Awake to Your Why
Achieve Your Goals and Change Your Life with the 5 AM Advantage
Modeling a daily course toward success, undertaken when the “moon and stars [are] still shining,” Awake to Your Why is a motivational self-improvement guide.
Bryce Chapman’s self-help text Awake to Your Why extols a regimen of rising before dawn to increase personal motivation, focus, and purpose.
As the book notes, many exemplary individuals have opted to wake in the earliest hours, including Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, and Toni Morrison. Chapman began his own eighteen-year experiment with the concept after he experienced an abrupt midlife crisis followed by a serious physical accident on his farm in Australia. He also realized that, while waking at 5:00 a.m. did represent a regular commitment, he needed to develop a deeper plan of action and redirection.
The book details the benefits of a 5:00 a.m. wake-up call alongside tips for logistically and emotionally pushing past the urge to stay in bed and ignore the alarm clock. Its description of quiet, purposeful moments with the “moon and stars still shining” is an alluring incentive. And because passion is integral to the program, it also suggests identifying a “Magnificent Obsession” as a motivator—an exciting, long-term goal like writing a novel, learning a language, or developing an entrepreneurial idea. Further introspective analysis is recommended in the form of an “Accidental Life Journal”—a review of one’s past and present used to assesses how missteps or diversions obscure one’s authentic self.
Chapman’s own life story is central to the book—an oft-referenced example of how the program can be utilized. In sympathetic terms, he covers the traumatic loss of his father in a plane crash, his divorce, remarriage, and various business ventures. He also interjects flavor by recounting the thrills of surfing, horseback riding through the Australian outback, and working as a “jackaroo” on sheep and cattle ranches.
The book’s structure is taut and its prose is vigorous. At times, it conveys a sense of energized exaggeration, with statements like “Be prepared to have your mind blown,” or “By the end of this book you’ll have everything you need to achieve success.” There are refrains of familiar self-help concepts as well: herein, life is a journey, not a destination, and positive mental projection is a tool. Indeed, the text is transparent about its draws from various other self-help programs, though it also cautions against getting so caught up in self-help routines and obligations that the “influence of … master motivators” is lost.
The book enumerates its own values well: discipline, passion, and commitment are called essential to success. Its encouragements to take action “before the world wakes up,” setting aside a few extra morning hours to set a daily course for success, are persuasive. The practice of “mind mapping” to create visual analyses of issues is defined with particular clarity, as is neuroplasticity, or how the human brain adapts to and anticipates new experiences. And the book’s five suggested “foundations of life”—health and fitness, happiness, friends and family, wealth, and work—are outlined with holistic conviction.
Enthusiastic and focused, the self-help guide Awake to Your Why balances the desire for personal growth and achievement with cumulative efforts.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
