5AM Club: 66 Days Challenge [Day 1]

Have you heard of the 5AM Club?

Based on an inspirational fiction book by @robinsharma, the story tells of the struggles of the characters, how they chance upon this opportunity to turn their lives around and learn the secrets of the 5AM club to operate at world-class.

I've heard of this book for a while but didn't get around to reading it till now. I like the useful advices in Robin Sharma's books ever since I started reading his "Monk who sold his Ferrari" series. They are self-help books written in fictional, third-person perspective which I find very engaging and relatable, as compared to the usual self-help books that address the readers directly.

The flowery language of the 5AM Club aside (which I find a tad too much), the contents resonated so much with me that I'm inspired to start my own 66 days challenge of the 5AM Club.

Why 66 days? According to the book, it takes 66 days for a habit to be ingrained to reach a point of automaticity, based on a research by University College London.

The main strategy of the 5AM Club is to harness the golden hour between 5 - 6am well through the 20/20/20 strategy.

The gist of that can be summarised by this beautiful quote from the book:

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

So, what's the 20/20/20 strategy?

To put it simply, it's dividing your golden hour into 3 pockets of 20 minutes each.

Pocket #1: MOVE - move your body through intense exercise so that you sweat. This wakes up the body and primes it to optimal mode to operate the rest of the day.

Pocket #2: REFLECT - meditate and reflect through the use of gratitude practice and journaling, as well as scripting your blue-print of the day. This clarifies the brain and set intent and focus for the day ahead.

Pocket #3: GROW - ingest knowledge through books, audio, podcasts etc. Grow your knowledge and never stop learning.

There are also many (and I really mean a tonne!) other tactics and concepts shared in the book which one can adopt through the course of the day. I will slowly share them over my 66 days but that would mean rereading the books many times in order to familiarise myself with them!

Right now, I'm only picking one of them, known as the 90/90/1 method:

You focus the first 90 minutes of your work hours for 90 days on 1 single task.

Instead of diluting your focus and resources on many tasks, focus on the 1 task to grow mastery.

I've decided to dedicate this 90 minutes on drawing. To commit to growing my skills and at the same time, finish up all the motifs and video lessons purchased in the last 3 years because of #fomo 😂

Prior to this, I had already built the habit of waking up at 5ish since February. I basically do something similar to the 20/20/20 strategy. The only thing is I don't have a structure that I follow and usually start the day with journaling to brain dump my thoughts. My brain goes into overdrive the moment I wake up so the journaling really helps clarify my thoughts and plan my time.

It did help me to some extend but I still feel like I am floating around from day to day. I think the problem lies with me not having focus and overscheduling my days. I always end up feeling like a loser because I clearly can't finish 200 tasks in a single day.

Stop managing your time and start managing your focus.