5 Hour Rule

Reading is one of the most common habits among highly successful people. Warren Buffett spends 80% of his time reading and Bill Gates takes a yearly two week reading vacation.

Why do the world’s smartest and busiest people find one hour a day for deliberate learning, while others make excuses about how busy they are?

What do they see that others don’t?

The answer is simple: Learning is the single best investment of our time that we can make. Or as Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Deliberate learning is fundamental to succeeding in knowledge economy, yet few people realize it. Luckily, once you do understand the value of knowledge, it’s simple to get more of it. Just dedicate yourself to constant learning.

The 5 Hour Rule
The 5-hour rule involves spending five hours a week, or one hour each working day, focused on deliberate learning. This means setting aside time to give your full attention to learning and development, without getting distracted by other work.

Don’t Confuse Working With Learning

It’s easy to confuse working with learning, and this is how you can end up feeling stuck. You might think that working for 40 hours a week should be enough for you to see improvement, but that’s rarely the case. While you’re focused on day-to-day problems, you’re not giving yourself time to develop and grow. The 5-hour rule is about deliberate learning, not about going to work everyday and hoping you might learn something. Set yourself specific learning goals and give yourself time to achieve them, and you’ll see a vast amount of improvement.

Interesting reads

• The 5-Hour Rule Used by Bill Gates, Jack Ma and Elon Musk https://www.entrepreneur.com/amphtml/317602

• 5-Hour Rule: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible https://medium.com/accelerated-intelligence/the-5-hour-rule-if-youre-not-spending-5-hours-per-week-learning-you-re-being-irresponsible-791c3f18f5e6
• The 5-Hour Rule Is Used by the World’s Most Successful People https://curiosity.com/topics/the-5-hour-rule-is-used-by-the-worlds-most-successful-people-curiosity/

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Junk Learning

Consumption of junk information 24X7 actually damage brain than making us any smarter. Also, most people nowadays are sure of their own belief without trying argue the opposite equally well!
These people become canon fodder of propaganda machines.

Not everything we learn is good for our brain. Junk foods are eatables, but they do not make us healthy. Similarly, a lot of the information that we come across everyday doesn’t actually make us smarter. If the data we gather are faulty, our reasoning based on that data will be faulty too, and so will be our actions based on that reasoning.

This is ‘junk learning’. Just as junk food can make you sick, junk learning can make you dumb. Worrying still, the more your brain gets fed with junk learning the more prone it will become to pick up further junk learning because of the pathways that have already been opened up in your brain.

With too much information available at our fingertips now, we are more and more at risk of getting swayed by junk learning.

How to avoid junk learning:

1. Recognize human capital often depreciates; invest in knowledge that increases in value.
2. Avoid overconfidence.
3. Avoid confirmation bias.
4. Avoid trusting the wrong ideas and false experts.
5. Learn across disciplines.

Source: Most People Think This Is A Smart Habit, But It’s Actually Brain-Damaging