The 5AM Club

📝 Notes

• Stay frozen in average and succumb to the mass mediocritization of behavior.
• As you grew up, you forgot how to be human. You forgot how to be bold and enthusiastic and loving and wildly alive. Your precious reservoirs of hope faded. Being ordinary became acceptable. The lamp of your creativity, your positivity and your intimacy with your greatness grew dim as you began to worry about fitting in, having more than others and being popular. As you grow up, you’ll die at thirty but will be buried at eighty.
• World-class begins where your comfort zone ends is a rule the successful, the influential and the happiest always remember.
• A major key to happiness and internal peace is knowing you’ve done whatever it took to earn your rewards and passionately invested the effortful audacity to become your best.
• The rich invest in time. The poor invest in money.
• Recognize the importance of being around only the highest quality.
• Results are much less about your inherited genetics and far more about your daily habits. And your morning ritual is by far the most essential one to calibrate.
• If everything seems under control you’re not going fast enough.
• Obstacles are nothing more than tests designed to measure how seriously you want the rewards that your ambitions seek. They show up to determine how willing you are to improve into the kind of person who can hold that amount of success. Failure’s just growth in wolf’s clothing.
• Most people can’t stand themselves. So, they can never be alone. And silent. They need to constantly be with other people to escape their feelings of self-hatred over all their wasted potential, missing the wonders and wisdom that solitude and quiet bring.
• I’d rather live a thoughtful life. A risky life. A real life. An artist’s life.
• The soreness of growth is so much less expensive than the devastating costs of regret.
• As we grow old, we shift from seeking legitimacy in society to constructing a meaningful legacy. The last fifty years then become less about me and more about we. Less about selfishness and more about service. We stop adding more things into our lives and begin to subtract—and simplify. We learn to savor simple beauty, experience gratitude for small miracles, appreciate the priceless value of peace of mind, spend more time cultivating human connections and come to understand that the one who gives the most is victorious. But some people still evaluate their achievement by what they’ve collected versus by the character they’ve cultivated. They compare themselves to the orchestrated—and fake—highlight reels presented by the people they follow. They measure their self-worth by their net worth. And they get kidnapped by the false thought that because something has never been done it can’t be done—depleting the grand and electrifying possibilities their lives are meant to become. This explains why the majority is sinking in the quicksand of uncertainty, boredom, distraction and complexity.
• Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
• You must start doing what 95% of people are unwilling to do. As you start to live like this, the majority will call you crazy. Remember that being labeled a freak is the price of greatness.
• A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.
• Married to the complacency of the ordinary and wedded to the shackles of conformity.
• Pure leaders are so secure in their own skin their main mission is the elevation of others. They have such self-respect, joyfulness and peacefulness within themselves that they don’t need to advertise their success to society in a feeble attempt to feel a little better.
• When we are young we sacrifice our health for wealth and when we grow old and wise we realize what’s most important — and become willing to sacrifice all our wealth for even one day of good health.
• The very gifts of seeing a vision few else could see, holding themselves to the absolute highest of standards, being content alone for long stretches of time as they worked monomaniacally detailing the most minor points on their projects, behaving relentlessly in following through on their masterpieces, acting with rarely seen self-discipline and listening to their hearts while ignoring their critics made personal relationships hard. They were misunderstood and seen as ‘difficult’ and ‘different,’ ‘rigid’ and ‘unbalanced.’”
• There’s a ton of competition at ordinary, but there’s almost none at extraordinary. There’s never been such a glamorous opportunity to become peerless because so few people are dedicated to world-class in this age of such scattered focus, eroded values and deteriorated faith in ourselves along with the inherent primal power we hold. How often do you meet someone at a store or in a restaurant who is fully present, astoundingly polite, unusually knowledgeable, full of enthusiasm, incredibly hardworking, intensely imaginative, noticeably inventive and gaspworthily great at what they do?
• You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.
• Don’t be timid when it comes to your ambitions. Stop wasting time on insanely trivial things.
• You’ll never rise higher than your personal story. Important insight there.
• Most people take the limits of their vision to be the limits of the world. A few do not. Join them.
• No one will believe in our ability to do great things until we first believe in our greatness and then put in the sincere and rigorous effort to realize it.
• There’s a staggering difference between being busy and being productive.
• They don’t diffuse their cognitive bandwidth. They don’t dilute their creative gifts chasing every shiny diversion and every attractive opportunity that comes their way. No, instead they exercise the fierce discipline required to do only a few things—but at an absolutely world-class level.
• Getting up at dawn is perfect self-control training.
• The way you practice in private is precisely the way you’ll perform once you’re in public.
• Anyone can be great for a minute. The sport of icons is sustaining genius-grade performance over a lifetime.
• Real leaders always feel great joy when they shine a light on the talents of others.
• They pushed their potential fiercely. They were ambitious, ceaseless and ferocious when it came to the complete capitalization of their grandest potential. The Latin root of the word ‘passion’ means to ‘suffer.’
• The single best way to build your willpower is to voluntarily put yourself into conditions of discomfort. Cold showers every morning.
• I’m not afraid of failing. That’s just part of learning to fly. I’m just horrified of not growing.
• If you knew how much work went into it, you would not call it genius. Everyone dreams of being a legend until it comes time to do the work that legends do.
• The five primary assets that all superproducers defend are mental focus, physical energy, personal willpower, original talent and daily time.
• Schedule yourself to invest the first ninety minutes of your workday on the one activity that, when completed at world-class, will cause you to own your field.
• Fill your life with exceptionally excellent, enterprising, healthy, positive, ethical and sincerely loving people.
• Tell people how proud you are of them and how much you love them while you—and they—are still alive.
• We must persist. We must continue. We must stay strong. We must live our luminous nature. And magnify our sovereign selves. Even if it feels the whole world is against us. This is truly what makes us human beings. Even if it seems the light will never transcend the darkness, keep making your walk to freedom.