about what the actual schedule/formula looked like and when I read Chapter 13 finally, then I realized the genius of the author. The author presented this formula in such a simple manner that I couldn’t help but bow down to him.
Without further ado, here’s what he mentions in the book while giving away the method to own your victory hour.
It is a three bracket formula. Each bracket is of 20 minutes each.
First 20 minutes – Move (Exercise – MUST SWEAT)
Middle 20 minutes – Reflect (Journal/Pray/Meditate)
Last 20 minutes – Grow (Read/Study/Review Goals)
I want you to pay special attention to the above three lines, that’s why I have put them in bold alphabets. Please note that I haven’t tried explaining anything and kept it as is from the book – giving you the importance of these three brackets and what to do with it.
I will stop here now with the hope that this will be helpful at least one single reader. And putting all the important and cool pictures from the book down below. Enjoy!
stochasticity 
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