The 5 Hour Rule
Necessary, but more importantly, there is a simple rule that you can follow to ensure that your opportunities for employment and success in your career continue to be plentiful, even as automation tech improves and competition for jobs heats up.
As the podcaster Tim Harford once put it, “Automation reshapes the workplace in ways much subtler than a robot took my job.” Automation can also lead to the creation of jobs that involve more creativity and more strategic thinking, both of which humans are pretty good at. But that also leads us to a conclusion. If you want to succeed in an automation-driven future, then you must keep learning. You have to maximize your ability to think creatively, and you have to become adept at working with these new tools and systems. And it’s not just automation driving this need for increased learning either. If automation is the rock, then our increasingly connected economy, which enables remote work and a vastly larger talent pool is the hard place. If you rest on your laurels, you’ll find yourself caught between them.
And that brings us to the five hour rule. This rule simply states that you should dedicate one hour per day to learning, five days per week. The author Michael D. Simmons came up with this rule after observing that Ben Franklin dedicated one hour per day on his daily schedule to reading and generally expanding his knowledge. He also noticed a similar pattern in figures like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett. His conclusion is that the constant among all these people’s success is their commitment to continually learning, improving their skills and their general knowledge across the entirety of their careers and by doing so, they’re always opening themselves up to new opportunities. They’re never resting on their laurels. So that’s really the five-hour rule, in a nutshell. It’s an incredibly simple idea. but there are probably two big questions sticking in your mind right now, one of them being, how do I make time for constant learning, especially if you’re somebody who’s really busy with work already. And number two, what should I be learning?
Let’s first start with how to make time.
First, you have to acknowledge the trade off. In Simmons’ article about the five hour rule, he notes that Franklin’s daily hour of work actually caused him to accomplish less in terms of short term productivity. However, over time, the gains he made through that constant learning accelerated, they added up, and they propelled him to greater heights than that extra hour ever could’ve. Franklin understood that learning, constant learning, is a longterm investment. All right, onto more practical advice, starting with this tip, which is upside down, I guess. But do it first thing in the morning. If you find it hard to make yourself disciplined enough to do your independent learning after work, then get up a little bit earlier in the morning and do it first. So, take advantage of the maximized willpower at the beginning of the day and do your learning then.
Secondly, work to eliminate low value activities from your life. See, even if you’ve made that trade off acknowledgement in your head, on an individual day, it’s quite easy to say, I just don’t have time for that hour of learning. I just have so much work to do. And this is also a the justification we tend to use for skipping workouts. But I would encourage you to examine that claim for yourself and if possible, test it. And you can actually do this using an app like Rescue Time, which will track the time you spend on the apps and websites that you go to. And when you see just how much time you spend on things like social media or mindless YouTube binges, of which this could be one, you’re going to find out that you do in fact have the ability to cut some of those low-value activities from your life, and make time for that hour of learning.
What should you be learning with this dedicated daily learning time?
Since we’re talking about increasing your career opportunities, even as automation takes over more and more low level jobs, I wanna talk about three specific types of learning.
First learning that directly impacts the skillset you’re currently using in your career. No matter what field you’re in, there’s always some area where you can broaden or deepen your knowledge. So go find it.
Secondly, we have learning that decreases domain dependence. Essentially domain dependence is what happens when a person has a ton of expertise and skills in one particular area, but they have an inability to transfer those skills to new fields, even if the two fields have a lot of underlying similarities. And people with domain dependence are not very adaptable, but luckily the fix here is pretty simple. You just need to take your skills that you already have and spend some time applying them to challenges that are slightly different than what you’re used to. In other words, you want to put yourself in what’s called a wicked learning environment, which is the opposite of a kind learning environment. Kind environments have well-defined rules and often perfect feedback mechanisms that show you exactly what you did wrong when you made a mistake. The game of chess is a great example here, but if you spend all of your time in environments like these, then you’re never really developing your ability to deal with unforeseen challenges. So find a way, at least sometimes, to make your learning environment a bit more wicked.
Finally, we have time spent learning skills that I think everyone should know. These are skills that will both improve your life, but also sometimes expand your career opportunities. I’m talking about skills like public speaking, like being able to evaluate statistics well, budgeting and investing your money wisely, learning how to think logically, and to bring this all around full circle, learning how to make and use spreadsheets. Seriously, a good working knowledge of Excel and Google Sheets can be a really helpful thing.
Whatever you decide to learn, the important thing is that you commit to lifelong learning. I’ve seen a lot of people graduate school, land a comfortable job, and then become complacent, which is a dangerous state to be in. So whatever you do, just keep learning.
