As per David Brooks (on the Charlie Rose show):
the average GPA of self made millionaires is 2.5
a disproportionate percentage of self made millionaires had their father die before they reached the age of 12
I’m not surprised about the first item. As for the second, the 3 most successful people I know had their father die young. I simply thought it was a coincidence and anecdotal. Would be interesting to find out the reasons explaining such a phenomenon.
Did any spend time in jail for killing ones father before the age of 12?
I remember reading that if you did a rational analysis, no one would be an entrepreneur. The risk/reward ratio is just too crazy. So maybe we need entrepreneurs that don’t think about that stuff and a few of them will be successful and celebrated.
^ How did they calculate risk?
The devil is in the details.
If you know you are good at X, and 1000 people bad at X fail, it doesn’t matter.
If you’re 21 years old and are choosing between Prepford Law School and a $100k job offer from BSD Corp, you’re probably not going to try to start a bar.
ha ha ha
One of my buddies in enginering has a pretty good job out of college. But he is still starting up a body shop and works it on the evenings. The body shop is about an hour away from his work, so he spends 2+ hours driving every day and is working like 12-14 hour days. He is doing well and is almost breaking even within the first few months. I think passion trumps things for some people.
What’s a “self-made” millionaire? I mean, does that just mean you started with less than $1mm and you now have $1mm or over?
I’m curious about his sample. It’s not that unbelievable. I mean, if the median is 3.0 or something and you have a few 1.0s in there that’s going to really drag down the average.
Or, it could just be that all the people getting 4.0s have successful parents and are thus excluded from the data. They could make 100mm and it wouldn’t matter for the purposes of the OP statement. If their parents gave them some amount of money (whatever amount is the threshold remains unclear) they would be excluded.
I am not surprised by the father thing. It makes sense that people whose fathers die have to take on additional responsibility, build a work ethic and grow up a lot faster than people who are lucky enough to have both of their parents.
Also note that the father death factor probably contributes to the poor parents factor; families with the dead dad are probably going to start off with less money, meaning more kids from those families will start without $1 million. The work ethic argument could stlll be true, meaning that the dead dad factor could contribute to the results in multiple ways.
The GPA result means little if we do not know the overall distribution of GPAs. If, for instance, 90% of people have 2.5 GPA, most millionaires will probably have 2.5 GPA for the sole reason that there are so many of these people. Most figures I see on the internets actually cite 2.7 to 2.9 GPA, but that’s probably not a meaningful difference.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, dead dad factor makes sense if the definition of “self made millionaire” is poor -> rich. People who make a lot of money tend to come from well educated families. Well educated families just so happen to be rich. So, where do we find the combination of poor + well educated? Well, this happens when the dad dies.
I don’t buy those statistics at all, I’ve never been asked or known anyone who has been asked such questions. I’m pretty sure they are made up to make mediocre people feel better about themselves.
P(father died before age 12 | self-made millionaire) = very high according to David Brooks. Ok, fun fact.
P(self-made millionaire | father died before age 12) = I don’t know but something tells me very very low, and likelihood of becoming a juvenile delinquent very high.
My hypothesis regarding this “phenomenon” is that it provides no predictive or explanatory power whatsoever about your chances of becoming a self-made millionaire, or about the reasons that contributed to your becoming a self-made millionaire (if you are already one).
In the social sciences, they call this “searching on the dependent variable”. Like all those management books that interview successful people and discover that 51% of them eat Wheaties for breakfast, but then forget to test whether Wheaties eaters are any more successful than anyone else.
But I bet Wheaties eaters are more successful than Lucky Charms eaters.
Yes, but you have to control for grape nuts.
Almost A Third Of Our Presidents
Twelve presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — lost their fathers while they were young.
A psychologist, Marvin Eisenstadt, poured through a number of major encyclopedias, looking for people whose biographies “merited more than one column” — and of 573 people, Gladwell reports, “a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of 10. By age 15, 34.5 percent had had at least one parent die, and by the age of 20, 45 percent. Even for the years before the 20th century, when life expectancy due to illness and accidents and warfare was much lower than it is today, those are astonishing numbers.”
“…in study after study, among those who have succeeded, the incidence of “eminent orphans” is oddly high.”