“The 5 A.M. Club” by Robin Sharma is a self-help text told through a fictional format, following the journey of an entrepreneur and an artist who meet an intelligent billionaire. This story teaches the art of waking up early and the significance behind it, why it is so crucial to one’s life. Through narrative, it also highlights the idea that small daily and seemingly insignificant improvements yield staggering results.
A lot of the time, we feel like we need to change everything about our lives to improve ourselves, but this is not realistic and, more than you may realize, practically impossible to achieve. We must make small changes that are sustainable, changes that we can follow without overwhelming ourselves, so that self-improvement is attainable and within reach. This reiterates the concept of becoming 1% better.
If you incorporate little changes to get 1% better for every single day of the month, such as making your bed every morning, to improve your quality of life, you will have become 30% better by the end of the month. Sharma says, “The smallest of implementations is always worth more than the grandest of intentions.” None of the things you decide to do have to be revolutionary or cause major shifts in your daily schedule, they should be just enough to push you to be more productive throughout the day.
Picture a graph with a line gradually moving upwards, illustrating an increase over time; this is 1% better. Gradual, yet consistent advancement of choices you make in your day-to-day life that will ultimately produce significant, life-changing outcomes. Some ways to become 1% better include incorporating a daily walk, reading 5-10 pages of affirmative action a day, listening to a podcast, laying out your clothing for the next day, and plenty more. Another example that applies to many people is bringing any dishes that have been collected in your room, into the kitchen to be cleaned for another day’s use. This is something very small you can do that takes less than 5 minutes, but can help reduce anxiety and get rid of clutter in your area, allowing for a cleaner, more open space. This small change is a manageable task you can build into a habit.
Initiating these little changes resembles the creation of a spiderweb, as enacting change connects to the quality of your life and impacts many aspects like feelings, thoughts, and actions you may perform without even realizing. These potential changes help set your daily intention and allow your brain to work out the steps of each action. Additionally, with 1% better, you can choose whether a habit is daily or situational, meaning within routine or based on a situation. For instance, a daily habit may be picking out clothes the night before school, while bringing down dishes from your room may not be something to do at the end of each day.
Choosing to implement change is half of the battle. Think about your life and which area you’ve been wanting to improve, narrow your options down, and when coming up with something to incorporate, be intentional. This means choosing a task that is small yet effective, a 1% that can be realistically integrated into your daily life. Performing something intense or mentally overwhelming may be draining and even discouraging, which isn’t optimal for the long term since the goal here is consistency, not immediate change or perfection. A task could even be as simple as clearing off that one chair you pile clothes on, procrastinating to put them away whenever you see the pile start back up again. This is a suitable one because it’s not the most time-consuming or strenuous, yet it is a buildable habit that you can easily master. At first it may feel like an annoyance; however, with daily incorporation it will soon be achieved habitually, which is holistically what the 1% better ideal preaches. You will also reap the benefits of completing the task, which may be a cleaner space or even better closet organization. It is essential to understand that the changes you choose to integrate are not at all random.
Habit Stacking
Building habits into your everyday life can be difficult to remain consistent with; however, there are tricks to get around this. Habit stacking is a concept that makes “1% better” easier to accomplish. It is the act of taking something you know you have to do and pairing it with something that you get to do or want to do. For instance, cooking, doing laundry, cleaning your room, and doing dishes may be things you have to do, but pairing these tasks with something you get to do or want to do like calling a friend, listening to an audiobook, watching TV, or listening to music can make you enjoy the productive and must-do moments a little more than you’d generally expect.
For instance, if doing dishes is a daily chore you’re expected to complete each day, but aside from that, you also have a desire to work on or build the relationships you have in your life, your habit stack may be doing the dishes while calling a friend or parent on the phone. This is guaranteed to make the task fly by and give rise to a deeper appreciation for the moments you don’t normally look forward to or think twice about.
Whether you are able to realize this from the get-go or not, you are actively optimizing your life and setting yourself up for success while performing your daily 1 percent activities. This is because not only are you making your life easier and reducing stress, you are also teaching yourself discipline, spending less time on procrastination or deciding what to do next by saving mental energy for more complex decisions, promoting long-term goals, improving your health and well-being, and increasing confidence. These skills reinforce lasting change and help you in various situations you may potentially encounter.
Implementing change is similar to the lottery in the sense that you put yourself out there to go and get that “ticket,” make that change. This improves your chances of finding solutions that will blow your mind and change the trajectory of your way of life.
Early Bird Benefits
For many high school students, a difficult concept to accept is the idea that waking up early will change their lives; however, no matter how reluctant you are to admit it, this is true. The reason for that is that students from freshman year to senior year are 9 times out of 10 expected to rise early for school or other outside of school commitments, dreading the early wake up that awaits them after a less-than-ideal amount of sleep. In life, we give so much of ourselves to so many things, like work, relationships, etc., that require our time and attention. By doing this, we put ourselves on the back burner and, as a result, aren’t given as much time to focus on ourselves and grow as people, learn, or even just sit and relax. While waking up early won’t automatically make you productive or change your walk of life, it will provide you with that time to do so, and it’s what you do with that time that makes it really count.
Waking up early is powerful in the sense that it gives you time to achieve personal goals you might be saying you want to do, but haven’t had the time to. For example, learning something new, taking a walk, or simply laying back to drink coffee and have a peaceful morning are all possible. When you say “I don’t have the time to do this” or “I don’t have the time to do that,” you’re correct, and that is exactly why you must recognize you’re the only one responsible for creating that time.
Building the habit of waking up early can even lower anxiety by permitting you time to be productive in a frame that will not be disrupted. Again, you must be intentional about what you choose to do with the time dedicated solely to you. Choose your habit stack. Choose your 1% better. Waking up early will not immediately make you fruitful or set you up for success. It’s about how you manage your time. If there is anything you aren’t able to complete at night, see if it’s possible to make time for it in the morning when you have a full cup of willpower.
Willpower
This all ties back to the concept of willpower. Every day you wake up, you wake up with a full glass of water on your bedside table, but as you go through your day’s activities, you slowly deplete the willpower storage that you started with. This is why we usually say things like “I’m going to start a diet” or “I’m not going to text my ex” at the end of the day, because most of our willpower is drained, meaning our glass is almost empty, and we feel the need to refill it. In other words, by the end of the day, you have used up all of your willpower, but in the morning is when you are going to have the most willpower. This is why mornings are not to be overlooked. They are important and illustrate how waking up early gives you the potential to do things you never were able to do before due to a lack of time in your day’s schedule.
When you create habitual behaviors that are so automatic and engraved within you, those do not and will not take up your willpower. You can get through those daily habits without draining your glass and make room for new improvements, habits, or “1 percent.” While creating new habits, it is inevitable that you will be depleting your willpower because these things are still being learned; they aren’t yet automatic or engraved gestures, but the more you build them up and become consistent, the more willpower you will have during your day. The morning is the only time that will consistently be for you. During your routine or weekday schedule, it is likely that unexpected circumstances will pop up and interfere with your plans, causing a shift. Creating that time in the morning ensures you will always have a part of your day dedicated to spending time with yourself and working on goals and aspirations you have for the future. When those non-negotiable things appear during your day, you won’t feel bad attending or completing them, thinking that they take away from the time you have to yourself, because you will have already created space for individual time. As Sharma says, “Dream big. Start small. Begin now.”
