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