5- HOUR Successful Rule

5-Hour Rule Is Used By The World's Most Successful

Success, In One Hour A Day

The rule itself is pretty simple: Carve out one hour from each weekday (one hour + five weekdays = five hours) to devote to deliberate practice and learning. Insert any bit of reading, studying, or practicing here that is applicable to the greater goal of advancing in your field. That's it. Ta-da. Watch out, Mr. Buffett.

The reason why the five-hour rule is so effective in priming the world's most accomplished people for continued success comes down to two things. First, working harder and longer is not the same as working smarter. Not even close. Smart working includes taking a little time away to learn instead of do. This will help you focus on long-term self-improvement, rather than your current workload. Do you really think Bill Gates reading 50 books a year is directly tied to his daily projects?

 

Secondly, nothing beats an expert. Jumping right into the deep end, figuring things out as you go is great and all, but there's no substitute for good ol' fashioned expertise. Billionaire entrepreneur Marc Andreessen points to Mark Zuckerberg as an example, saying in an interview, "I think skill acquisition, literally the acquisition of skills and how to do things, is just dramatically underrated. [...] There's a reason there are so many stories about Mark Zuckerberg. There aren't that many Mark Zuckerbergs. [...] The really great CEOs, if you spend time with them — you would find this to be true of Mark today or of any of the great CEOs of today or the past — they are really encyclopedic in their knowledge of how to run a company, and it's very hard to just intuit all of that in your early 20s."

Bill Gates

Bill Gates says that he reads about fifty books a year. 

Why would the world's richest man — worth an estimated $78 billion (in 2016) — spend so much time leafing through pages?

Most of what he reads is nonfiction that explains something about how the world works.

His favorites from 2015 dug into how buildings are built, how children succeed, and how diseases are eradicated. 

In a recent interview with Katherine Rosman at the New York Times, Gates explained that reading has always been one of the "chief ways" that he learns. 

"These days, I also get to visit interesting places, meet with scientists, and watch a lot of lectures online," Gates explained. "But reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding."

Sometimes, a book will help him see familiar things in a new light. 

"For example, this year I enjoyed Richard Dawkins’s 'The Magic of Reality,' which explains various scientific ideas and is aimed at teenagers," Gates writes. "Although I already understood all the concepts, Dawkins helped me think about the topics in new ways. If you can’t explain something simply, you don't really understand it."

It's fascinating that Gates, one of the greatest technologists in history, relies on one of the oldest information technologies — the written word — to further his understanding of the world.

Not even on an e-reader— the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation head reads print. 
As the American philosopher Morimer Adler noted in "How to Read a Book," books are the best teachers available for people who aren't in school. And Gates, the world's richest man (and perhaps one of the most studious), uses reading to add to his understanding of the world. 

"This is one of the things I love about reading," Gates said. "Each book opens up new avenues of knowledge to explore."

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, has emerged as a force in the publishing industry, thanks to the book reviews he posts on his blog, Gates Notes. Mr. Gates, who says he reads about 50 books a year, discussed his love of reading, how he makes his selections and what book Warren Buffett recommended. Below are excerpts from a recent email interview.

 

What role does reading play in your life?

 

It is one of the chief ways that I learn, and has been since I was a kid. These days, I also get to visit interesting places, meet with scientists and watch a lot of lectures online. But reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding.

For example, this year I enjoyed Richard Dawkins’s “The Magic of Reality,” which explains various scientific ideas and is aimed at teenagers. Although I already understood all the concepts, Dawkins helped me think about the topics in new ways. If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it.

 

What made you decide to start the books blog and write reviews?
 

I have always loved reading and learning, so it is great if people see a book review and feel encouraged to read and share what they think online or with their friends.

It also helps to have a platform for talking about the work I’m doing, both through the foundation and separate from it, because I find people are curious about it.

 

How do you choose the books you read? Recommendations from family/friends/media?

 

It’s a mix of things. Melinda and I will sometimes exchange books we like. I also get recommendations from friends. After I finish something great, I will often try to find other books by that author or similar ones on the same subject.
 

Earlier this year Melinda and I saw the musical “Hamilton,” which inspired me to read Ron Chernow’s biography.

 

What was the process of selecting the books for the best-of-the-year list? Any tough choices?

