A couple of funny tidbits from the paper:<p>> Of the 677, we were unable to find 27 males and 15 females in our Internet searches (we could not confirm their identities in our contact-information database). Given our method and criteria (Table 1), however, we believe it is unlikely that we missed an individual with a truly illustrious career. ... Our reasoning was that, if someone were truly eminent, then that person should be publicly conspicuous and therefore discoverable through online searches.<p>And a finalist for the irony in naming things award:<p>> We used Publish or Perish software (Harzing, 2007) to collect information on each participant’s number of publications, number of patents, and h-index.
The next question is how do we build as many people with traits like this as possible, and I assume it to be high quality education with a low stress home life. This is something that the US economy is not currently achieving, based on happiness and education metrics.<p>What should not be learned from this is that there are high caliber people, but instead that these traits call be learned, and I'm certain that there are schools teaching them, but I assume that those are quite foolishly only offered to specific subsets of people here, and that we will see further advancement in other societies as they find solutions to that exact problem by advancing educational practice through scientific experimentation on a national scale.
Looking at the comments, there needs to be a distinction between the "eminent" career vs what people define as "success" in the title.<p>The success in this paper is the equivalent of the Forbes 30 under 30 rankings except it's when you're 48. There will be genuinely eminent people who run a fortune 500 company, illustrious careers in academia, but the methodology of simply searching for someone years later has clear problems.<p>What if you were to win a Nobel prize at age 55 or 60 (very common). You may have contributions earlier but didn't meet the criteria.<p>On the reverse, like with Forbes 30 under 30, there are always people who master personal branding and PR over substance. Lot's of news articles about you doesn't equate to being eminent in the usual definition of the world- just well known.<p>FYI, I'm not disputing their thesis or suggesting their results are wrong, I just find it odd that evaluating people at age 48, they couldn't find an algorithm much better than Forbes 30 under 30 which we all know has a lot of BS.<p>I'd be curious to the results at age 75.
It's interesting how "success" means "selective, high-workload, white-collar career" in this study. In other cultures, it just means having friends/relationships and not being stressed all the time. I suspect many of these successful types are failures in this regard.
Ok so I see no controls for income/family wealth, etc<p>If anything I see selection for wealth: the samples in one of the bigger studies selected from “the 15 best STEM graduate training programmed”, which is broadly a proxy for wealth.<p>More over they don’t have negative samples: afaict their “study” was to take the top X% of students from some already wealth biased institutes and compare their performance to the overall average for everyone. What they should have done is compare the performance of the X% of the class they sampled from with the performance of the remainder of that class.<p>Then we could compare more similar starting points.<p>Obviously we would generally expect <i>some</i> correlation between skill when younger to 35 years later, but I would expect the entire group to do significantly better than the general average. Eg a person who got into Harvard because of their family history, and gets a C, is likely to do better than a person with a 4.0 from a state university. (General averages, obviously there can be outliers in every direction)