Every day when you wake up, you approximately have already been sleeping for the first 7 or 8 hours of a day. That leaves you with 16 hours, you wake up; brush your teeth, wash your face, and have breakfast. 15 and a half hours left. You get ready for work and drive to the workplace, 15 hours. Assuming you work 8 hours a day after work or school you’ll have around 5 hours. When you think about this, you can easily understand that an average person working 9-5 or a student going to school 9-5 does not really have a lot of time left for themselves, and when you factor in homework for students that can easily fall down to 4 hours or even 3. From all that work you’re kinda tired you sit down on the couch, lay down. Thinking that you’ll only look at your phone for 5 minutes. Oh poor you, next thing you know you’ve been scrolling for an hour and doing basically nothing.
If you do this from time to time it’s fine, but doing it every day can have a lot of negative impact on you. Most successful have found a solution to this problem; learning in your free time. On this study, author Thomas Corley reported that most successful people don’t even watch TV. Nearly all of them read books. More than half of them listen to audiobooks in the morning.
Like motivational speaker and author Jim Rohn said, “Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary.” You should always try to read whenever possible, if you’re mostly on the go, you can use audiobooks or podcasts. If former US president Barrack Obama can find time to read, I’m pretty sure you can too. If you’re wondering how they do it, here you go.
Breaking The Rule Down
The five hour rule was found by by Michael Simmons, founder of Empact, who has written very detailed stuff about it. It is very simple, so simple in fact that that’s what makes it perfect: No matter how busy successful people are, they always spend at least an hour a day learning or practicing. And they do this across their whole career. Simmons traces it to Benjamin Franklin, who often read an hour a day, five days a week. He often wrote his goals for the day and looked on his results other than reading in the morning.
The Three Principles
The three very simple yet very effective principles of the five hour rule are:
Reading: Reading is key when it comes to success, Elon Musk learned how to build rockets from reading, Mark Cuban and Dan Gilbert also read 1-3 hours a day. Other than improving and expanding your knowledge, Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba, says that “Reading can give you a good head start; this is often what your peers cannot obtain. Compared to others, readers are more likely to know other industries’ strategies and tactics.” If you can’t read an hour start with fifteen or twenty minutes and then adjust your day for your reading. Most people pull out their phone whenever they’re bored. If you can, don’t carry your phone in your pocket, instead carry a book. Even reading for 5 minutes will expand your knowledge.
Reflecting:This rule also includes reading, for example start a diary, if you don;t have a lot of time, you can stare at a wall and think of your goals and think about your results like Franklin did. Focusing on the past also makes you more aware of your mistakes so you don’t repeat them all the time. As a result, you’ll be better suited to achieve your goals and improve your life. In 2014, a University of Texas study found that mental rest and reflection improves learning.
Experimenting:The last and my favorite principle is experimenting, Franklin and Edison succeed because of their experiments. Gmail exists because Google allowed their employees to experiment.
The reason experiments are so useful is because you have facts, not assumptions. Experiments show you what’s working and give you feedback quickly. You can learn from your mistakes and obtain feedback from others. Best of all, experimentation isn’t that time consuming. Most of the time, you are testing through the same activities you would perform without testing. Experiments are the reason coding keeps you going even though you’ve been professionally fixing errors and bugs, it’s because of the instant feedback.
Reading regularly can help improve your personal growth and productivity, leading to success in different areas of your life. It’s a valuable investment in yourself and can benefit your company or organization too.
Thank you for reading and I hope you can start reading and learning effectively with this.
Sources :
https://www.entrepreneur.com/living/the-5-hour-rule-used-by-bill-gates-jack-ma-and-elon-musk/317602
https://michaeldsimmons.com/why-constant-learners-all-embrace-the-5-hour-rule-mm09/