 

I didn’t set out to do this intentionally, but when I looked back at the books I read this year, I realized that a lot of them touch on the theme “how things work.”

 

Some, like Randall Munroe’s “Thing Explainer,” are written exactly for that reason. He uses diagrams paired with the most common 1,000 words in the English language to explain complicated ideas.

Other books on my list offer insights into human beings, our values, our strengths and flaws.

 

Is there one book that was an unexpected choice for you that you unexpectedly loved?

 

One of the main reasons I started my blog was to share thoughts about what I’m reading. So it is nice to see people sharing their own reactions and recommendations in the comments section of the site.

 

One book that was especially fun to highlight was “Business Adventures,” by John Brooks. This is the first book Warren Buffett recommended to me after we met in 1991, and it is still the best business book I have ever read. Brooks deserves to be much better known than he is.

 

Although he wrote in the 1960s, the issues he talks about are still relevant today. “Business Adventures” went out of print decades ago and Brooks died in 1993, but his family was nice enough to let me post one chapter called “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox” on my blog.

 

I don’t read a lot of fiction but was surprised by how much I loved the novel “The Rosie Project,” by Graeme Simsion. Melinda read it first and kept stopping to recite parts of it out loud to me. Eventually, I decided to take a look.

 

I started it one night at 11 p.m. and stayed up with it until 3 a.m. It is very funny, while also showing a lot of empathy for people who struggle in social situations.

 

After I sent it and the sequel (“The Rosie Effect”) to dozens of friends and wrote about it on my blog, I heard from a lot of people who were touched by it. There is talk of turning it into a movie, which I hope happens. Rosie and Don Tillman would make a great on-screen couple.

 

I like highlighting the work of Vaclav Smil. He has written more than 30 books, and I have read them all. He takes on huge topics like energy or transportation and gives them a thorough examination.

 

Smil’s books are not for casual readers and I don’t agree with him on everything, but I like to feature his work because the world would be a better place if more people thought as rigorously and systematically as he does.

 

Evan Thomas, the best-selling biographer of Robert F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower and the author of a half-dozen other books, has seen those books reviewed over the years by The New Yorker, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. But with the recent publication of his latest work, “Being Nixon: A Man Divided,” he experienced for the first time a new phenomenon: the Bill Gates bump.

 

Just before Christmas, Mr. Thomas learned that his book had been favorably reviewed by Mr. Gates on his blog, Gates Notes.

 

“I’m surprised by the number of biographies I read that paint their subjects in black-and-white terms,” Mr. Gates wrote. “A classic example is former U.S. president Richard Nixon, who is too often portrayed as little more than a crook and a warmonger. So it was refreshing to see a more balanced account in ‘Being Nixon,’ by author and journalist Evan Thomas.” The review was illustrated by a photograph of the book on a desk adorned with objects from the Nixon era, like a rotary phone.

 

Mr. Thomas was taken by surprise. “I’ve never met Bill Gates,” he said. “I had no idea he had a books blog.”

“I was thrilled because he has a lot of reach,” Mr. Thomas said, adding that sales of the book jumped soon after that review was posted. “I can tell the blog is well read because I heard from all sorts of random people.”

For years, Mr. Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft who now focuses on the philanthropic work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, had been scribbling notes in the margins of books he was reading and then emailing recommendations to friends and colleagues.

 

Then he began to post these recommendations and critiques on the blog. “A few years ago I started thinking it would be fun to share some of these notes with the public,” Mr. Gates wrote in a recent email interview. “I have always loved reading and learning, so it is great if people see a book review and feel encouraged to read and share what they think online or with their friends.”

 

Mr. Gates says he reads about 50 books in a year, eschewing digital readers for old-fashioned books on paper. When he is busy with work, he reads about a book or two a week but will consume four or five in the same period while vacationing with family.

He has loved reading since boyhood. “I did things like reading the encyclopedia for fun,” he said, “and I was lucky in that my parents would buy me any book I wanted.”
 

The books section is one of a handful on Mr. Gates’s blog. He also writes on his philanthropic work and his foundation’s endeavors in health care, education and the like. The blog is filled with personal touches like a slide show of him with his friend Warren Buffett (including one of Mr. Buffett doing push-ups at Mr. Gates’s 50th birthday celebration) and an ode to his father to mark his father’s 90th birthday. But his book reviews tend to generate the most attention.
 

