Striving for success is a trait many people share but don’t always know how to accomplish. This need to succeed causes many people to try their best, however, often leads to them feeling like they’re walking in place as opposed to other people who started off at the same point and are now reaching their goals.
If you feel stuck in place, the "5-Hour Rule" can help you get out of this situation, and many famous people like Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the person who brought us Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, use it to succeed in life and keep up with their success.
As its name implies, the 5-hour rule speaks of a dedication of 5 hours a week, or one hour per day of work, to deliberate learning and self-improvement. This means that in order to succeed, you have to leave yourself 5 hours a week and devote your attention to learning only, without distractions or excuses. Not everyone learns in the same way, but there are several methods to do this to produce the best results from the process and to understand what you need to change in order to be more successful:
The hobby of reading is shared by many successful people, and Bill Gates, who reads about 50 books a year, attributes this to his never-ending learning. In order to make sure you read and develop, always keep a book in the bag you carry around, set reading goals like several hours or several pages a day, and do your best to meet them. In today’s day and age, we also have the option to read books on our cell phones or portable tablets, making reading books that much easier.
Understanding what you have read and the information you’ve collected is a key condition for success and learning. When you spend time reading to learn and improve yourself, it is also important that you take the time to understand what you have read so that you don’t feel overwhelmed and tired. It is essential that you spend the time to cut off distractions when internalizing this information. A good way to do this is to keep a journal that will help you process your feelings and thoughts. Journaling will also help you process the things you’ve learned and apply them to your work or any other field you wish to succeed in.
Once you have begun to learn and understand what you need to do to get ahead and succeed, you can start the practical stage; make time for yourself every week or day to try theories or ideas you have. It could be a project in a job you've struggled with which you've found an interesting way to do or anything else you want to succeed in. When it comes to practical experience, there are no bad ideas, and experimenting with different things, "crazy" as they may be, will allow you to test what works and what doesn’t. This way, you won’t risk failure on the ground, but simply conduct experiments of your own without involving other people in your failure or success. When you find what works, you can apply it to the "real world," that is, at work or other places where you are struggling to succeed.
It is easy to confuse work with learning, and when we do, people begin to feel that they are standing in place. It is important that you realize that investing many hours at work is not what will guarantee you success in the future. When you begin to devote time to learning and not just to work, you can develop significantly. This way you will focus not only on your daily problems but also on the future and on the way you can strive for it and your goals successfully. Set apart time for deliberate learning so that you’re not only consumed with work, but also with other important things that can push you forward in life.
People often mistakenly think that having a product of their actions means being successful, but that isn’t true. Success in life is not measured only by material achievements that can disappear in an instant, but in constant improvement. Achievements are important, but try not to focus only on them and what you have at a given moment, but on what you will gain in the long run.
The biggest challenge in the 5-hour rule is perseverance since people are constantly out to reap rewards and good outcomes. However, when that doesn’t happen they may give up and make mistakes that will only push them further away from their goal. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, try to focus on learning and improving yourself, not just on the number on your paycheck, for example. When you learn that you can do things much more complicated than you thought you were capable of before, success will come in a way you could never imagine.
