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Why successful people spend 10 hours a

week on ‘compound time’
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Michael Simmons, Medium Share    

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Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO Warren Buffett Rick Wilking | Reuters

One question has fascinated me my entire adult life: what causes some
people to become world-class leaders, performers and changemakers,
5 All 8 Ivy League schools will not
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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.

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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 haircut and that most of his weeks
were similar. This is the opposite of most people who are overwhelmed
with short-term deadlines, meetings, and minutiae.

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.”

 1:56

This one ancient trick will make you a better decision maker

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
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 with what’s called metacognitive thinking,
which is our awareness of our own thoughts. Metacognition is a key
element in performance.

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 percent better on an evening test if they’ve had an hour-long
nap than if they haven’t.

 2:39

These successful people share how to get more done in your 24-
hour day

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

Now we have scientific data proving what these geniuses intuited: taking
a walk refreshes the mind and body, and increases creativity. It can even
extend your life. In one 12-year study of adults over 65, walking for 15
minutes a day reduced mortality by 22 percent.

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.

 1:11 Top performers in all areas take advantage of this high-powered, low-
Marcus Lemonis
cost way toshares
learn. his top productivity trick

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

Tverskydeveloped 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
 1:02 Warhol and Pat Hackett took two hours each morning to “do the diary”
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day’s activities salesperson

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, Leonardo da Vinci, and other luminaries aren’t just filled with
writing, they’re also filled with sketches and mind maps.

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
 1:02 Square Garden by piecing his routine together in small clubs for months
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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
 1:04 creativity. Creativity is not unleashed by working more, but by working
Legal Sea Foods CEO: Develop a ‘maniacal’ focus on quality
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 is possible and beneficial; that a lifestyle
where you ruthlessly focus on your strengths and passions is not only
feasible, but necessary.

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.

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advice This article originally appeared on Medium.

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