Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah all use the 5-hour rule. Here's how this powerful habit works. (2024)

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1. Read

According to anHBR 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 path 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 adayreadingfive newspapersand500 pages of corporate reports.
• Bill Gates reads 50 books ayear.
• Mark Zuckerberg aimed to read at least one book every two weeks.
• Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to hisbrother.
• Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day.
• Arthur Blank, a cofounder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.
• Billionaire entrepreneur David Rubenstein reads six books a week.
• Dan Gilbert, the self-made billionaire who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, reads for one to two hours a day.

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2. Reflect

Other times, the five-hour rule takes the form ofreflection and thinking time.

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong makes his senior team spendfour hours aweekjust thinking. Jack Dorsey is aserial wanderer. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner schedulestwo hours of thinking time eachday. Brian Scudamore, the founder of the $250 million companyO2E Brands, spends10 hours a week just thinking.

In 2014, when Reid Hoffman needed help thinking through an idea,he called one of his pals like Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, or Elon Musk. Billionaire entrepreneur Sara Blakely is a long-time journaler. Inone interview, she shared that she had more than 20 notebooks where she logged the terrible things that happened to her and the gifts that had 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.

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3. Experiment

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

Throughout his life,Ben Franklin set aside timefor experimentation, masterminding with like-minded individuals, and tracking his virtues. Google was known to allow employees to experiment with new projects with 20% of their work time. Facebook encourages experimentation throughHack-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 hisbiographers, "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."

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The power of the 5-hour rule: improvement rate

People who apply the five-hour rule in the world of work have an advantage. The idea of deliberate practice versus just working hard is often confused. Also, many professionalsfocus 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 poignantlytalked 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."

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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 eachday to have a sustainable and successful career.

Just as we have minimum recommended dosages of vitamins, steps eachday, 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 not having a healthy lifestyle.The CEO of AT&T makes this point loud and clear inan interview with The New York Times; he says those who don't spend at least five to 10 hours a week learning online "will obsolete themselves with technology."

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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 every day. So can you!

There are just three steps you need to take 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 past 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. You can sign up for the free Learning How to Learn webinar here.

This Medium story was originally published on Business Insider July 10, 2017.