- 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.