“How do they do that?”

I’m sure you’ve found yourself asking that question, thinking about that one person who always seems to catch the lucky break.

No matter what they do, they grow. Everything they try seems to take off. They are always in the right place at the right time with the right people under the right circumstances, and before you know it, they move up a notch and add to their success.

But before you label them, ‘God’s Favorite,’ understand that God had nothing to do with their success or their luck—they created it.

And while that doesn’t sound like the answer you’d want, it’s the answer you need to hear because, if they can, why can’t you?

Fast Success is Bad Success

First, we need to get this idea out of our heads.

We’ve come to believe that if we succeed fast or achieve our goals at a young age, success will get in our heads, our ego will go into overdrive, and we’ll mess everything up.

I’m not reasoning against that belief because our newspapers are littered with such stories. Every few years, we hear of a young, promising movie star’s untimely death, often because of drugs or suicide. We read about genius businesspeople who got too much funding too fast and drove a promising idea into the ground. And musicians whose first album was a huge success, but the subsequent ones didn’t make any noise.

As we hear these stories over and over, we make the classic correlation-causation error. Instead of looking at the real cause for failure (which is often different in each case), we connect the common dots in each story (the fast, early success), and just because they’re correlated, we think fast success is the reason people fail and mess up.

But it’s not. Fast Success is not Bad Success. Unearned Success is Bad Success. That’s a crucial difference.

True Success Comes from Preparation

It doesn’t matter if it takes you decades or years or months or weeks to get your goals. Time is not the defining metric for how long your success lasts; a strong foundation is.

The people who succeed fast and fail faster don’t have that strong foundation. They get the lucky break, but they cut corners. They don’t prepare well enough. They let go of their values and make decisions that don’t align with their long-term goals. They stop working hard, grow complacent, and think, “I’ve arrived. No one can touch me now.”

And that’s precisely why they fail, and why you will too if you get to your goals with that mindset. You will come tumbling down—even if you spent fifteen years trying to climb to the summit.

The only kind of success that lasts is the kind you earn through your work, effort, dedication, and preparation.

And no one explained the difference better than Charlie Munger at his 2007 Commencement address to graduates at the USC Law School:

I frequently tell the apocryphal story about how Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum mechanics.

Over time, his chauffeur memorized the lecture and said, “Would you mind, Professor Planck, because it’s so boring to stay in our routine. [What if] I gave the lecture in Munich and you just sat in front wearing my chauffeur’s hat?” Planck said, “Why not?” And the chauffeur got up and gave this long lecture on quantum mechanics. After which a physics professor stood up and asked a perfectly ghastly question. The speaker said, “Well I’m surprised that in an advanced city like Munich I get such an elementary question. I’m going to ask my chauffeur to reply.”

When your success is as weak as the Chauffeur’s knowledge, you fail at the first question or challenge. When you face a problem you didn’t prepare for, finding a solution becomes impossible, and the success you once enjoyed becomes the biggest headache of your life.

The Path That Works:

I know we started this email with a promise to help you succeed faster. This section is where I fulfill it. 

You can build lasting success faster than you could ever imagine if you stop driving around like the chauffeur and focus on mastering your field, just like Max Planck mastered the physics of quantum mechanics.

How quickly you progress on that journey of mastery depends on how much effort you put forth. You can achieve lasting success and do it fast. You can make something happen in 1 year instead of 10 without cutting corners.

Apply basic mathematics and you’ll know what to do. If you want to 10X the results, you 10X the efforts.

Be more intense in your hard work and preparation. 

Add speed to your actions. 

Be confident. Even if you don’t feel like it. 

Promise. Even if you can’t deliver. 

Execute. Like your life depends on it. 

Overpromise. Then overdeliver.

That’s a lesson I learned from my mentor, and it’s the path to lasting success because the intensity of your actions defines the speed of your growth. 

Is it hard? Yes. But it’s your choice. 

Hard but fast. 

Or… 

Easy but slow. 

With the first option, your chances of success are higher because your commitment to making things happen is higher.

With the second one, you can grow decently, but you can’t expect extraordinary results. 

Because extraordinary people become extraordinary in their efforts first and results second.