This seems completely wrong to me. If you look at who is the top 0.1% it's either inherited wealth, a few professionals (lawyers, certain medical specialties, etc.) who own their own practices, or people who've managed large groups of people (i.e. business executives). The third group is overwhelmingly full of people with good social skills, and skilled professionals are almost always personable too.
Politics, law, finance, the arts, advertising, religion, and the media all rely on persuasion. And because narcissists and sociopaths are so much more credible and charming than introverts and tech nerds, these professions are full of people who make a living selling stories - about themselves, others, and related brands and products.
This is why we have such problems with the constraints of physical or social reality. These people believe their stories. They experience any suggestion they're objectively wrong as an unreasonable threat to their status and self-image.
They feel the same way about any suggestion that other people's stories matter. To them, they don't. If they did matter they'd show some hesitation and nuance, and the persuasion magic would evaporate.
For the banks and credit unions where customer service is a key advantage, operations people with good people skills are super important. But because of industry culture, these people are pretty much sh1t upon. It shows in their pay, and in the rapidity with which they are laid off.
I bet there's tons of places where this happens.
I am not trying to nitpick, and this is totally offtopic from the rest of the thread, but suggesting that huge group of people is more "successful" due to being evil, narcissistic, deceiving, [insert any other trait] seems to be a major bias in itself. Especially if the root cause is having strong emotions due to that group's role in modern society.
OP even jumps from averages and statistics down to making personalised conclusions ("who wants to have a beer with their CEO?"), which is textbook confirmation bias[0].
Unfortunately, I see this kind of argument often here on hacker news.
All of my fifty closest underlings laugh at my jokes. What more social proof do I need?
A big part of this comes down to practice. Anyone who practices chitchat (or "persuasion") all day gets pretty good at it, at least in a narrow niche. Those "tech nerds" who spend a lot of time going to parties can also get good at it; however, many of the introverted tech nerds would rather be writing code or reading a book or whatever, and end up not practicing these skills starting from a young age, and by the time they reach adulthood are far behind. (In just the same way that someone who never spends time exercising ends up far behind in playing sports, or someone who never spends time solving technical problems ends up far behind in technical skill/expertise, etc.)
Beyond that, if the main goal incentivized is just to "make the sale", the methods used aren't going to necessarily ethical. There's a reason that pick-up artists, used car salesmen, carnival barkers, and social-climber middle managers use deception and burn people in the process of getting ahead: it works. If you have a system that selects for "what works" and doesn't negatively select away "causes collateral damage", then you end up (a) making ethical people play with a huge handicap, and (b) chasing them out of the field.
That doesn't sound true to me at all, though. How are you defining these terms that there's no overlap between the first set and the second?
> And are we saying that definitive driver of execs success is due to having all these traits?
Mmm no, that's not what I'm asserting. I can't speak for the other poster.
> Look at the top 5% and you find some very rich people [...]
The top 5% does not predominately consist of "very rich people". The 95th percentile is "upper middle class", people like relatively ordinary white-collar professionals and successful small-business owners including tradespeople who run their own shops, etc. We're talking about "own a nice house, take vacations, and can afford to retire comfortably" money, not "fleet of servants" money.
In a thread about people being rich or not, yes, of course he meant that. There isn't any alternative way to define this.
I stumbled over that sentence. I genuinely don’t understand what this means in context. Can someone explain the metaphor and/or the point that’s being made here?
5%: $336k
1%: $819k
0.1%: $3.3m
The income curve is a hockey stick that goes vertical at the far right side and it keeps getting steeper over time. https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
We keep hearing that. (Because it sounds good).
It should be true because it's not all that hard to keep wealth increasing at least modestly - and let time do the work. But take heart! "The Missing Billionaires" argues that in practice inherited wealth is reliably lost over shockingly few generations.