The 5 Hour Rule

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Always a pleasure seeing new videos coming out. You've come a long way from when I first began watching in 2017!

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/JustLetThatZincIn 📅︎︎ Jul 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

No way did I just see a Charles Cornell and Thomas Frank collab.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/Geomaster77 📅︎︎ Jul 20 2020 🗫︎ replies

Is there any way to get the template for your Housing Price Spreadsheet or your Personal Budget Spreadsheet?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/stephen2glasser 📅︎︎ Aug 13 2020 🗫︎ replies
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- This video is sponsored by Brilliant. The robots are coming. You've read the headlines, of course, you've heard all the hyperbole, the robots are coming and well, you'd better batten down the hatches and stock up on the canned beans because they're coming for our jobs and for some jobs, well, that's absolutely true. The transportation industry, just to give you one example will largely be powered by self-driving tech in the near future, obviating the need for human drivers and for something that might hit a bit closer to home, for those of you with more desk-bound jobs, there are now algorithms that can even write news reports. In fact, in 2016, the Washington Post's Heliograf Bot wrote over 850 sports articles. And that was four years ago. How long until robots can create convincing online videos? In fact, how do you even now that I'm human? It's not all bad news though, and don't worry, I'm actually human. I'm not a robot. Like you, I enjoy ingesting organic material, both for enjoyment and refreshment, and hydration. Necessary, but more importantly, there is a simple rule that you can follow to ensure that your opportunities for employment and success in your career continue to be plentiful, even as automation tech improves and competition for jobs heats up. It's called the five hour rule. And in this video, we're gonna explain exactly what it is and how you can use it in your own life. But first let's set the stage with a little story. Hey Charles, can I trouble you for one of those flashback sounds real quick? - Sure thing. (piano music) - It's 1978, and all over the world accounting clerks are recording data in spreadsheets, except these spreadsheets are written on paper, physical paper, and even a small recalculation can require hours spent tediously erasing and refilling cells, which is a huge reason why these clerks are employed full-time. One year later, the world's first electronic spreadsheet is released. It's called VisiCalc, and it becomes known as the world's first killer app. Just as Halo made the Xbox a must-buy back in 2002, VisiCalc helped make the Apple Two computer a success. It also erased hundreds of thousands of jobs. All those accounting clerks who had once made their livings writing, erasing, and rewriting data into paper spreadsheets, saw their jobs taken over by VisiCalc and its many successors, which could do the work much faster. But that's not the end of the story. While it may be true that there are 400,000 fewer accounting clerk jobs in the US today than there were back in 1980, it's also true that there are now over 600,000 additional regular accounting jobs. While the electronic spreadsheet may have eliminated some kinds of jobs, it also created others as well. With the ability to quickly make changes and run calculations on a computer, the demand for high level accounting, financial analysis, and a lot other really quite nerdy services, but also quite useful services, went way, way up. Accountants can now do things that were either impossible or at the very least very time consuming in the past. As the podcaster Tim Harford once put it, "Automation reshapes the workplace in ways much subtler than a robot took my job." Automation can also lead to the creation of jobs that involve more creativity and more strategic thinking, both of which humans are pretty good at. But that also leads us to a conclusion. If you want to succeed in an automation-driven future, then you must keep learning. You have to maximize your ability to think creatively, and you have to become adept at working with these new tools and systems. And it's not just automation driving this need for increased learning either. If automation is the rock, then our increasingly connected economy, which enables remote work and a vastly larger talent pool is the hard place. If you rest on your laurels, you'll find yourself caught between them. And that brings us to the five hour rule. This rule simply states that you should dedicate one hour per day to learning, five days per week. The author Michael D. Simmons came up with this rule after observing that Ben Franklin dedicated one hour per day on his daily schedule to reading and generally expanding his knowledge. He also noticed a similar pattern in figures like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett. His conclusion is that the constant among all these people's success is their commitment to continually learning, improving their skills and their general knowledge across the entirety of their careers and by doing so, they're always opening themselves up to new