Research Reveals the No. 1 Personality Trait of Highly Successful People Across 8 Industries

We all know and have heard of the most successful people in the world; Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and many more!

You probably wonder what they all have in common, besides a lot of money.

This one personality trait is something they all share! Which one is that? The top personality trait is intellect.

According to job search Paysa, which used data from IBM’s supercomputer Watson, the firm ranked each trait from a scale of 1.0 being the highest, to 0.0 being the lowest.

Among intellect, the other top traits are altruism, cheerfulness, assertiveness and cautiousness; all depending on the industry. The 8 industries that they included were Entertainment, Fashion, Finance, Law, Marketing, Media, Medicine and Politics.

Something we found funny and some might agree with, is that according to a graphic put together by Paysa, the only industry that doesn’t list intellect first is Politics.

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In Politics, the highest personality trait was found to be Altruism. As publicly elected officials, politicians are expected to selflessly care for the well-being of others. Research has shown this attribute can be beneficial in corporate business as well and was highly ranked by Watson in medical, media, marketing, law, finance, fashion, and entertainment.

The firm also drew upon IBM data for a slew of other analyses, including determining the 11 most assertive CEOs in tech. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella ranked first, followed by Bill Gates – the founder of Microsoft and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They discovered that the three of them have one strong personality trait in common, which turned out to be assertiveness.

Nadella came in first with a score of 0.92, Bill Gates came in second with a score of 0.90 and Mark Zuckerberg with a score of 0.87.

The list continues with other big names in tech, including Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman (0.78), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos (0.55), Apple’s Tim Cook (0.36) and Tesla’s Elon Musk (0.32).

According to IBM, Watson “can understand real language and respond to questions.” The methodology, according to Paysa, is: “For this project we gathered speeches, essays, books, the transcripts of interviews and other forms of communication produced by those highlighted above. After we’d obtained over 2,500 words, we fed these through the Watson Personality Insights API and procured the above findings.”

According to IBM Watson’s website “Personality Insights extracts personality characteristics based on how a person writes. You can use the service to match individuals to other individuals, opportunities, and products, or tailor their experience with personalized messaging and recommendations.” 

For more interesting data, you can always go ahead and visit Paysa.com