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Why Successful People Spend 10 Hours A

Week On “Compound Time”
Published on August 15, 2017

Warren Buffett, Albert Einstein, Oprah Winfrey all do this one thing outside their
to-do-lists everyday.

One question has fascinated me my entire adult life: what causes some people to
become world-class leaders, performers, and changemakers, while most others plateau?

I’ve explored the answer to this question by reading thousands of biographies, academic
studies, and books across dozens of disciplines. Over time, I’ve noticed a deeper
practice of top performers, one so counterintuitive that it’s often overlooked.

Despite having way more responsibility than anyone else, top performers in the business
world often find time to step away from their urgent work, slow down, and invest in
activities that have a long-term payoff in greater knowledge, creativity, and energy. As a
result, they may achieve less in a day at first, but drastically more over the course of
their lives.

I call this compound time because, like compound interest, a small investment now
yields surprisingly large returns over time.

Warren Buffett, for example, despite owning companies with hundreds of thousands of
employees, isn’t as busy as you are. By his own estimate, he has spent 80 percent of his
career reading and thinking.

At the 2016 Daily Journal annual meeting, Charlie Munger, Buffett’s 40-year business
partner, shared that the only scheduled item on his calendar one week was getting his

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haircut and that most of11his weeks were similar. This is 7the opposite of most people
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are overwhelmed with short-term deadlines, meetings, and minutiae.
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Ben Franklin once wisely said: “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
Perhaps the source of Buffett’s true wealth is not just the compounding of his money,
but the compounding of his knowledge, which has allowed him to make better
decisions. Or as billionaire entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist Paul Tudor Jones
has eloquently said, “Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.”

To build your own intellectual capital, here are six compound time activities that you
can start incorporating into your life immediately:

Hack #1: Keep a journal. It could change your life.

Many top performers go beyond open-ended reflection: they often combine specific
prompts with a physical journal.

Each morning, Benjamin Franklin asked himself, “What good shall I do this day?” and
each evening, “What good have I done today?” Steve Jobs stood at the mirror each day
and asked, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to
do?” Both billionaire Jean Paul DeJoria and media maven Arianna Huffington takes a
few minutes each morning to count their blessings. Oprah Winfrey does the same: she
starts each day with her gratitude journal, noting five things for which she’s thankful.

Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman asks himself questions about his
thinking before bed: What are the kind of key things that might be constraints on a
solution, or might be the attributes of a solution? What are the tools or assets I might
have? What are the key things that I want to think about? What do I want to solve
creatively? Grandmaster chess player and world champion martial artist Josh
Waitzkin has a similar process, “My journaling system is based around studying
complexity. Reducing the complexity down to what is the most important question.
Sleeping on it, and then waking up in the morning first thing and pre-input
brainstorming on it. So I’m feeding my unconscious material to work on, releasing it
completely, and then opening my mind and riffing on it.”

Whenever legendary management consultant Peter Drucker made a decision, he wrote

down what he expected to happen; several months later, he’d compare the results with
his expectations. Leonardo da Vinci filled tens of thousands of pages with sketches and
musings on his art, inventions, observations, and ideas. Albert Einstein amassed more
than 80,000 pages of notes in his lifetime. Former President John Adams kept over 51
journals throughout his life.

Ever notice that after writing about your thoughts, plans, and experiences, you feel
clearer and more focused? Researchers call this “writing to learn.” It helps us bring
order and meaning to our experiences and becomes a potent tool for knowledge and
discovery. It also augments our ability to think about complex topics that have dozens of
Follow Write an a
interrelated parts, while our brain, by itself, can only manage three in any given
moment. A review of hundreds of studies on writing to learn showed that it also helps

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thoughts. Metacognition is a key element in performance.
Michael Simmons 875 67 399

Hack #2: Naps can dramatically increase learning, memory, awareness, creativity,
and productivity.

Pulling from the results of more than a decade of experiments, nap researcher Sara
Mednick of the University of California, San Diego, boldly states: “With naps of an
hour to an hour and a half… you get close to the same benefits in learning consolidation
that you would from a full eight hour night’s sleep.” People who study in the morning
do about 30% better on an evening test if they’ve had an hour-long nap than if they
haven’t.

Albert Einstein broke up his day by returning home from his Princeton office at 1:30
p.m., having lunch, taking a nap, and then waking with a cup of tea to start the
afternoon. Thomas Edison napped for up to three hours per day. Winston Churchill
considered his late afternoon nap non-negotiable. John F. Kennedy ate his lunch in bed
before drawing the curtains for a one- to two-hour nap. Others who swore by daily naps
include Leonardo Da Vinci (up to a dozen 10-minute naps a day), Napoleon
Bonaparte (before battles), Ronald Reagan (every afternoon), Lyndon B. Johnson (30
minutes a day), John D. Rockefeller (every day after lunch), Margaret Thatcher (one
hour a day), Arnold Schwarzenegger (every afternoon), and Bill Clinton (15–60 minutes
a day).

