Bill Gates, Warren Buffett And Oprah All Use The 5-Hour Rule

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In the article “Malcolm Gladwell got us wrong”, the researchers behind the 10,000-hour rule set the record straight: different fields require different amounts of deliberate practice in order to become world class.

If 10,000 hours isn’t an absolute rule that applies across fields, what does it really take to become world class in the world of work?

Over the last year, I’ve explored the personal history of many widely-admired business leaders like Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett in order to understand how they apply the principles of deliberate practice.

What I’ve done does not qualify as an academic study, but it does reveal a surprising pattern.

Many of these leaders, despite being extremely busy, set aside at least an hour a day (or five hours a week) over their entire career for activities that could be classified as deliberate practice or learning.

I call this phenomenon the 5-Hour Rule.

How the best leaders follow the 5-hour rule

For the leaders I tracked, the 5-hour rule often fell into three buckets: reading, reflection, and experimentation.

1. Read

According to an HBR article, “Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow.”

Oprah Winfrey credits books with much of her success: “Books were my pass to personal freedom.” She has shared her reading habit with the world via her book club.

These two are not alone. Consider the extreme reading habits of other billionaire entrepreneurs:

• Warren Buffett spends five to six hours per day reading five newspapers and 500 pages of corporate reports.
• Bill Gates reads 50 books per year.
• Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks.
• Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to his brother.
• Mark Cuban reads more than 3 hours every day.
• Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.
• Billionaire entrepreneur David Rubenstein reads six books a week.
• Dan Gilbert, self-made billionaire and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, reads one to two hours a day.

Want to find the time to read? Sign up for the free webinar here.

2. Reflect

Other times, the 5-hour rule takes the form of reflection and thinking time.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong makes his senior team spend four hours per week just thinking. Jack Dorsey is a serial wanderer. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner schedules two hours of thinking time per day. Brian Scudamore, the founder of the 250 million-dollar company, O2E Brands, spends 10 hours a week just thinking.

When Reid Hoffman needs help thinking through an idea, he calls one of his pals: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, or Elon Musk. When billionaire Ray Dalio makes a mistake, he logs it into a system that is public to all employees at his company. Then, he schedules time with his team to find the root cause. Billionaire entrepreneur Sara Blakely is a long-time journaler. In one interview, she shared that she has over 20 notebooks where she logged the terrible things that happened to her and the gifts that have unfolded as a result.

If you want to be in to company of others who reflect on what they’re learning with each other, join this Facebook group.

3. Experiment

Finally, the 5-hour rule takes the form of rapid experimentation.

Throughout his life, Ben Franklin set aside time for experimentation, masterminding with like-minded individuals, and tracking his virtues. Google famously allowed employees to experiment with new projects with 20% of their work time. Facebook encourages experimentation through Hack-A-Months.

The largest example of experimentation might be Thomas Edison. Even though he was a genius, Edison approached new inventions with humility. He would identify every possible solution and then systematically test each one of them. According to one of his biographers, “Although he understood the theories of his day, he found them useless in solving unknown problems.”

He took the approach to such an extreme that his competitor, Nikola Tesla, had this to say about the trial-and-error approach: “If [Edison] had a needle to find in a haystack, he would not stop to reason where it was most likely to be, 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.”

The power of the 5-hour rule: improvement rate

People who apply the 5-Hour Rule in the world of work have an advantage. The idea of deliberate practice versus just working hard is often confused. Also, most professionals focus on productivity and efficiency, not improvement rate. As a result, just five hours of deliberate learning a week can set you apart.

Billionaire entrepreneur Marc Andreessen poignantly talked about improvement rate in a recent interview...

“I think the archetype/myth of the 22-year-old founder has been blown completely out of proportion… I think skill acquisition, literally the acquisition of skills and how to do things, is just dramatically underrated. People are overvaluing the value of just jumping into the deep-end of the pool, because like the reality is that people who jump into the deep end of the pool drown. Like, there’s a reason why there are so many stories about Mark Zuckerberg. There aren’t that many Mark Zuckerbergs. Most of them are still floating face down in the pool. And so, for most of us, it’s a good idea to get skills.”

Later in the interview he adds...

“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 the past, they are really encyclopedic of their knowledge of how to run a company, and it’s very hard to just intuit all of that in your early 20s. The path that makes much more sense for most people is to spend 5–10 years getting skills.”

We should look at learning like we look at exercise.

We need to move beyond the cliche, “Life-long learning is good,” and think more deeply about what the minimum amount of learning the average person should do per day in order to have a sustainable and successful career.

Just as we have minimum recommended dosages of vitamins, steps per day, and aerobic exercise for leading a healthy life physically, we should be more rigorous about how we as an information society think about the minimum doses of deliberate learning for leading a healthy life economically.

The long-term effects of NOT learning are just as insidious as the long-term effects of smoking. The CEO of AT&T makes this point loud and clear in an interview with the New York Times; he says that those who don’t spend at least 5 to 10 hours a week learning online “will obsolete themselves with technology.”

Interested in applying the 5-hour rule to your life?

Bottom line: the busiest, most successful people in the world find at least an hour to learn EVERYDAY. So can you!

There are just three steps you need to take in order to create your own learning ritual:

• Find the time for reading and learning even if you are really busy and overwhelmed.
• Stay consistent on using that ‘found’ time without procrastinating or falling prey to distraction.
• Increase the results you receive from each hour of learning by using proven hacks that help you remember and apply what you learn.

Over the last three years, I’ve researched how top performers find the time, stay consistent, and get more results. There was too much information to fit in one article, so I spent dozens of hours and created a free masterclass to help you master your learning ritual too!

Sign up for the free Learning How To Learn webinar here.

Looking for more support on your learning journey?

I created a several active Facebook groups to help you:

• Learning How To Learn: Join 260,000+ people who want to remember what they learn, conquer information overwhelm, find time in their schedule for learning, and learn faster.
• Learn From Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Sara Blakely & Bill Gates: Get daily inspiration and insight via quotes, interview clips, and links to longform articles featuring super innovators.
• Daily Learning Journal: Share your biggest lesson learned everyday with a community of dedicated learners.

This article was written with love and care using the blockbuster mental model.