Reviews tagging 'Forced institutionalization'

The 5 Am Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life. by Robin S. Sharma

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angelfoodcakes's review against another edition

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informative reflective slow-paced

1.5

This is a wannabe inspirational speech formatted as a book. Every character in it is a one dimensional vehicle for buzzwords, catchphrases and quotes. Speaking of quotes, this book is absolutely dripping with them, not only does each chapter begin with one but each character seems to have memorized thousands of quotes. What quotes aren’t memorized are printed on their personal belongings, written down as notes to themselves or others, or even tattooed on their bodies. Many of them are absurdly wordy (to the point where I zoned out in the middle of some of them) and some of them are even just made up.

On top of this, this book is chock full of extraneous details to the point where they get in the way of my understanding of the chapter. I don’t need to know that there was a dog walking past our main characters or the exact music playing in a restaurant thirty feet away from them, just tell me the fucking information.

The book spends the majority of the first half going on and on about how sad the characters are that most people these days are victims and sheeple following the herd to the point where I don’t think there’s really anything of value until about chapter 8 or 9 in this 17 chapter book (I would even argue that the only worthwhile chapters start around chapter 13) and, like I said before, it’s so fucking wordy and full of unnecessary material that gleaning any actual advice from it becomes a nightmare.

Not to mention the content of the actual framing device itself is unnatural at best (the groan I let out whenever the billionaire started doing pushups mid-conversation or the entrepreneur said she had “fatherless daughter syndrome”) and borderline culty at worse. The prose felt like the author hadn’t written anything since a middle school creative writing assignment.

It also feels extremely self-worshipping, when the characters aren’t bemoaning how sad the average person in modern society is, they’re going on about how fantastic and life changing the 5am club is and how they’ve really turned their life around since joining. The billionaire and spellbinder characters are worshipped throughout the story, everyone loves them and constantly talk about how much they love them despite the billionaire’s weird eccentricities to the point where it feels weird (re my “culty at worse” point). It’s obvious these characters are supposed to be a stand-in for the author, too, they’re the ones teaching everyone about the author’s principles. 

That isn’t to say there is no good advice to be gleaned from this, but I wouldn’t recommend reading the actual book, there are videos on YouTube that summarize the worthwhile points in here which are only about 10 minutes long minus the annoying framing device.
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