443 - Robin Sharma On The Extraordinary Benefits Of Waking Up at 5am

0:00Hey, are you feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, or just drowning in busy work and still not making the money you deserve? In this brand new training, you're going to learn three super common mistakes that can kill your productivity and tank your profits and how to stop them fast. Just go to MarieForleo.com slash free class or scan the QR code on your screen right now. Robin, thank you so much for taking the journey to be here. Thank you, Marie. So I want to talk about the 5AM Club and we're going to dive deep into that. But first, for those that don't know your story and your journey, I feel like there's so many people in our audience that may find themselves in the position that you once were in a career that you're like, this isn't necessarily me.

0:42Can you take us back to those days and tell us a little bit about how you started out and what that transition was like from being in a place that didn't feel aligned with who you ultimately were to the career that you have today? Sure. You know, I think, Marie, life's greatest heartbreak is being untrue to yourself. and I come from very humble beginnings. I have a great family and yet the people around me said if you become a lawyer, like I basically had a choice, become an engineer, a doctor or a lawyer and so I followed through on that and I went to law school and I became a really successful litigation lawyer and I had a nice place to live and I had a nice car and I was making great money and people said, you're on your way to being a judge.

1:28And yet I would wake up every morning and I would look at myself in the bathroom mirror and I didn't like or even know the person who was looking back at me. And I love that word angst. You know, that angst just got to a point where I said I had to make some changes. And so I started listening to that silent whisper of my heart. You know, there's something I believe in, which is instinct is much more powerful and wiser than intellect. And I think when all of us trust our instinct in a world that says intellect and logic is everything, we start to enter what Mr. Riley in the 5am club calls the magic.

2:08And that's sort of what happened to me. And so did you know what you wanted to do instead of your law career? Or did you have, was there like a period of transition? I know for me, when I was on Wall Street and I worked in magazines, I kept hearing that little voice of like, this is not where you're supposed to be. This is not who you're meant to be in the world and not the work that you're meant to do. But I was really frustrated because I didn't have, I was like, well, can you please tell me what else I'm supposed to do? And it took me years to kind of find my path. So I was curious about if you had clarity in that moment, or if you had to kind of take a journey around to find some discovery and what else you could do.

2:42Yeah. And I totally hear what you're saying. I find your destiny doesn't knock, it whispers. and so it wasn't this epiphany you know it was just um i think when you start to trust your instinct and trust yourself versus the world and you sort of block out the opinions of other people the pace of synchronicity starts to open up and these doors that you're supposed to walk through start to present themselves to you so what happened to me was i just started i mean the angst and the pain and the confusion and by the way i think confusion has a bad rap in society anyone on a path to growth and self-excavation and personal mastery is going to be confused all the time because the very nature of leaving your safe harbor of the known going out to blue ocean where possibility lives constantly means you're going to be out in the unknown which is where fear lives but on the other side of your fear is your freedom and so I started you know paying attention to that angst and that confusion yeah and I went I went to books you know I went to books and I started interviewing people who were financially successful as well as emotionally successful and spiritually successful.

3:52And I started putting together this new philosophy for living. And then as we know, ideation with that execution is delusion. And so I started living what I learned step by step and I started changing the way that I lived. And given my, you know, air quotes transformation, I said, I want to share my message with other people. so I self-published a little book called uh mega living that was actually my first book and I had super cheesy title 30 days to a perfect life yeah and I had this little passport picture on the front and it was poorly designed and the type was so small you couldn't read it I had 3 ,000 copies that were published and they sat in my in my little dining room and that book started selling and then I self-published a book called The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari in a Kinko's copy shop.

4:44My mom was my editor. My father helped me sell it at service clubs. One, just one book at a time. And that sort of led into a whole new, a whole new reality for me, a whole new career for me. What's so cool about that is when I started my journey, I remember I first published an ebook, which was new at the time, right? This is like the late nineties. And I just remember that journey and it turned from an ebook into a self-published book. And my parents helped me get it out into the world and shrink-wrapped it. And I just look back at those days and it was so cool, like the beginnings and then to see where it could go.