Modern science confirms that napping makes us not only more productive, but also
more creative. Maybe that’s why greats such as Salvador Dali, chess grandmaster Josh
Waitzkin, and Edgar Allen Poe used naps to induce hypnagogia, a state of awareness
between sleep and wakefulness that helped them access a deeper level of creativity.

Hack #3: Only 15 minutes of walking per day can work wonders.

Top performers also build exercise into their daily routine. The most common form is
walking.

Charles Darwin went on two walks daily: one at noon and one at 4 p.m. After a midday
meal, Beethoven embarked on a long, vigorous walk,carrying a pencil and sheets of
music paper to record chance musical thoughts. Charles Dickens walked a dozen miles
a day and found writing so mentally agitating that he once wrote, “If I couldn’t walk
fast and far, I should just explode and perish.” Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
concluded, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”

Others who made a habit of walking include Gandhi (took a long walk every day), Jack
Dorsey (takes a five-mile walk each morning), Steve Jobs (took a long walk when he
had a serious talk), Tory Burch (45 minutes a day), Howard Schultz (walks every
Messaging

morning), Aristotle (gave lectures while walking), neurologist and author Oliver
Sacks (walked after lunch), and Winston Churchill (walked every morning upon
waking).

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Now we have scientific11data proving what these geniuses
7
intuited: taking a Try Premium
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walk refreshes the mind and body, and increases creativity. It can even extend your life.
Michael Simmons
In one 12-year study of adults over 65, walking for 15 minutes a day875
reduced 67
mortality399
by 22%.

Hack #4: Reading is one of the most beneficial activities we can invest in

Here’s an amazing truth: no matter our circumstances, we all have equal access to the
favorite learning medium of Bill Gates, the richest person in the world: books.

Top performers in all areas take advantage of this high-powered, low-cost way to learn.

Winston Churchill spent several hours a day reading biographies, history, philosophy,
and economics. Likewise, the list of U.S. presidents who loved books is long: George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and JFK were all voracious
readers. Theodore Roosevelt read one book a day when busy, and two to three a day
when he had a free evening.

Other lumineer readers include billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban (three-plus hours a
day), billionaire entrepreneur Arthur Blank (two-plus hours a day), billionaire
investor David Rubenstein (six books a week), billionaire entrepreneur Dan Gilbert (one
to two hours a day), Oprah Winfrey (credits reading for much of her success), Elon
Musk (read two books a day when he was younger), Mark Zuckerberg (a book every
two weeks), Jeff Bezos (read hundreds of science fiction novels by the time he was 13),
and CEO of Disney Bob Iger (gets up every morning at 4:30 a.m. to read).

Reading books improves memory, increases empathy, and de-stresses us, all of which
can help us achieve our goals. Books compress a lifetime’s worth of someone’s most
impactful knowledge into a format that demands just a few hours of our time. They
provide the ultimate ROI.

Interested in reading more? I recorded a webinar to help you to find the time to
read and double your return on learning.

Hack #5: Conversation partners lead to surprising breakthroughs

In Powers Of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs, author

and essayist, Joshua Shenk, makes the case that the foundation of creativity is social,
not individual. The book reviews the academic research on innovation, highlighting
creative duos from John Lennon and Paul McCartney to Marie and Pierre Curie to Steve
Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

During long daily walks, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky developed
a new theory of behavioral economics that won Kahneman the Nobel Prize. J.R.R.
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis shared their work with each other and set aside Mondays to
meet at a pub. Francis Crick and James Watson, the co-discoverers of the structure of
DNA, batted ideas back and forth relentlessly, both in their shared office and during
daily lunches in Cambridge. Crick recalled that if he presented a flawed idea, “Watson
would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice-versa.” Artists Andy

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Warhol and Pat Hackett11took two hours each morning to7 “do the diary” together: Try Premium
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recounting the previous day’s activities in detail.
Michael Simmons 875 67 399

Many greats made a habit of conversing in large, ritualized groups. Theodore

Roosevelt’s “Tennis Cabinet” included friends and diplomats who exercised together
daily and debated the issues facing the country. Benjamin Franklin created a “mutual
improvement society” called the Junto that gathered each Friday evening to learn from
each other. The Vagabonds were a group of four famous friends — Henry Ford, Thomas
Edison, Harvey Firestone, and John Burroughs — who took road trips each summer:
camping, climbing, and “sitting around the campfire discussing their various scientific
and business ventures and debating the pressing issues of the day.”

