One of my favorite business writers of all time is Robert Ringer. In his original book, Winning Through Intimidation, he talks about an important concept called the leapfrog theory.

This concept states that being successful doesn’t take a lot of work or a lot of time. If you want to be successful, you simply do a few things, do them correctly, and then you’ll be successful. It doesn’t take 100-hour work weeks. It doesn’t take 25 years. It happens pretty fast.

This is in direct conflict with Societal Programming, which says that if you want to be successful or rich or whatever, you have to essentially become a workaholic for the rest of your life, unhappily slave over hard, painful work, and sacrifice everything else fun in your life, pretty much forever.

Nope. Wrong.

As I’ve written about before, I started out at age 18, by myself, with no money, no contacts, no people skills, no real technical skills, no education, and barely any job skills.

Just two years later, when I was twenty, I was making the modern-day inflation equivalent of $6,000 a month.

Did that take me 25 years of busting my ass and having no fun for the rest of my life? Nope. It just took two years.

That’s all. Just two years.

By the time I was 27 years old, I was making a six-figure income in 1990’s dollars. I don’t know what that would be adjusted for inflation today, but it would be a lot.

Nothing at age 18 to a six-figure income in 1990’s dollars in less than nine years… and much of that nine years was spent farting around, making mistakes, getting married, learning how to be married, raising kids, and other stuff that had nothing to do with work or being successful.

Once I quit my last full-time job and went full time with my business, with very little income, I went from that to six figures (again, in 1990’s dollars which is worth much more than today’s dollars) in exactly 3.5 years.

25 years? Nope. 20 years? Nope. 10 years? Nope. Just 3.5.

And again, back then, I had absolutely no time management skills whatsoever. I wasted entire years of my life spending hours and hours a day doing stupid, wasteful, incorrect things.

In other words, I went from zero to a six figure income in 3.5 years while doing most things wrong. Yet I still got there.

Do you know why?

Because success is actually somewhat easy. Success actually doesn’t take very much time at all.

Do you have to work to be successful? Of course! I spent several years working pretty hard to achieve those results. But it was only a few tiny years out of my life. Statistically, I’ll live to be into my nineties. Does it bother me I had to spend two or three years out of my likely 90+ years to be successful? Of course not! How stupid!

This applies to you, too. You’re going to live a very long time. If you just take one, two, three, or maybe on the outside, four years of some reasonable focus in your life, you’ll be successful (financially, or with women, or with whatever other area you want). Then all you have to do is maintain that success, which is way easier than achieving the success, and takes way less time, particularly if you follow my Alpha 2.0 business and lifestyle advice that I lay out in my book.

Society doesn’t want you to know any of this. Society wants you to think that being successful is really hard and takes decades of painful sacrifice.

Poor people and losers want you to think this because it gives them an excuse to be lazy. “It’s too much work,” they say, even though they’re wrong, “So it’s not worth it. I don’t want to bust my ass for 20 years to be rich. I’ll just make $20,000 a year for the rest of my life instead.” If they can get you to think that being successful takes mountains of hard work, they might get you to think they’re not being lazy, when in fact they are.

As Robert Ringer pointed out in his book, rich and successful people also want you to think this. That’s because once they achieve a position of power, they don’t want the competition. They also don’t want anyone to achieve success faster than they did… that pisses them off. They want only a few people to succeed, and they want those people to “put their nose to the grindstone” and “put in their time” before they achieve success.

So you get this false Societal Programming from both the poor losers and the successful rich people: being successful is really hard and takes mountains of work. It’s not worth it. Just be mediocre. That’s easier.

It might be easier, but it won’t make you happy. I’m one of the happiest men I know, and if I hadn’t put in those few years of work almost 20 years ago, I wouldn’t be very happy today. I wouldn’t be miserable, but I wouldn’t be happy.

Do you know what?

Happy is better.

Success doesn’t take a long time.

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