Michael Simmons, a while back, wrote in Inc. Magazine of his study on the personal histories of widely admired business leaders, like Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg. His goal was to better understand how they apply the principles of ‘deliberate practice’.
Some say deliberate practice is the fastest way to become good at things. If you want to become great, you need to practice deliberately. But there is a problem…its hard!
What Simmons found reveals a surprising pattern. Many of these leaders, despite being extremely busy, set aside at least an hour a day for actions that could be classified as ‘deliberate practice.’ Lets call it the, five-hour rule.
How do the best leaders follow the five-hour rule?
It often fell into 3 buckets: reading, reflection, and experimentation.
Reading - According to HBR Magazine, "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 pass to personal freedom." She has shared her reading habit with the world via her book club. These two are not alone. Mark Cuban reads more than three hours every day. Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day. Billionaire entrepreneur David Rubenstein reads six books a week. Dan Gilbert, self-made billionaire and owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, reads one to two hours a day.
Reflecting - Other times, the five-hour rule takes the form of reflection and thinking time. CEO Tim Armstrong makes his senior team spend 4 hours a week just thinking. Jack Dorsey is a serial wanderer. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner schedules 2 hours of thinking time per day. Brian Scudamore, the founder of the O2E Brands, spends 10 hours a week just thinking. When Reid Hoffman needs help thinking through an idea, he calls one of his pals: Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, or Elon Musk. When billionaire Ray Dalio makes a mistake, he logs it into a system that is public to all employees at his company. Then, he schedules time with his team to find the root cause.
Experimenting — Ben Franklin set aside time for experimentation, master-minding with like-minded individuals. Google allows employees to experiment with new projects for 20% of their work time. Facebook encourages experiment-tation through a program called ‘Hack-a-Months’.
The best example might be Thomas Edison who approached new inventions with humility. He would identify every possible solution and then systematically test each of them. According to one of his biographers, "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 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."
The power of the five-hour rule: the improvement rate
People who apply the five-hour rule in work have an advantage. For most of us, it's a good idea to get help and skills. You will find this to be true of any of the great CEOs — they are encyclopedic in their knowledge of how to run a company.
We should look at the five-hour rule the same way we look at exercise
"Lifelong learning is good," but we must think more deeply about the minimum amount of learning the average person should do per day to have a sustainable and successful career. Just as we have minimum recommended dosages of vitamins and exercise for leading a healthy life physically, we should be more rigorous about how we think about the minimum doses of deliberate learning for leading a healthy life economically.
Summing it up
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 made this point loud and clear in an interview with the New York Times; he says that, “those who do not spend at least five to 10 hours a week learning online will soon obsolete themselves.”
