- 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.
Always a pleasure seeing new videos coming out. You've come a long way from when I first began watching in 2017!
No way did I just see a Charles Cornell and Thomas Frank collab.
Is there any way to get the template for your Housing Price Spreadsheet or your Personal Budget Spreadsheet?