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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature
Imagine life as it used to be for our distant ancestors.
Here, in this wilderness, food is always scarce. Danger is everywhere. The weather can shift in a second. A predator could be crouched in the grass. Everywhere there are threats and obstacles. One bad decision, one moment of inattentiveness, and that’s it – game over. Here, failing to pay attention to reality means, at best, injury and, at worst, death. The brain evolved to keep us alive in this environment. It’s a tool, a tool for navigating a perilous reality – the reality of hunting and gathering and avoiding the jaws of saber-toothed tigers.
Fast-forward to today. There’s food on the table. We live in cities, sheltered from the elements. The saber-toothed tigers are long dead. But we’ve still got the same tool in our head, a brain that evolved over the course of thousands of years to help us navigate a reality that we can now only imagine.
Today, unlike our ancestors, we can indulge in fantasies and daydreams. We can let our guard down, and our environment probably won’t kill us. Today, the main threats we face are interpersonal, psychological, posed by other people rather than predators.
These dangers are subtler than the dangers of old. It’s possible, even, to ignore them, to pretend they don’t exist. It’s possible, in other words, to detach from reality – to become naive. But the dangers are very much there. And you ignore them at your peril.
The purpose of these blinks is to bring you into intimate contact with the reality we live in now.
So let’s get into it and take a quick trip through The Daily Laws, by Robert Greene.
The Daily Laws (2021) is a compendium of 366 rules for life, covering everything from seduction and power to the discovery of your life’s great task. It distills the insights author Robert Greene has uncovered in a series of best-selling books spanning 22 years of word.
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Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 5,500+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trialBlink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma