The five-hour rule and its use by the most effective leaders.
Reading, reflecting, and trying new things were the three activities that most often fell inside the 5-hour guideline for the leaders that I observed.
- Read
An article published in HBR states that “Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in order to enter it, visitors are required to remove their shoes and bow.”
Oprah Winfrey attributes a significant portion of her accomplishments to reading, saying, “Books were my visa to personal freedom.” Through her participation in a book club, she has made her love of reading known to the whole globe.
These two people are not on their own. Consider the excessive reading habits of some successful entrepreneurs who have amassed billions of dollars:
- Warren Buffett reads for five to six hours a day on average. He reads 500 pages of business reports and five newspapers.
- Each year, Bill Gates reads the equivalent of fifty novels.
- At the very least once every two weeks, Mark Zuckerberg will read a book.
- According to his brother, Elon Musk spent most of his childhood reading two novels on a daily basis.
- Every day, Mark Cuban puts in more than three hours of reading time.
- The co-founder of Home Depot, Arthur Blank, reads for a total of two hours each day.
- Billionaire entrepreneur David Rubenstein reads six novels a week.
- Reading is a daily activity that takes up one to two hours of time for Dan Gilbert, the self-made millionaire who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers.
- Do you wish you had more time to read? Register for the free webinar that’s being offered here.
- Reflect
At other times, the 5-hour rule is meant to be used as a period of time for meditation and thought.
The chief executive officer of AOL, Tim Armstrong, mandates that his top staff devote four hours every week to nothing but a reflection. Jack Dorsey has a tendency to move around a lot. The CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, sets aside two hours a day for reflection. The man who started the firm that is now worth 250 million dollars, Brian Scudamore, thinks for 10 hours per week without interruption.
Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Elon Musk are three of Reid Hoffman’s close friends who he relies on whenever he needs assistance working through a concept. When the millionaire Ray Dalio makes a mistake, he takes sure to enter it into a system where it can be seen by all of the workers at his firm. After that, he sets aside some time with his team to investigate the underlying problem. Billionaire businesswoman Sara Blakely is a long-time journaler. She said in one of her interviews that she has more than 20 notebooks in which she records the awful things that have occurred to her as well as the talents that have developed as a direct consequence of those occurrences.
Join our Facebook group if you’d like to be in the company of other people who share what they’re learning with one another and reflect on it.
- Experiment
Last but not least, the 5-hour rule is implemented in the form of fast experimentation.
Ben Franklin made sure to schedule time in his busy life for conducting experiments, brainstorming with other people who shared his values, and keeping a record of his own qualities. It is well known that Google gave its workers the opportunity to devote 20% of their work time to experiment with new initiatives. Hack-A-Months is a program that Facebook uses to promote experimentation.
Thomas Edison is often cited as the most prominent example of experimenting. Edison had a modest attitude to developing new ideas, despite the fact that he was a genius. He would first determine every conceivable answer, and then he would rigorously test each of those answers. Although he knew the ideas of his day, he thought them to be unhelpful in the process of addressing unknown situations, as stated by one of his biographers.
Because he took the method to such an extreme, his rival Nikola Tesla had this to say about the method of trial and error: “If [Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be; rather, he would proceed at once with the feverish diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.” (If he was looking for a needle in a hays
The power of the 5-hour rule expressed as a rate of improvement
In the realm of work, those who adhere to the 5-hour rule have a distinct competitive edge. People sometimes get confused between the concept of purposeful practice and just working hard. Additionally, the majority of professionals center their attention on production and efficiency rather than progress rate. You may differentiate yourself from the competition with as little as five hours of focused study every week.
In a recent interview, the successful entrepreneur and billionaire Marc Andreessen had some profound things to say regarding the pace of progress. “I believe that the archetype or myth of the 22-year-old creator has been utterly blown out of proportion… I believe that the acquisition of skills, both in the literal sense of learning how to do things and learning how to do them, is drastically undervalued.
People give too much weight to the benefits of just venturing into the deeper end of the pool, despite the fact that the truth is that those who do so are likely to drown. People overvalue this strategy. , there must be a justification for the abundance of tales revolving around Mark Zuckerberg. There are not that many people with the same name as Mark Zuckerberg. The majority of them are still floating in the water with their backs on the surface. Therefore, it would be beneficial for the majority of us to acquire new talents.
Later on in the interview, he goes on to say, “The really great CEOs, if you spend time with them, you would find this to be true of Mark [Zuckerberg] today or of any of the great CEOs of today or of the past, they are really encyclopedic in their knowledge of how to run a company, and it’s very difficult to just intuit all of that when you’re in your early 20s.” This is something that is true of Mark Zuckerberg today. The approach that is going to make the most sense for the majority of individuals is to spend five to ten years gaining experience.
We ought to approach education in the same way that we approach physical activity.
We need to go beyond the cliché that “lifelong learning is beneficial” and look more carefully at the amount of learning that the ordinary individual should undertake on a daily basis in order to have a career that is both sustainable and successful.
We should be more rigorous in how we think about the minimum doses of deliberate learning for leading a healthy life economically. Just as there are minimum recommended dosages of vitamins, steps per day, and aerobic exercise for leading a healthy life physically, there should also be minimum doses of deliberate learning for leading a healthy life economically.
The long-term impacts of NOT learning are just as sneaky and damaging as the long-term implications of NOT leading a healthy lifestyle. The Chief Executive Officer of AT&T made this point very plain in an interview with the New York Times. He said that individuals “will obsolete themselves with technology” if they do not spend at least five to ten hours each week studying new things online.
Are you interested in incorporating the five-hour rule into your daily routine?
In nutshell, the busiest and most successful individuals in the world make time every single day to improve themselves by studying for at least an hour. So can you!
To establish your own personal learning routine, you need to complete just three simple procedures, which are as follows:
Even if you are really busy and feeling overwhelmed, you should still make time for reading and studying.
Maintain a steady approach to using your ‘found’ time without putting things off or allowing yourself to get distracted.
Make the most of your time spent studying by using tried and true memory aids and study hacks that will assist you in putting what you have learned into practice.
I’ve spent the last three years studying how the most successful people use their time to stay consistent and reach higher levels of success. Because there was too much material to condense into a single post, I spent hundreds of hours developing a free masterclass that will assist you in becoming an expert in your own learning routine.
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