The 5 Second Rule: Transform your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage

Everyday courage is the ability to face the small uncertainties and difficulties of everyday life, such as stepping on a scale or getting out of bed. Courage is not only reserved for Nobel prize winners or presidents who make great decisions. The chapter highlights the small and great feats people have accomplished after using the #5SecondRule shared on social media using the appropriate hashtag, ranging from quitting drugs to making career-defining decisions.

Robbins uses Rosa Parks as an example of how impromptu decisions are the result of everyday courage. In December 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, even though Jim Crowe laws and segregation had chipped away at Black people’s rights for years. Later, she would recall that her decision was not premeditated, that she had not weighed the dangers of her act of defiance. It was a decision she made in the moment because she had been pushed too far. Four days later, the Montgomery Improvement Association nominated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to lead a bus boycott in response to Parks’s arrest. Dr. King later wrote that the decision to take up the mantle happened so quickly that he did not “think it through” because he might have declined the position had he been given the time to hesitate (69).