In addition to a thick wallet, billionaires like Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, or Elon Musk have one more thing in common – they apply some version of 'five-hour rule' in their lives. The idea of 'five-hour rule' is that at least one hour a day is dedicated to personal development – learning, mastering new skills, or exercising brain cells. One hour every day, or five hours a week, will turn a failed day into a meaningful one and improve the quality of life in the long run.
However, since it is a challenge for every employed person, especially if they have a family or any obligations, to find a free minute in the day, the team from Big Think shared a few tips on how to make the five-hour rule a part of everyday life.
Three Categories
To start, they advise reading. Audio and physical books, radio, podcasts, and websites are full of inspirational, entertaining, and at the same time, educational content; consume it whenever you can. You can also spend meaningful hours in – experimenting. As noted in Big Think, working on yourself does not mean you have to fill your head with facts. The most successful people in the world are not those who stumbled upon some secret treasure but those who tried, failed, tried again, and failed five times. In his book 'Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford says that 'first, we seek new ideas and try new things; second, when we try something new, we prepare for the fact that mistakes are likely; and third, we learn from those mistakes'.
