I'm sure you've seen the articles saying "x % of Fortune 500 CEOs majored in _____".  There are a lot of variations involving being tall or having a long ring finger or growing up in a certain environment.  While some of these stories stop at correlation, many of them seem to think that there is causality and then they try to infer meaning from that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that there is some causality.  I just don't think people tend to interpret things correctly.  Being tall is a great example of this.  Do you think that when a company is looking at the final list of candidates for the CEO job, they take a look at a lineup of successful executives and they end up going with the tall person?  Probably not.  Being tall probably just helps people build confidence when their young which in turns makes them more effective at their jobs.

The statistics say that many of the richest people in America dropped out of school.  That's not a good reason to drop out.  A lot of CEOs majored in engineering or math.  They probably would have been very successful with any other major.  It's probably true that the types of people interested in math are more likely to have some amazing innovation in the future, but the math degree doesn't matter.

The only trait that all really successful people share is that they're exceptional.  When I say "exceptional" I don't mean "good".  I mean "not ordinary".  They are exceptions.  Trying to copy people that are outliers doesn't make any sense.  It's the things that they don't have in common with other people that make them successful.

Great artists don't go around copying what all the other great artists do.  Why would it be a good idea for business people to try?  The only trait worth emulating is the ability to be different.  The ability to stand out.  It's not only pointless to care what most CEOs did at their first job, it's probably detrimental to your ability to find whatever you're actually good at.

I realize that it's silly for me to act like I know something about success since I'm still in the process of proving myself.  Hopefully I can look back at this in a few years and know that I was right.  If not, hopefully I can grow about 9 inches.