5:19So thank you for sharing that because I know so many people listening right now might have, whether they want to transition into a career where they share their thoughts and ideas or they want to just transition into being an artist or maybe an engineer or maybe a lawyer, just to understand that it takes time and that it's okay to start humbly and you can go to great places and you just have to listen to that instinct. I want to transition into The 5am Club because you've shared that this book took you four years to write. So how is this process different than your other books? You know, I wanted The 5am Club to be the most beautiful, content-rich, handcrafted book I've ever done.

6:04Now, whether that happened or not is up to the readers. One of my favorite books is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. I don't know if you've read it, but it's just a masterpiece of philosophy. And one of the things that I read about Khalil Gibran is he carried the manuscript around with him for five years because he wanted every single line to be the best line he could possibly handcraft. And so that was my intention with the 5AM Club. So I wrote it in Rome, which is one of my favorite places in the world. I wrote it in Mauritius. I wrote it in Russia. I wrote it in Sao Paulo. I wrote it in Switzerland.

6:39And it was just this beautiful, dangerous, messy, confusing, inspirational process where I just wrote to try to make it the best piece of work I could do. I faced self-doubt. I faced people who looked at the content and said, you know, okay, everyone's talking about mindset. You're talking about these four interior empires that the book is based upon. mindset, hearts, and health set and soul set. What's that all about? I tried to have images, like little pieces of art in there. I have these frameworks on exponential productivity and elite performance. And then towards the end of the book, there are those 11 letters from Mr.

7:15Riley, the eccentric tycoon talking about entering the magic and the mysticism of prosperity and, and philosophy on living a life that soars and sings and has an impact and is beautiful. And so it's, you know, I just tried to write from the deepest, most honest, honorable place I could because I think the world is in a very messy place right now. I think a lot of people are bored and struggling and exhausted. And I think, and this isn't a platitude. I think every single human being has this, this bigness and this bravery and this creativity and this magic inside of them. And I've experienced it in my life, not every day, but I've experienced it.

7:54and I wanted to share with people how they can enter it in their own lives. And so was the process hard for you because you feel like it was a different style of writing or was it hard just because of travel and balancing the business? Like I want to, I'm trying to understand a little bit more about what made this one more difficult or different than the others for you because you've written a lot, you've written a ton of books. Yeah, it's a very great question. It was different for me. it was different for me because a lot of my other books, it was sort of teaching. Yeah. And what I tried to do in this book is balance.

8:30How do you master the world by first honoring and building intimacy with your primal hero? It was, it was a hard book because I wanted to go deeper. Yeah. It was a hard book because there are a lot of new concepts that I believe are disruptive to the field of personal development and elite performance. And there was a lot of self-doubt as well when I wrote this book. Because I think when you try to present anything new to the world, you're going to doubt yourself. And also, to be completely candid as I always want to be, I hadn't written a book for roughly 10 years. Interesting. I didn't know that.

9:12Yeah, and so I really had focused more on other things. And there were people who were saying, well, his best days are over. Oh, he's the monk who sold his Ferrari or the greatness guide or the leader who had no title, but he's not an author anymore. And perhaps he's not relevant anymore. And so I felt that challenge. I wanted to do something that was, you know, something that was hopefully special. Yeah, I think you really accomplished it. You know, before the cameras turned on, I really, really enjoyed it. But I think what you just mentioned there is important because so many of us, no matter what stage of life we're at, I remember when I was in my early 20s having this constant voice in my head like, you're too old.

9:53You're too old already. Like you haven't done X, Y, or Z by 22 or 23, which now sounds absolutely just – I could slap myself, right, going back. But I think that is one of the most prevalent undercurrents of anxiety and fear in our culture is a fear of irrelevance and somehow that our best days are behind us. So thank you for sharing that because it's something that I think all of us, if we haven't faced it yet, it's definitely coming. Yeah. And I think that's an important point, which is I think we live in a world where the seduction is to push a thousand pieces of mediocrity versus deliver one piece of mastery.

10:31And what I mean by that is if you spend 20 years on one book, but it is the greatest book that you could possibly do, then that's a win. And by the way, even if the world doesn't applaud what you bring to the world, if you've delivered your piece of magic to the world, your Sistine Chapel ceiling to the world, you've won. Yes. You know, we live in this world that is much more about egoism versus heroism. And I think heroism is it's really the race is really a race against yourself. I'm not that into applause and and, you know, worldly accolades. I think if you feel you've done your best and you've been true to your creativity and you've lived by your values and you've released what you believe to be magic to the world and you've done your best to raise others while you've honored yourself, you're a hero.

