At the beginning of this year I started waking up at 5am and doing a workout program first thing in the morning. When I started that, I thought it would be a good idea to read The 5am Club to motivate myself to get up early. After reading The 5am Club I decided to read The Miracle Morning to continue learning more about the benefits of waking up early and spending focused time in the morning on specific activities for increased productivity, happiness and success.
I posted my reviews for both of these books earlier this week. You can read the reviews here:
- The 5am Club by Robin Sharma
- The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod
These books are very similar in theory—waking up early will change your life, but very different in the writing style and the approach. So I thought it would be good to share a comparison of the two.
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The 5am Club
First of all, The 5am Club is written like a fictional story. That surprised me a little since it’s a nonfiction book, but Sharma uses the characters and their experiences to convey the message. The one thing I kept thinking while I was reading The 5am Club was how hard it would be for some people to do what he teaches. As a working mom, when my kids were younger, I couldn’t imagine waking up any earlier to spend time focusing on myself. I was just happy to get as much sleep as possible. Yet his method is very rigid and unwavering.
In addition to the morning routine, Sharma talks about some ways to approach your work day, and similarly, I kept thinking how the things he was saying you must do to be productive and successful just wouldn’t make sense for some people. Sure, spending the first 90 minutes of your workday on completely focused work with no distractions (devices stored away in another room) is a great idea. However, this is not realistic for all jobs or all people. Still, I took away some of those tips and have tried to implement them in my own schedule, just with some slight adjustments to make it work for me.
Overall, I thought The 5am Club was a great book and worth reading.
The Miracle Morning
The style of The Miracle Morning was more like I would have expected of The 5am Club. It’s a nonfiction book that’s to the point and walks the reader through the whys and hows of the method.
Hal Elrod has an amazing story and he uses that to share his message. The book is inspirational and the method Elrod teaches is simple and clear.
The Miracle Morning was a quick read. I read it in less than half of the time it took me to read The 5am Club.
Also, Elrod’s approach is very flexible. Sure, the best thing to do is get up early in the morning and do the things he says to do. However, if for whatever reason that doesn’t work for you (i.e. you work a night job), Elrod encourages adapting his method to fit your individual lifestyle. He doesn’t say you must get up at 5am every day, he tells you to get up one hour earlier than you normally would.
The only downside of The Miracle Morning (and it’s not really a bad thing, just something to be aware of) is that there’s always a constant up-sell in the book—go here and download this, sign up for that, buy this, etc. Again, it’s not really a bad thing, it just is what it is. Elrod started a movement with his book, so he wants readers to know there’s a community out there, there are resources available, etc.
Both books were fantastic. If I was going to recommend one over the other, I’d probably go with The Miracle Morning because it’s a quicker read with basically the same amount of takeaways and the method is more flexible so it would work for more people.