On Gates Notes, he often recommends books that have a bend toward science and public health. This year, he read, and liked,

“Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World,” by Mark Miodownik;

 

“On Immunity: An Inoculation,” by Eula Biss;

 

and “Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory,” by Vaclav Smil, to name a few.

 

Last month, he published a short list and accompanying video of his favorite books read in 2015. (His reviews are not necessarily for books published within the calendar year.) The list included Mr. Thomas’s Nixon biography; “Eradication: Ridding the World of Diseases Forever?” by Nancy Leys Stepan; and “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success,” by Carol S. Dweck. (“‘Mindset’ first came to my attention a few years ago,” Mr. Gates wrote, “in a fascinating invention session on education with my friend Nathan Myhrvold.”)

 

On the best-of list, he also included, “Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words,” by Randall Munroe, the graphic writer and cartoonist who created the blog XKCD.

 

Earlier in the year, Mr. Gates lavished praise on an earlier book of Mr. Munroe’s: “What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.” “My guess is that you haven’t spent a whole lot of time wondering what would happen if you pitched a baseball at 90 percent of the speed of light,” he wrote. “I haven’t either. But that’s O.K., because Randall Munroe has figured it out and explained it really clearly in his book ‘What If?’”

 

Mr. Munroe first learned that Mr. Gates had read and enjoyed his book when a relative sent him a screen shot of a photograph showing Mr. Gates reading his book. “I stared at it for a while,” Mr. Munroe said in a phone interview. “It didn’t really register. I didn’t know what to do.”

 

Mr. Gates said in the interview that he tries to fill his reviews with bits of information he hopes people will consider, even if they don’t end up reading the book. “I read textbooks related to global health but they are pretty technical for a general audience, so I generally don’t review them,” he said. “I make an exception for things like ‘Sustainable Materials: With Both Eyes Open,’ where the authors’ conclusions are important, and they help clarify some important basic facts. I like to share what I learn from books like that because I know most people won’t read the whole thing but some will read an 800-word review of it.”

 

He also shares some unexpected titles. Of Allie Brosh’s memoir, “Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened,” Mr. Gates wrote: “You will rip through it in three hours, tops. But you’ll wish it went on longer, because it’s funny and smart as hell. I must have interrupted Melinda a dozen times to read to her passages that made me laugh out loud.”

 

Of the novel “The Rosie Project,” by Graeme Simsion, Mr. Gates wrote: “I started it myself at 11 p.m. one Saturday and stayed up with it until 3 the next morning. Anyone who occasionally gets overly logical will identify with the hero, a genetics professor with Asperger’s syndrome who goes looking for a wife. (Melinda thought I would appreciate the parts where he’s a little too obsessed with optimizing his schedule. She was right.)”

 

He rarely posts negative reviews of books, explaining that he sees no need to waste anyone’s time telling them why they shouldn’t bother reading something. He doesn’t spare himself, though. “I have a habit, which I don’t recommend, of finishing essentially every book I start,” he said. “And if I disagree with a book I spend lots of time writing notes in the margins. Perversely, this means that the more I dislike a book, the longer I spend reading it.”

 

As publishers have become more aware of Mr. Gates’s reviews — missing the publicity they used to get from Oprah Winfrey’s televised book club or from the regular author appearances on “The Colbert Report,” which have been less frequent since Stephen Colbert moved to CBS from Comedy Central — they have tried to figure out how to get their new books in front of him.

 

Stephanie Kim, a publicist for Mr. Munroe’s publisher, hustled her way into a connection with someone on Mr. Gates’s team only to be told, “‘We don’t have any say over what Bill chooses,’” she said “‘We just leave it on his desk and he reads what he wants to read.’” Ms. Kim lucked out.

 

Mr. Gates’s reading selections are influenced by his wife, his work and the experiences that move him. “Someone at the foundation recently recommended ‘The Vital Question,’ by Nick Lane,” he said, “which is about mitochondria and the origins of life on Earth. It was so good that as soon as I finished it, I ordered all of Lane’s other books.”

 

“This is one of the things I love about reading,” Mr. Gates said. “Each book opens up new avenues of knowledge to explore.”