11:19You've won. You know, it doesn't matter if you're an army of one. I mean, Van Gogh didn't, I believe Van Gogh didn't sell one piece of art while he was alive. Yeah. So let's talk about the 5 a.m. club specifically. I love the subtitle, which is Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life. So is this a practice for you that you had not only experienced for yourself and the transformative nature of it, but clearly you've taught it to other people? Were you like, goodness, if people could just get this one thing? You know, obviously there's so much more in the book than just the 5 a.m. club idea, which I wanted to dive into.

11:51But there's something, I mean, that's the title of your book. So was this practice itself so transformative or like this is what the next book has to be about? Absolutely. I have two children, Colby and Bianca. And if there was one morning ritual, if there was one habit or if there was one piece of advice, not that they listened to my advice, but if there was one piece of advice I'd ask them to listen to, it's rise before the sun. There is a reason many of the great women and men of the world, the great history makers, the great poets, the great philosophers, the great movement makers rose before the sun.

12:23There is a magic in the air at 5 a.m. And that's why the 5 a.m. club is so transformational, because it's the time of greatest quietude. And I believe tranquility is the new luxury on our planet. It is the time of intimate creativity because you've just been rested. Your brain is fresh. There's latest, there's very recent cutting edge science coming out. Now, when you sleep, your brain actually has a mechanism to wash itself. When you wake up in the morning, your willpower is strongest. When you wake up in the morning, you've got a full well of mental focus. And we know that focus in our world is even more valuable than intelligence.

13:01And I could go on and on on the benefits. I mean, you get up at 5 a.m., you've got the world to yourself. There's no crowds. You can think. You can plan. You can care for yourself in a world where so many people are so depleted. And so the 5 a.m. club really is a game changer. And then it's not just get up at 5 a.m. and, you know, scratch your stomach or stare up at the ceiling. Or look at your phone. Or look at, especially not, I believe you can play with your phone or change the world. You don't get to do both. Yeah. And so the 5 a.m. club method is based on the 2020 formula. I'm happy to get into it.

13:36But that is the revolutionizer. Yeah, tell us what it is. That's the revolutionizer. And it started from my experience with working with many billionaires. I've coached many of the most successful financiers and titans of industry for over two decades. And one of the things I would run them through is the way you begin your day sets up the way you live your day. And so the 20-20-20 formula that the book is based upon is pretty simple. I go into great detail in the book, but essentially it's from 5 to 5-20, the first pocket is move. And I'm a fanatic about neuroscience. And why do you get up and move?

14:12Because you're going to release serotonin, which is going to make you feel better. You're going to release dopamine, which is the pleasure and inspirational neurotransmitter. You're going to release norepinephrine, which will boost your focus. You'll promote neurogenesis. Marie, you can actually grow new brain cells. You can increase your metabolic rate. So the way you feel when you first wake up is not the way you're going to feel at 520. Second pocket of the 20-20-20 formula, 20 minutes from 520 to 540, that's on reflection. So a lot of us are busy, but what's the point of being busy if you're doing the wrong things?

14:47The billionaires, the great creatives, the people of great impact, the people who live beautiful lives are very intentional. They're very deliberate. They're very conscious. So for 20 minutes, you write in a journal. You can visualize. You can pray. You can meditate. You can simply contemplate how you're going to live your day, what you want to stand for during the day, for example. And then the final pocket of the 2020-20 formula is all about grow. And that's where you just read from a biography or a business book or a philosophy book or a... Or watch a MarieTV. Well, especially watching MarieTV.

15:23Yeah, of course. That's the game changer, isn't it? And so that's 20 minutes of growing because I think we're most alive when we are growing. Yes. And I believe the leader who learns the most wins. So that's in a nutshell the 2020-20 formula. I loved it. And I loved how you weaved this tale and this wonderful narrative in with all the teaching. And I wanted to share that. So one of the gifts I've developed from doing this show for almost a decade now is I can almost hear when folks are like, oh, wait. So for my audience who's thinking, all right, Robin, this sounds good, waking up at 5 a.m., but what about the fact that I have, you know, tiny babies and a dog that just threw up and all of these kind of concerns or constraints that I don't think I can do this?

