Starting a career is a good thing, but thinking of strategies to work with to make it a success is another thing altogether. A number of entrepreneurs like Gates, Oprah, Musk, and others, confess they use the 5-hour rule. It sounds pretty simple, right? We’re not saying this will make you the next Zuckerberg, but, at least, its definitely worth trying.
Related media: The 5 Hour Rule
Success In Just An Hour
The 5-hour rule is one of the simplest productivity tools to use in achieving success. It’s pretty simple: just take out one hour from each weekday to devote to deliberate practice and learning (an hour of a day is equivalent to 4 percent of the day).
You can insert any bit of learning, reading, studying, or practicing a new skill that can help you achieve your goals. Like we said, pretty simple. The rule is very effective for startup entrepreneurs willing to achieve success.
The reason why it’s so effective yet infamous comes down to two ideas:
First, we’ll all agree that working hard for long hours is a tough thing, which is not as working smarter. Technically, working smart involves taking quite some to learn bit-by-bit instead of multitasking yourself with work loads. This ensures that whatever you get doing is done effectively and efficiently — and will also help you to concentrate on long-term self-improvement.
Second, nothing beats an expert on the job. The acquisition of a skill in totality is the acquisition of skills over a long period of time, practicing every day improves your abilities gradually, not at once. As they say, “practice makes a man perfect,” so getting the task done in bits is the effective way.
How Do I Use An Hour Effectively?
The 5-hour rule is centered on three key traits: Reading, Reflection, and Experimentation.
Read: This habit is pretty much seen in most successful entrepreneurs, so you think of running a successful enterprise, think of this. Billionaires like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, all confess that reading is a great passion of theirs. Musk, at age 9, read the entire Britannica Encyclopedia.
“I was reading various books on trying to figure out the meaning of life and what does it all mean?,” he said in an interview.
Oprah credits books with much of her success.
“Books were my pass to personal freedom,” she shared her reading habit with the world via her book club.
Do you really think Bill Gates reading 50 books a year is directly tied to his daily projects?
Reflect: A healthy mind they say is able to think straight (just making this up), but in fact, the 5-hour rule takes the form of reflection and thinking time. CEOs like Tim Armstrong of AOL, Jack Drowsy of Twitter, Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn; all confessed to be critical thinkers.
Brian Scudamore, founder of O2E Brands, spends 10 hours a week just thinking. Sara Blakely was a long-time journaler. In one interview, she shared that she has more than 20 notebooks in which she logged the terrible things that happened to her and the gifts that have unfolded as a result.
(Psychology says overthinking is depressing to your emotional health, and not thinking of how to run a multi-million dollar company. So put on your thinking caps).
Experiment: Now is the best time to test your ideas. Here is where you practice your skills and develop them. By experimenting, you ensure that you’re really working on your goals and not wishful thinking. This is even evident in most successful entrepreneurs.
“When starting SpaceX, I thought the odds of success were less than 10 percent,” Musk talking about how he started SpaceX in an interview, “and I just accepted that actually probably I would just lose everything. But that maybe we would make some progress.”
So go ahead and try your luck (best) anyway. Who knows tomorrow?
An Hour A Day Makes One Successful
“I think skill acquisition, literally the acquisition of skills and how to do things, is just dramatically underrated.” says Marc Andreessen, a billionaire and entrepreneur, making reference to Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview;
“There’s a reason there are so many stories about Mark Zuckerberg. There aren’t that many Mark Zuckerbergs. … The really great CEOs, if you spend time with them — you would find this to be true of Mark today or of any of the great CEOs of today or the past — they are really encyclopedic in their knowledge of how to run a company, and it’s very hard to just intuit all of that in your early 20s.”
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Written by: Nana Kwadwo, Thu, Jan 24, 2019.
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