All of the most successful people in the world today have one major thing in common. They all dedicate about an hour a day reading and learning. This simple daily aspect, also known as the 5-hour rule, is one of the reasons they are successful and remain successful. Let’s take a closer look at what makes this 5-hour rule so crucial to people like Barack Obama, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey. This is indeed something that you can implement into your life as well as your business.
Why implement the 5-hour rule?
The sheer importance behind the 5-hour rule is learning. This means learning for you, your staff, and your company. The idea is to develop and grow yourself and your business. It’s easy to confuse work with learning, as business owners tend to work long hours to achieve maximum effort and to progress further.
This may feel productive and intuitive, but the truth is, you don’t learn. And when you don’t learn, you won’t progress further the way you should. You must dedicate time to understanding other aspects of life that are not necessarily linked to your business. In doing so, it is possible that you may gain valuable knowledge and lessons from other industries that you can use in yours.
Learning also facilitates growth as you figure out new ways to efficiently automate your business and expand into other markets, online and offline. Spending all your time merely working your craft won’t be enough to survive the everchanging and volatile markets of today.
You must experiment with new ideas to remain innovative among your competitors and customers. To begin, all you have to do is take part in these three basic activities on a daily basis. The best minds in the world today spend at least an hour reading, reflecting, and experimenting. What’s stopping you?
Reading
Reading is a habit that is commonly shared between some of the most successful people of our generation and before. People such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk have confessed to spending a significant amount of their time reading.
Bill Gates is famous for reading around 50 books a year. Elon Musk is also famous for stating that he once went through an entire Encyclopedia Britannica when he was nine years old. He used to spend around ten hours a day reading.
The most common reason behind why Gates, Ecango and Musk love to read is because reading is one of their primary ways of learning. They and dozens of other successful entrepreneurs such as Tony Robbins and Richard Branson read to learn. Which is why they love to read!
Elon Musk has also stated that he learned to build rockets from reading. This is how he was able to develop his successful SpaceX company. An hour a day for reading is ideal. This will help you progress quickly through your books. It is advisable to start off with around 20 to 30 minutes a day first before upping it to an hour.
Reflection
Reflection is considered to be an integral part of learning. You need to spend some time reflecting upon the content that you may have read. Not doing so while just continuing to read over and over again will deprive you of picking up the necessary skills that can be realized through reflection.
In other words, when you do finish reading a book, article, or blog post, spend some time thinking about how you would put this information to use. The content that you have read doesn’t have to be related to your work, nor do you have to go and action it 100% in the real world.
However, reflection gives you the opportunity to play out various scenarios in your head, related to the content you just read. This means that you can practice what you have learned through imagination. This is also a great way to build up your thought process which will help you when brainstorming ideas related to your business.
No one wants to be a prisoner of the past, but spending some time looking back and reflecting on your mistakes will help you to learn from them. Try to spend about 15 to 20 minutes a day reflecting upon some of the most important lessons you have read, experienced, or have planned for the future.
Experimentation
Experimentation is needed to progress. Innovation will never be achieved by doing the same thing every day. You will have to put to the test the things you have learned from reading as well as the ideas you would have come across after reflecting upon them.
Experiments turn assumptions into facts. Experimenting means taking innovative aspects from other industries and implementing them into your industry, even if those aspects are unheard of by your peers. In doing so, it is possible that you might just change the game.
It’s important to remember that it is perfectly fine if your experiments don’t work out. The primary objective is to learn from your mistakes and to gather as much information as possible from your experiments. Your ideas might be very advanced, so your findings may not be relevant now, but maybe in the near future.
Companies spend large sums of money on staff and manager training. There isn’t anything wrong with this, but reading on subjects of your choice at your leisure is much different. This allows you the opportunity to become more innovative in your thinking, which can lead to more opportunities. It doesn’t take much time and effort to implement the 5-hour rule. Go ahead, start today!
Ecango 