16:06What do you say to people when they're like, that just sounds too hard? Well, you know, the pathway to world class is hard. I think suffering has got a bad rap. I think difficulty, you look at any, you know, great athlete, for example, they understand that challenge, difficulty, grit, persistence, wiring in new habits, morning rituals, evening routines are the price of admission for world class. And so let's go to the research again. And University College London says it takes 66 days of practice to wire in a new habit. In other words, the gift of genius is not genius. The gift of genius is actually neuroplasticity.

16:50In other words, we have a brain that can grow. It's sort of plastic. It's malleable. The good news is that's not just for Kanye and Beyonce and Federer and Oprah and Phil Knight. Every one of us has that capability in our brain to build genius. So what I'm suggesting is anyone who wants to get up early so they get an extra hour and they can do the things that we're talking about, practice it for 66 days until you will reach what researchers call a state of automaticity. where it actually gets easier to get up at 5 a.m. than not to get up at 5 a.m. And so in the book, one of the brain tattoos is all change is hard at first, and it's messy in the middle, and it's gorgeous at the end.

17:35And everything, Marie, that we now find easy, we once found difficult. We do have the ability to wire in new habits, and joining the 5 a.m. club is simply the best habit anyone can wire in to lead to an upward spiral of success for greater productivity, better health, more peace of mind, more happiness, and living a much more high impact life. Yeah. It's the one thing I'll tell you, getting up early in order to write my book, that was the only way I could get it done. And I knew it was going to be a hard journey, but it was such a beautiful time for me that those moments when it's still dark out and when And it's so silent and so peaceful.

18:18And I remember it was honestly so transformative for me. And I kept up the practice after finishing the book because it's worked so well. So yeah, thank you for that. So I love that you share too. And we talked about this a little bit, but I feel like we need to go back to it. Actually, I want to go here first. You share in the book, one of the rules, when faced with a choice, always choose the one that pushes you the most, increases your growth and promotes the unfoldment of your gifts, talents, and personal prowess. I agree with you on kind of running towards that, which is challenging or difficult.

18:50And I feel like there's a balance. It's like for anyone listening going, you know, are you guys telling us to make everything so hard? It's like, no, there's kind of this zone, I think, where you stretch yourself and you see what you're capable of. It's not pushing it over where you get injured or you get sick or you get burnt out. But in your career, have you noticed that when you've taken that path towards growth, with your life. Oh my goodness, look at all I can accomplish now. Yeah, absolutely. I think a bad day for the ego is a great day for the soul. And, you know, you were talking about people who say, well, maybe, you know, maybe I don't want to get up at 5am.

19:25It's not for me. And here's why I can't do it. And one thing I've realized is we, we become victims when we recite our excuses and we recite them so many times, we actually believe they are true. And I think you can cling to your excuses or you can go out there and have an impact and live a fulfilling life and be highly creative and enjoy the magic life, but you don't get to do both. And so you're right. No one's saying, you know, burn yourself out and hurt yourself or anything like that. I think there's a whole chapter in the 5am club on the essentialness of rest. I believe that elite performance without deep recovery leads to depletion of all your assets of genius.

20:10So I think it's self-awareness to know when should you rest, when should you pull back, when should you give up from a project, or when you should just continue past your limits so you can find new horizons. And that's about getting to know yourself. But I think growth comes from stretching ourselves. And one thing, I mean, often we talk about physically, but in the book, I think one of the disruptive ideas are the four interior empires. And if I may, I'd just love to get into it because everyone's talking about mindset, you know, like everything is a mindset, change your thinking, change your life.

20:44And I think that comes from a lot of messaging from men, candidly. And we are more than just our mindset because our mindset is our psychology, but a human being is mindset. And then what I call heart set, which is your emotionality. and then your health set, which is your physicality, and then your soul set, which is your spirituality. And if you really want to master yourself and honor these four interior empires so that you experience other exterior empires, then it's not just mindset. It's, yes, that's only 25%. Yes, you want to work on your psychology and be a positive thinker and install the beliefs of prosperity and elite performance.

