People With These 2 Personality Traits Are Predestined To Achieve Success
They're not the ones you think…
andresr | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Everyone has their own theories about the secret to success. But when it comes to the actual research on the matter, the answers are things most of us would never expect.
In fact, they sort of fly in the face of the conventional wisdom that success is primarily about luck, ambition, or privilege. It may actually come down to far simpler, common attributes.
Research shows that there are two personality traits that predict success, and they have nothing to do with ambition.
Many of us tend to think success ultimately comes down to forces beyond our control. There's a reason people who grow up rich and well-connected tend to stay that way, of course. Nepotism always helps; we have a stunning array of otherwise incompetent tycoons to prove it.
Things like an insatiable ambition, whip-smart intelligence, and a whole lot of luck tend to make the list, too — and we have just as many examples of those who rose to the top in part because of their dogged determination to succeed.
There's no denying the reality of those attributes — privilege of all types really has been found to be not just correlated with but predictive of success in many studies. But it turns out that while their impact is real, they're not the primary determining factors according to research. Lucky or unlucky, rich or poor, highly successful people tend to have two so-called "soft skills" across the board.
1. Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is a bit hard to define, but career expert and speaker Grace McCarrick landed on a good description in a recent TikTok on the subject: an "inner compass that drives you to want to do right by your work and to do the right thing."
The University of Minnesota, which published a widely cited study on how this attribute affects success in 2019, defined it as a "family" of traits that includes "being disciplined, focused, tenacious, organized and responsible."
In her video, McCarrick broadened this a bit to include people who are willing to go the extra mile from time to time, not just with respect to their duties, but to their own growth and career path — using your downtime at your boring office job to plan and broaden your network rather than just scrolling your phone, for example.
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One of the University of Minnesota study's authors, Professor Deniz Ones, would likely agree with that take. He stressed that conscientiousness is not just about making sure your i's are dotted and your t's are crossed — it's ultimately about "motivational tendencies — tendencies to set goals [and] work towards them, in a consistent, reliable manner."
2. Self-control
McCarrick called this an "undervalued" trait but one she predicted to be "coming back in vogue" in the working world as leaders look for workers who have a grasp around how they "perceive work," "the way they do their work" and perhaps especially, their "emotional reactions" to their work.
In short, the research says that this is largely about attitude and perspective.
Being in the working world is no picnic, of course. That's why they have to pay us to do it. But while advocating for change in the working world is essential for myriad reasons, it's all too easy for the problematic parts we want to change to become the be-all/end-all of our perspective on work and our careers — that they're an irredeemable and unfair slog.
Giving into that narrative gives you little room to grow, of course, and this view has been found to have a huge impact on what some researchers on the matter have named "positive emotional affect" and its impacts on success.
In short, attitude is everything.
A study at the University of Illinois found that this kind of self-control, which it pointed out was closely related to conscientiousness, is far more predictive of success than even simple willpower — that dogged dedication mentioned earlier.
Crucially, these are both qualities we all have control over. We can't go back and make ourselves be born into nepotism, and we can't change our intelligence, but we can control our conscientiousness and self-control.
And in this dog-eat-dog world, that agency really is everything.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.