Why you need to spend 5 hours a week on training

Why learning is so important

Our knowledge is becoming obsolete every day

The mathematician Samuel Arbesman, in his book The Half-Life of Facts, writes: “The body of facts also has half-lives. We can measure the time it takes for half of the domain knowledge to be disproved."

For example, if you have liver problems and you see a doctor who was educated more than 45 years ago, about half of his knowledge is most likely incorrect.

In ordinary life, we do not feel that knowledge is becoming obsolete. But consider the following facts:

In 2017, 85 new species described by the California Academy of Sciences in 2017 85 new species of plants and animals were discovered. At the same time, scientists believe that we have yet to discover 90% of the species of living beings. According to some data, Scaling laws predict global microbial diversity, while science knows only one thousandth of a percent of all microorganisms.
If you were to study psychology in 2010, you would be familiar with a hundred major studies. In 2015, scientists repeated them and the results were confirmed Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science in less than half the cases!
Not so long ago, smoking was considered beneficial and was even advertised by doctors for Outrageous vintage cigarette ads.
In the 1980s, it was believed that bacon, butter, and eggs were the three most harmful foods to the heart. Now the opinion has changed.

In the 1970s, new information science research emerged that determined the half-life of knowledge. It was measured based on how long it took to stop citing the average scientific work. The data is taken from the book "Half-life of scientific facts":

Field of knowledge	Half-life (in years)
Physics	13, 07
Economy	9, 38
Maths	9, 17
Psychology	7, 15
History	7, 13

But if in medicine or chemistry the basic knowledge changes relatively slowly, then in the new important areas of today this process is much faster. Among them:

artificial intelligence;
Application Development;
development of projects of unmanned vehicles;
cloud computing;
social media management;
YouTube content creation;
creation of online courses.

15 years ago, most professions in these areas did not even exist. Business schools said it took hundreds of hours to create a detailed business plan. Entrepreneurs are now advised not to write it at all, but to focus on communicating with customers and apply the principles of Lean Startups.

15 years ago, online publishing was a complement to print magazines and newspapers. Now everything is exactly the opposite.

According to the Mind the (Skills) Gap of Harvard scientists, the skills acquired at the university remain relevant only for five years. The following factors affect the obsolescence of knowledge:

The amount of information about the world and ourselves is growing exponentially. With the advent of the Internet of Things, more accurate measuring instruments and online tracking, scientists have more data and the ability to infer scientific facts from them.
The number of scientists in the world is growing rapidly.
The number of people who create and share ideas is also growing. 30 years ago, only scientists and intellectuals were doing this. With the advent of social media, millions of ordinary people can regularly share their experiences.
We can do more and more complex calculations. According to Moore's Law, the number of calculations per second is growing. Each such step forward helps us to better understand the world around us and solve problems that previously seemed insurmountable.
Scientific instruments are also being developed in accordance with this law. This further accelerates scientific progress.

Your competitors are constantly learning new things

According to the Global Rise of Education research site Our World In Data, the average person in a developed society has spent more and more time studying in formal educational institutions over the past two hundred years.

For example, in America, from 1940 to the present, the number of people who graduated from college has increased by eight Percentage of the U. S. population who have completed four years of college or more from 1940 to 2017, by gender times. And in China, from 1997 to 2017, their number increased almost ten times Inside the world’s largest higher education boom.

A similar situation is observed with informal learning. You can learn almost anything for free with podcasts, videos, articles, games, and online courses.

In such a situation, when your competitors are constantly learning new things, you also need to do this. If you stand still, others will leave you far behind. If at work you do the same for a long time, you may not notice that your skills are becoming obsolete. Usually people find this out when they move into a new field or return to work after a break.

Why you need to study exactly 5 hours a week

Four-year university studies include How many credits, or credit, hours do you need to get a student at an American university? on average about 6,000 hours of study. For convenience, let's assume that mastering a profession takes 5,000 hours. With each passing minute, the knowledge you have gained is becoming a little outdated, that is, it is becoming less valuable.

We can confidently assume that in 10 years half of the knowledge in any area is refuted or supplemented. That is, 50% of the data is outdated. Now let's see how this affects the 5000 hours you spent on training:

Number of years	% outdated knowledge	The number of hours it takes to stay in the know
1	5%	250 (5% of 5000 hours)
5	25%	1,250 (25% of 5,000 hours)
10	50%	2,500 (50% of 5,000 hours)

If the training is evenly distributed, you need to study 5 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, just to stay on top of the current state of affairs.

How to do it without rearranging your schedule

You probably think you don't have five extra hours a week. Considering work, family, health care and various responsibilities, it seems impossible to carve them out. But you don't need to change your routine at all. Add training to free spaces in the current schedule. With videos, podcasts, and audiobooks, you can learn while doing other things. Here are some examples:

The road to work (on average, it is from an hour to two per day).
Jogging and walking.
Communication (discuss with others what you are learning to better remember information and learn something new).
Cooking and time spent eating.
Cleaning or gardening.

Think about where else these opportunities lurk during your day. If you have difficult material to master, choose an environment in which you can fully focus on the information.

Everyone knows that to stay healthy, you need to get a certain amount of nutrients and walk a certain number of steps per day. But few people think that to maintain economic well-being, you need to regularly learn new things.

Without constant training, you can get stuck in an uninteresting job or even be left idle. Recent research confirms The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment that job loss affects not only the life of the individual, but also the lives of his children.

Unemployment leaves noticeable economic, psychological and even physical consequences. Its impact is as real as the impact of poor diet, lack of sleep and a sedentary lifestyle.

So take one hour, five days a week, and gradually learning will become a habit.