A self-help book dressed in fiction clothes, starred by Robin Sharma

by Defne Sam Alkan

Reading The 5 A.M. Club feels like observing an under-appreciated genre, one that blurs motivational coaching and fiction. Yet the ideas on both ends are underdeveloped, and better be under-represented in this case. 
How and why you should be waking up before the sun is the focus of The 5 AM Club. Supported by scientific findings—simply referred to as “as science supports”—Sharma aims to transfer his knowledge on “elevating your lives.” Despite its self-help genre, Sharma takes an unorthodox approach by introducing characters, turning the book into a sort of fiction.

This is not a new method discovered by Sharma, despite most readers on the Internet seeming to think so. It has been used all along in popular self-help books to convey delicate topics to the reader. Sharing real-life people on paper connects with the audience on a deeper level, showing how they can apply the concepts to their own days. This removes the rigorous task of figuring out how to apply the techniques in the book, instead giving the reader an artificial trial run. For those who thought this was a breakthrough style of writing, they may read Turkish professor and educator Doğan Cüceloğlu’s The Warrior.

In the case of Sharma, however, the storyline is underdeveloped. As readers, we witness Stone Riley, a billionaire, helping two struggling souls transform their lives by introducing them to the 5 AM Club. These two souls are an entrepreneur who is constantly threatened and a blocked painter trying to rediscover his creativity. The story takes us to Mauritius, Rome, Spain, and India while explaining various concepts related to waking up early.

Includes Spoilers

We see the characters improve, the entrepreneur not using technology much or the artist getting fitter with every destination visited.

However, Sharma fails to connect the storyline with the timeline of the early-morning classes. The two parts sit together like a badly written group project, patched together at the last minute without clear links between them.

Includes Spoiler

For example, at some point, the entrepreneur and the artist’s love is an obvious plot development. Yet when this intimate relationship actually has time to bloom is far less clear. In Chapter 16, the love story reaches its happy ending—or so we believe. The reader never gets to experience the wedding, only to be told that it’s happening. The very next paragraph jumps to the characters biking through the mountains, freezing the storyline once again.

Moreover, the characters are also half‑developed, with no real personalities attached. We get only a few physical characteristics sprinkled between the lines, and even those contradict each other at times. A review on Medium.com by ReginaOfTech illustrates this by showing AI‑generated art based on Sharma’s descriptions of his characters.

AI generated image of the entrepreneur by @ReginaOfTech

Frankly, they look like Beta versions of humanity. 

Includes Spoilers

The image is depicted by the following description on the page 12.

“The entrepreneur’s face was angular and long. A wealth of wrinkles and weighty crevices ran along her forehead like ruts in a farmer’s fresh field. Her brown hair was medium in length and styled in an “I mean business and dare not mess with me” kind of way. She was lean, like a long-distance runner, with thin arms and lithe legs that emerged from a sensible blue designer skirt. Her eyes looked sad, from old hurts that had never been healed. And from the current chaos that was infecting her beloved company.”

Besides the underdeveloped personalities of the characters, Sharma also fails to give names to anyone except the billionaire‑guru, Stone Riley. While I cannot come up with a personal explanation for this choice, it seems Sharma doesn’t offer much more clarity either. In a 2019 interview conducted by Hana P. Ansari, he was asked whether there was a reason behind the naming. His answer relied on pure self‑intuition:
“It just intuitively felt like the right thing to do,” he answered.

For most readers, however, the nameless characters felt wrong—a sign of an underdeveloped persona.

A Reddit user, @Hitaro9, offers another explanation. The user suggests that Sharma inserted himself into the book through the character Stone Riley. As a real‑life motivational speaker who focuses on self‑improvement and helping the masses, Sharma in fact closely parallels Stone Riley. Even their physical appearances—bald, yet looking young for their age—seem to echo each other, making the two figures appear closely related.

Some readers may argue that this is nothing more than a coincidence of initials:
Stone Riley ~ Robin Sharma

I will be leaving this ‘coincidence’ hanging here for the readers to ponder on. 

Up until this point, these are all relatively small hiccups along the way. The most horrendous mistake comes from the editorial aspect. Many sentences — or even entire parts of the storyline — are left hanging with no further explanation. Famous quotes from all over the world and across centuries fly left and right, as if throwing enough of them at the reader will make one stick. If the book took four years to write, then I believe most of that time was spent collecting quotes ranging from Gandhi to Obama. You expect quotes from self-help books; you crave the kind of learning that other media can’t quite give you. However, overusing these quotes makes them far less intriguing. I felt dizzy trying to catch up with all the big words every character seemed to spit out, as if they were releasing some kind of carbon dioxide buildup from their systems. You know how water becomes poisonous once you drink too much? There’s a motivational quote Sharma can use for his next book.

These quotes are supposed to deliver a point, but most of them miss the dartboard entirely. The images are even worse. A dolphin family flying high in the sky above the ocean? A heart wearing a pirate hat? (And just to be clear, pirates were never a thing in the book, nor is any explanation given for this supposedly symbolic image on the cover.) These visuals feel like they’re trying to send subtle messages, but whatever vision Sharma had wasn’t clearly conveyed. The only thing the dolphins reminded me of was a dream I had at age seven. Lovely memory — completely unrelated to waking up at 5 AM, considering I barely woke up from that dream at all.

Pirate hat with a heart on the cover of the very book

Most of the pictures also come with explanations that have no meaning or are simply abandoned. One example is the wishbone scene, where the billionaire tries to cheer up the “cats” — yes, he calls his pupils “cats.” After they make their wishes, he enlightens them with the line: “Remember that a wishbone without a backbone doesn’t really get you very far.” (p. 200) He then immediately moves on to the day’s lesson with no further explanation. The reader never hears about the wishbone again for the remaining painful hundred-ish pages. That’s why I won’t force myself to complete this paragraph with my own interpretation — I simply don’t have anything to add.

The wishbone on the page 200

There’re many more editorial mistakes that should have been marked with a red pen to be never published. However, this essay cannot be that long, to bore the reader like this very book bored me to sleep.

I guess it is the only good part of this book, helping me sleep, even though I know that I’ll not be waking up early.