opportunities. They're never resting on their laurels. So that's really the five-hour rule, in a nutshell. It's an incredibly simple idea. In fact, you could print it on a tee shirt. And in fact, I actually do, but there are probably two big questions sticking in your mind right now, one of them being, how do I make time for constant learning, especially if you're somebody who's really busy with work already. And number two, what should I be learning? So what I want to do with the rest of this video is answer both of those questions. And let's first start with how to make time. First, you have to acknowledge the trade off. In Simmons' article about the five hour rule, he notes that Franklin's daily hour of work actually caused him to accomplish less in terms of short term productivity. However, over time, the gains he made through that constant learning accelerated, they added up, and they propelled him to greater heights than that extra hour ever could've. Franklin understood that learning, constant learning, is a longterm investment. All right, onto more practical advice, starting with this tip, which is upside down, I guess. But do it first thing in the morning. If you find it hard to make yourself disciplined enough to do your independent learning after work, then get up a little bit earlier in the morning and do it first. I have found that like the blood pooling into my head, making me less and less eloquent and able to think over time as I do this particular shot, as the day wears on, my willpower tends to go down. But if I have a deadline or a boss, or some kind of assignment hanging over my head, the lack of willpower doesn't matter so much. So, take advantage of the maximized willpower at the beginning of the day and do your learning then. Secondly, work to eliminate low value activities from your life. See, even if you've made that trade off acknowledgement in your head, on an individual day, it's quite easy to say, I just don't have time for that hour of learning. I just have so much work to do. And this is also a justification we tend to use for skipping workouts, particularly when it's leg day. But I would encourage you to examine that claim for yourself and if possible, test it. And you can actually do this using an app like Rescue Time, which will track the time you spend on the apps and websites that you go to. And when you see just how much time you spend on things like social media or mindless YouTube binges, of which this could be one, well, you're going to find out that you do in fact have the ability to cut some of those low value activities from your life, and make time for that hour of learning. That brings us to question number two. What should you be learning with this dedicated daily learning time? Well, since we're talking about increasing your career opportunities, even as automation takes over more and more low level jobs, I wanna talk about three specific types of learning. First learning that directly impacts the skillset you're currently using in your career. For example, as a YouTuber, my main technical skillset is making videos, setting up lights, turning on the camera, all that kind of stuff. As a YouTuber, the technical requirements for getting videos made are pretty low, but that didn't stop me from taking a full week earlier this year to read this workflow guide put out by a company called Frame.io, and this is a hundred thousand word guide that goes through the process used by professional filmmaking teams, like actual Hollywood studios and documentary crews, and helps them get their bigger works completed, and put onto platforms like Netflix or even big screen movie theaters. And not only does this guide go through the entire process, starting with filming, going to editing, covering color grading, sound, VFX, it also gets into really technical territory, exploring color spaces, and bit depth, and garbage mattes, and all kinds of stuff that I've really never heard of before, or at least had never explored. And again, as a YouTuber, my productions are a lot smaller and I didn't really need to learn this stuff in order to do my job, but learning it improved my craft. I was actually able to learn some things that helped me to make the workflow that we use for my channel a lot more efficient. For just one tiny example, we found, after reading this guide, that the video codec we were filming with was actually pretty bad for editing. And that was why we were having a lot of sluggishness in Premiere Pro. Well, one of the reasons why, the other reason being Premiere Pro. But once we changed to a more edit friendly codec, things got a lot better. And if this example teaches you anything, it's that no matter what field you're in, there's always some area where you can broaden or deepen your knowledge. So go find it. Secondly, we have learning that decreases domain dependence. Essentially domain dependence is what happens when a person has a ton of expertise and skills in one particular area, but they have an inability to transfer those skills to new fields, even if the two fields have a lot of underlying similarities. And people with domain dependence are not very adaptable, but luckily the fix here is pretty simple. You just need to take your skills that you already have and spend some time applying them to challenges that are