Habits And The 5AM Club

I call myself a healthy human being - working out, cooking healthily (as much as possible, Schnitzels are always welcome) and reading daily. Looking back at the last few years, I found that I always gravitated toward books, articles, and podcasts about habits. What is it about habits that makes you feel like you are better than before? Just a plain “want” feeling of being better, and habits seemed like the obvious answer.

The Habit Complex

So many books filled with paragraphs about just doing it, “Eating the Frog” being the most important part. Although starting is the most important step, keeping up is actually more important. 21 days and it becomes a habit, apparently. Or 30, according to other books. Probably 66, depending on who you ask. It takes time, that’s the key point. Not a short while. You have to be committed, and only after that can you even think about starting something new.
Damn, why am I doing this at all? All I wanted was to drink more water, and now I am in an infinite loop, tracking my water consumption, making sure I don’t get less than 3 liters and feeling bad after drinking only 2. Buying a nice 1L water bottle for easy tracking and always-cold water, making lists, reminders, listening to Atomic Habits recommendations and attaching drinking water to my habit of brushing my teeth. I became a water-drinking monster with guilt after not reaching my daily goal. I am this close to being a water bender after doing this for 66 days. Is this what being better feels like?

You Are Not Building a Habit, You Are Building a Person

This was me until a few weeks ago. I finally found a new way to look at habits after reading an article that challenged my thinking. The main idea was this: you are not creating a habit, you are creating a person. What does that actually mean? If we look at the habit of working out, you should not aim for 3 or 4 days in the gym a week. You should aim to be an active person. The main difference is what matters more: the action, or the streak. I’m sure you’ve felt this before. A workout is all planned out, waking up early, getting to the gym (or after work, I’m not judging). You wake up groggy, in your warm bed, maybe even next to a beautiful wife, and think: am I really going to leave this heaven to make myself hurt, sweat, and feel uncomfortable? Forget it. You sleep in, wake up in a rush, running to catch the bus and drinking coffee on the go, and you feel frustrated while telling yourself: I’ll try again tomorrow. It was all planned out, what happened? You wanted to train, you had a training program and a dedicated time slot, but you weren’t committed to the streak. You aimed for action, not a streak.

The Power of Plan B

Now picture this: a workout is planned for 6am. You wake up angry. Who set this alarm? Lying in your warm bed, you think: I don’t have a single brain cell that wants to do this workout. No chance I’m doing the full session, today is Plan B. Just 10 pushups, and we call it a day. You have enough time to sleep more, and perhaps these 10 pushups will open a door to a longer session.
That backup plan comes from understanding that breaking the streak is the real loss. You don’t have to go all out to make a habit stick. Even a small effort (10 pushups, 1 liter of water, read 1 page) leads to positive results. A 1% gain is so much better than none at all. It’s the compounding effect we’re used to seeing in stocks, but applied to real life.

OK, But What Am I Actually Building Toward?

So I learned the best way for me to make habits stick, but I still had to figure out which habit I actually wanted. I kind of missed the point, after all this research, I had no real plan. I think this happens a lot in the productivity world. You get a thousand tools to help you reach a goal, and you are so focused on the path that you forget what you came here for. It’s like a good retention game: you should enjoy the path to the reward, or the player will leave after reaching it once. But you have to have a reward in the end, right? What am I actually aiming for?

Enter the 5 AM Club

New day, new book (I wish), and I started reading The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma after hearing plenty of people talk about it. Let me be clear: this book is as cringy as it gets. An artist and an entrepreneur on a journey to become “World-Class Performers.” The cringe comes from how every lesson is answered with a variation of: I will implement this and be a top-class performer, after every session like a robot, responses that feel completely unreal. That said, I did like it, because its core proposition is something I’d been searching for.
The 5 AM ritual goes like this: 20 minutes for the body, 20 minutes for the soul, 20 minutes for the brain. I won’t get into the whole story, I do recommend reading it if you’ve ever wanted to make better use of your mornings. The idea is that training first thing lowers your cortisol levels, which peak right after waking up. Then you journal, meditate, or do something to clear your mind. Last, you learn something new.

My Version of the Morning Ritual

Here’s how I made it work:
6:10 - Wake up (I have a life, a wife, and a job, I wouldn’t survive waking up earlier), wash my face and brush my teeth
6:20 - 15x3 pushups, 12x3 squats, no weights, just enough to feel my heart rate climb
6:30 - Tefillin (takes more time than I’d like, replace with whatever grounds you)
6:45 - 5 minutes of breathing exercises with my eyes closed. As simple as it sounds.
6:50 - Coffee, sparkling water, and journaling in my Flying Tiger notebook, I liked that it gave me a structure to write in
7:10 - Learn something: AI, shaving (my latest mustard, a deep-dive into a niche obsession), or a podcast
7:30 - Out the door
Armed with the wisdom of roughly 20 books on habits, I made it stick. It’s been almost three weeks of doing this daily. I feel better about myself, my back pain has improved, and I feel productive before I even leave for work. Now I actually have time to learn things in my 20-minute brain slot.

The Question That Really Matters

This is where I stumbled onto a question I’d never considered, and I want to share my answer. It goes like this: “If you knew you would die in exactly 10 years, what would you do differently?” It hit me differently from the usual clichés, “What would you do if you died tomorrow?” or “Live like it’s your last day.” The quick answers are always the same: be with family, spend your money. But 10 years? I needed to actually think.
I love my job, working in the gaming industry is a childhood dream. I love my wife to the bone. I didn’t feel like anything was missing, until I thought about my late dad. He used to write a lot. Not in a book kind of way, more like the speeches guy in our family. The best birthday writer and a few golden letters he gave me at key moments in my life, my first bad investment, my 18th birthday. A man of words. That’s it, I want to write something. I hate birthday messages and have no one to write speeches for, so I chose a blog. It’s a therapeutic way of understanding my journey, sharing my thoughts, and thinking more clearly.
This thing you’re now reading is my goal, something that 10 days ago I didn’t even know would exist. Thank you for reading.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​