21:24but you can have a great mindset and if you have a toxic heart set because you have pain, shame, heartbreak, anger, sorrow, then that's why you're not going to get traction around your ambitions. And so in the book I explain how to calibrate the mindset, how to purify your heart set and then how to optimize your health set and then I'm going to be a little dangerous here if I how to escalate your soul set now people might be you know i know you speak to a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of creative people so they might say well robin soul set isn't relevant to me and i would with with humility and respect say it's it's essential to everyone because soul set is nothing mystical and it's nothing religious soul set is about saying i am going to turn down the voice of my ego through my deep inner work so that the primal hero and highest part of me runs my life.

22:25Soul set is about saying life is short. Before I know it, no matter how long I live, I'm going to be dust. How can I serve as many people as possible? Soul set is about finding a cause that is bigger than your life that you're going to donate the rest of your life to. I suggest to you, when you calibrate your soul set, you become a force of nature on the planet that becomes undefeatable. And yet people don't really focus on soul set. Yeah. No, it's a, well, I loved it in the book. And I actually think our audience is really tapped into this and they're going to love that reaffirmation of it. So you also share a lot of people are spending their best hours of their best days playing with their phones.

23:07And I loved this line, your phone is costing you your fortune. So let's talk about cyber zombies and distractions and the epidemic of mistakes being made at work. I thought this was really interesting. Josh, my man and I, we often talk about this like just in our personal lives where just dealing with whatever it is, the cable company, you know, the kind of day-to-day stuff. And we're always like, did people always make this many mistakes? It feels like the errors in every single facet of every single industry have skyrocketed way more than I've ever noticed as an adult. So I wanna, we can go wherever you wanna go with this, But you were one of the first people that talked about that, the kind of epidemic of just shoddy, crappy work and mistakes that are being made.

23:51And I believe, I think as you do, a lot of it has to do with distraction and technology in our phones. For sure. And you're right. Now it's very popular to talk about the addiction to technology. I've been talking about it for over 10 years. And one of my brain tattoos that I share in the book is an addiction to distraction is the death of your creative production. and we all know about the dopamine addiction that happens when you play with your phone i mean it taps into the nucleus accumbens of the brain which is the reward center and so every time we look for like every time we play with a phone every time we respond to a notification there's a shot of dopamine that creates a habit and then over time the habit turns into an addiction that is just as powerful as an addiction to cocaine.

24:38So everyone who can't break free if their technology is like a cocaine addict, they are hooked to their phone versus hooked to their projects and hooked to their values and hooked to doing something that's going to allow them to feel amazing about their lives at the end. And so there's, this could be helpful to your, to your viewers and listeners, but there's a concept known as attention residue. And every single time you respond to a notification every single time you look at your phone you deliver or give a piece of your priceless attention to that notification and if you do it a hundred times a day then by the end of the day you have zero focus I was in a in a high quality hotel relatively recently and I ordered a large bottle of Evian water and I kid you not they delivered 11 bottles of Evian water you want to talk about the mistakes being made it is stunning there are very few people who are fully present.

25:37And yet one of the traits of the great geniuses is this, they could spend long stretches of time in acute focus, thinking about one project free of distraction. And then in the book, I talk about the model, it's called transient hypofrontality, which is really flow state. We all can tap into flow state where genius lives, but you don't get to do there if you're checking your phone all day long. Yeah, totally. And in terms of those mistakes, I find that in terms of economics, like what that's costing us globally, I can't even make me want to throw up. And then just when it comes to business and just being your best in the world, sometimes it's like if someone actually just shows up and does what they say they were going to do, like they show up on time, they actually fall through.

26:27I'm like, wow, they're amazing. But they've just met the bar of like what's expected. Anyway, I think there's just an opportunity for people when they bring their full presence and their heart to their work. You will be seen now, given the landscape, as extraordinary. In the 5am club, I call it a GCA, a gargantuan competitive advantage. It has never been so uncrowded at world class because so few people are doing the fundamentals of world-class. So few people literally sit down in blocks of time, create what I call a tight bubble of total focus and do real work versus fake work. And then I think you were hinting at this, but right now, I mean, there's so much loneliness on the planet.

27:12We are so technologically connected. And yet how many people do you meet, Marie, that are so, cellularly present that just by their listening or just by their being, you feel safer around them? It's pretty rare. And I will say one of the things that I love about Team Forleo, I'm just going to brag on them for a minute, that it's our culture here. And I think that's why so many of the folks that we work with are so happy at work because we actually pay attention to each other and we're like really present. But to, to your point, it's transformative in so many ways. And just that ability to be here.