Hack #6: Success is a direct result of the number of experiments you perform

There’s a reason that Jeff Bezos says, “Our success at Amazon is a function of how
many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day….”

One big winner pays for all of the losing experiments. In a recent SEC filing, he
explains why:

“Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times

payoff, you should take that bet every time.
But you’re still going to be wrong nine times
out of ten. We all know that if you swing for
the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but
you’re also going to hit some home runs. The
difference between baseball and business,
however, is that baseball has a truncated
outcome distribution. When you swing, no
matter how well you connect with the ball, the
most runs you can get is four. In business,
every once in awhile, when you step up to the
plate, you can score 1,000 runs.”

No matter how much you read and discuss, you’re still going to have to spend some
time making your own mistakes. If that discourages you, just remember Thomas
Edison. It took him more than 50,000 botched experiments to invent the alkaline storage
cell battery, and 9,000 to perfect the light bulb. But at his death, he held nearly 1,100
U.S. patents.

Experiments don’t just happen in the “real” world. Our brain has an incredible ability to
simulate reality and explore possibilities at a much faster rate and lower cost. Einstein
used thought experiments (imagining himself chasing a light beam through space, for
instance) to help construct breakthrough scientific theories; you can use them to set your
imagination free on slightly smaller conundrums. The journals of Thomas Edison,

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Leonardo da Vinci, and11other luminaries aren’t just filled
7
with writing, they’re also
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filled with sketches and mind maps.
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Standup comedy is a far cry from inventing, but experimentation is just as key in the
arts as it is in science. Take a star comedian like Chris Rock, for instance. Rock prepares
for huge shows in venues such as Madison Square Garden by piecing his routine
together in small clubs for months on end, trying out new material and getting instant
feedback from audiences (they either laugh or they don’t).

Others use experiments to force them to take on new habits or break unhealthy ones.
Iconic producer and writer Shonda Rhimes decided to take on her workaholism and
extreme introversion and say yes to everything that scared her in an experiment she
called the Year of Yes. Jia Jang confronted the universal fear of rejection with his 100
Days of Rejection project, which he then catalogued on YouTube. College grad Megan
Gebhart spent the first year of her career taking one person a week out for coffee; she
compiled the lessons she learned in a book called 52 Cups of Coffee. Filmmaker
Sheena Matheiken wore the same black dress every day for a year as an exercise in
sustainability.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you
make, the better.”

Go Ahead, Take That Hour Now

In a world where everyone is speeding up and cramming their schedule to get ahead, the
modern knowledge worker should do the opposite: slow down, work less, learn more,
and think long-term.

In a world where frantic work is the focus, top performers should focus deliberately on
learning and rest. In a world where artificial intelligence is automating more and more
of our work, we should unleash our creativity. Creativity is not unleashed by working
more, but by working less.

It’s easy to say to yourself, “Sure! Warren Buffett can do it because… well…. he’s
Warren Buffett.” But don’t forget that Warren Buffett has had his learning ritual for his
entire career, way before he was the Warren Buffett we know today. He could have
easily fallen into the trap of the constant “busy-ness,” but instead, he made three crucial
decisions:

Ruthlessly remove the busy work in order to rise above incessant urgent deadlines,
meetings, and minutiae.

Spend almost all of his time on compound time, things that create the most long-
term value.

Tap dance the work because he leverages his unique strengths and passions.

This lifestyle may not happen for you overnight, but in order to leverage compound
time, you first need to believe that a lifestyle where you work less but accomplish more

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is possible and beneficial; that a lifestyle where you ruthlessly focus on your strengths
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and passions is not only feasible, but necessary.
Michael Simmons 875 67 399

To get started, follow the 5-hour rule: for an hour a day, invest in compound time: take
that nap, enjoy that walk, read that book, have that conversation. You may doubt
yourself, feel guilty or even worry you’re “wasting” time… You’re not! Step away from
your to-do list, just for an hour, and invest in your future. This approach has worked for
some of the world’s greatest minds. It can work for you, too.

Interested in using compound time in your life? In order to help you get started,
I recorded a webinar to help you create a learning ritual and to more than double
your learning speed.

———

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Jean Emmanuel NLO Nlo 3mo

Evangelist / Rel.Lib at Center South Conference
Quite interesting! It takes thinkers...
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Lotte Zoontjens 2h
Conecto empresas con el mejor talento en Latino America
Excellent articule
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Michael Simmons
Serial Social Entrepreneur (Co-Founder of Empact) | Bestselling Author | Forbes, Fortune, Inc., Entrepreneur, & Time

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