New studies show that the billionaires of this world didn’t get to where they are by luck, or even hard work, alone. It turns out that people who get really, really rich are basically just smarter than you.

Jonathan Wai, a research scientist at Duke University has released study results that show a strong relationship between brainpower and success.  Here’s a line from Wai’s study results: “The top one percent in wealth highly overlaps with the top one percent in brains.”

It goes on:

 About 45 percent of billionaires are in the top one percent of cognitive ability. Billionaires were generally smarter than Fortune 500 CEOs, where 38.6 percent were in the top 1 percent of brains. Senators ranked just below that, with 41 percent, along with federal judges 41 percent. Members of the House were less smart, with 21 percent. (The smartest sub group of the American rich and powerful are male Senate Democrats).”

Cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties are the brain-based skills we need to carry out any task from the sim­plest to the most com­plex. They have more to do with the mech­a­nisms of how we learn, remem­ber, problem-solve, and pay atten­tion rather than with any actual knowl­edge.

Our Welkom-born Mark Shuttleworth should fit into this percentile – Africa’s first Internet Billionaire must have a fantastic head to pull that off.

But there’s a loophole:

As the study concedes, factors other than test scores and IQ can play a role in admission to elite colleges like legacy preferences, wealth, sports scholarships and other attributes. And some very smart people don’t go to the elite schools for financial or other reasons.

Take, for example. that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are not college graduates.

[Source: CNBC,Sharp Brains]