Embrace Learning as a Lifestyle: The 5 Hour Rule

Do you or your company take personal development seriously? How often do you successfully take time out during your working day to reflect or invest in personal learning? Ever feel that taking this time just isn’t high enough on your and your employer’s priorities list?

Well, it turns out that devoting one hour of purposeful learning (reading, experimenting, reflecting) every weekday can actually enable you to be radically more productive, innovative, and successful, in the long run.

A system of constant learning used by Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates

Don’t believe us? Look at these stats:  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. 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. Constant and deliberate learning is an integral part of the lives of today’s most successful individuals.

As business site Inc. explains, the five-hour rule is simple: invest at least five hours every week—that’s one hour per weekday—into deliberately learning. What form that takes can be up to you, but the point is to spend a meaningful amount of time bettering yourself. Focusing on learning disrupts our behaviours so we can keep improving them rather than plateauing.

By committing to being a lifelong learner, you commit to advancing your work, you invest in your future, and most importantly, you invest in yourself.