slightly different than what you're used to. In other words, you want to put yourself in what's called a wicked learning environment, which is the opposite of a kind learning environment. Kind environments have well-defined rules and often perfect feedback mechanisms that show you exactly what you did wrong when you made a mistake. The game of chess is a great example here, but if you spend all of your time in environments like these, then you're never really developing your ability to deal with unforeseen challenges. So find a way, at least sometimes, to make your learning environment a bit more wicked. For instance, switching up the tools that you use sometimes. I've found that the time I've spent building spreadsheets and big formulas in Google Sheets has actually made me better able to think about the templates and databases that I build inside of Notion. These are two very different tools, but they share a lot of the same underlying structures. And I found that time spent in either one makes me better at both of them. Finally, we have time spent learning skills that I think everyone should know. These are skills that will both improve your life, but also sometimes expand your career opportunities. I'm talking about skills like public speaking, like being able to evaluate statistics well, budgeting and investing your money wisely, learning how to think logically, and to bring this all around full circle, learning how to make and use spreadsheets. Seriously, a good working knowledge of Excel and Google Sheets can be a really helpful thing. Right now, my fiancee and I are actually starting to look at buying a house and the housing price calculator that I built for myself in Google Sheets, which honestly wasn't that hard to do, has been really helpful for showing us how much we'd probably pay per month, given certain house prices and certain down payment amounts. Whatever you decide to learn, the important thing is that you commit to lifelong learning. I've seen a lot of people graduate school, land a comfortable job, and then become complacent, which is a dangerous state to be in. So whatever you do, just keep learning. Now, if you're already committed to continual learning, then one resource you may want to check out to further that is Brilliant. We talked earlier about how creative and analytical thinking are both hugely beneficial as automation technology advances, and these are the exact types of thinking that Brilliant is designed to help you improve. For example, their computer science fundamentals course, doesn't just throw a bunch of code at you. Instead, it helps you think about algorithms abstractly, so you understand how they work at a fundamental level. And having a firm grasp of these concepts is even more important than knowing how to code in any one particular language. These concepts make you more adaptable. Though I will note that Brilliant does have a great Python programming course, and that course, alongside Brilliant's other courses across math, science and computer science, all focus on active, hands-on learning. So you'll find yourself progressing more quickly and staying interested for longer. In the library, you're gonna find a full math suite ranging from basic number theory, all the way up to vector calculus and finance math. So you can use that to progressively go through entire math education along with science courses, including one on electricity and magnetism, and computer science courses, covering machine learning, search engines, and like I said before, algorithms. So if you want to start improving your problem-solving abilities, and learn in an active, hands-on way, then get started by going over to brilliant.org/ThomasFrank, which you will find in the description down below. And if you are one of the first 200 people to use that link to sign up, you're even gonna get 20% off their annual premium subscription. Guys, that's it. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video and found it helpful, maybe consider gently fist bumping that like button with your middle knuckle. You do have to be specific here. And if you're looking for something additional to watch, I'm now doing some Q&A videos over on my Instagram, multiple videos per week. So if you want to follow me, down in the description down below, I have a link and you can get those videos whenever I post them. Beyond that, subscribe right there, if you haven't done so already. Otherwise click the other videos I've got linked on the screen right now if you want to keep watching stuff here on YouTube or don't do any of that and go do whatever you want, 'cause as always, I'm not your dad.
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Channel: Thomas Frank
Views: 1,152,497
Rating: 4.9374285 out of 5
Keywords: thomas frank, productivity, education, how to learn, studying, automation, five hour rule, 5 hour rule, warren buffett, bill gates, oprah, obama, constant learners, constant learning, never stop learning, how to learn faster, learn faster, learn new skills, skill acquisition, knowledge, self improvement, personal development, self discipline, wake up early, self help, life lessons, how to live well
Id: 27fQl4oRlBI
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)
Published: Mon Jul 20 2020
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