[babyboy808]

Good question.

But why not 3 years?

As we all know, let's say if we are given an assignment for college to do and we are given a week to complete it, almost always, I will start the assignment about 3/4 days into the week and then as the deadline looms closer, the real work happens! So in answer to your question, if I said 10 years, I would be focused on 10 years :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law

[nandemo]

The analogy doesn't hold. The problem is not so much that your school assignment is 1 million times easier. There's also:

1) There's not such a huge variation in the time necessary to complete an assignment. Your professor knows that some people can finish it in a couple of days but others need a whole week. But it's much harder to estimate the time to get $1M.

2) You can finish a school assignment on your own. Assuming you have access to the necessary resources (books, net, etc) it depends only on you. You don't need any luck to finish it. But to get rich you need favorable market conditions, meeting the right investors, hiring the right people, the government not screwing you up, etc, i.e. "luck".

[nostrademons]

I've found this doesn't apply if you remove the deadline entirely. If given a task and a week to complete it, I will start the task on the night of the 6th day. However, if just given a task, I'll start the task immediately - or at the very least, as soon as I finish what I'm currently working on. Whether I complete it within the week depends on whether it's a week's worth of work, but I can be fairly sure that I'll end up putting in more work than if I had the original deadline, and I'll probably have something equivalent in quality to the deadline-work after about a day or two.