4 Un-Trainable Attributes of Wildly Successful People

I want to know: how do you find the world’s best people? I’ve recently become borderline obsessed with trying to surround myself with the best people on the planet. If you want to live a great life, be a part of a great organization or cause, you have no choice but to do so. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett - the list goes on and on - have ended up with the best possible people around them. Why? Nobody by themselves is great in all areas, so in order to “drift upwards”, you have to be immersed in group of people better than you. It’s impossible to drift upwards if you’re not.

But the “best people on the planet” is tricky to define, and I think most people get it wrong. Being in that group is not fully about experience, current skill-set, incredible intelligence, current wealth, popularity, a strong resume - although those can be strong indicators. The problem with measuring by those indicators alone (which many job interviews seem to focus around), is that you miss out on the people who are poised to have all of those qualities, but haven’t had the opportunity to achieve them yet.

The advantage of finding the best people on the planet before everyone else recognizes them as such, is that you actually have access to them. If you tried to surround yourself with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett (other than by immersing yourselves in news about them), you might not be able to. But can you surround yourself today with the Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffetts of tomorrow? That’s much more likely.

You can find those super successful people of the future by looking for certain attributes, though. Even complex skills can be taught. Effective communication can be learned. Great ideas can be found. Money can be raised. But personality traits are almost impossible for anyone to truly change, and there are some that are so key to being wildly successful, that they all have to be present. If you want to surround yourself with the best people possible, here are 4 such traits that you should look for in your friends, employees, business partners, mentors, and more (for better or worse, you’re stuck with family!):

1. Inner Fire to Become The Best/Win in Their Domain
Incredibly successful people have done something that’s incredibly hard - otherwise, everyone would be incredibly successful. That means they’ve had to persevere through extremely tough times as well as in good in order to achieve their goal. So look for people who know what they love (or a few things that they love). What keeps them up at night out of excitement and passion? Bill Gates & Warren Buffett clearly wanted to win in business and money. Warren Buffett had an inner fire about business - of many sorts. Steve Wozniak, on the other hand, had an inner fire to create the best possible circuit board and computer.

What I’m not totally sure of is how to figure out what people have an inner fire about. I hope to revisit this section and add to it when I have some better ideas. And I welcome your feedback!

2. Talented in Their Domain
Talent is an obvious one - but it needs to be called out because it’s different than a skillset. Very few people can be extremely successful in their domain without some basic propensity in it.

You pinpoint talent in a domain by having an understanding in the domain, and realizing how far a person’s achievements stand out among the rest of their peers, in relation to how much time they’ve spent honing that talent. It was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Steve Jobs had a talent for persuasiveness - even before he was The Steve Jobs. Warren Buffett had a talent for money, numbers, and ratios - even before he was The Warren Buffett.

3. Quick to Figure Out, Fix, and Learn from Own Mistakes
Everyone starts out making a lot of mistakes. The only ones who can come out of that rut are the ones who seek to understand - and fix - what they’re not doing quite right. Figuring out how one could be successful otherwise is an exercise in futility, but it’s amazing how most human beings tend towards pride and saving face - and pridefulness is not something you can change about someone. One need look no further than many of the restauranteurs on Kitchen Nightmares to understand this.

Another way to think about this concept is whether or not the person aggressively, keeps trying to be qualified for “the job”. Do they keep improving, or are they satisfied with some level of accomplishment in their domain?

Yet another way to think about this, alá Warren Buffett? Someone who keeps an inner scorecard rather than an outer scorecard.

4. As Honest as Humanly Possible
If someone has all three of the prior attributes going for them, but is dishonest, they murder their success at any second, which at the end of the day makes them useless. Trust is the ally of anyone who’s going to be successful. Figuring out how honest someone is, however, just takes time. You can get a sense of their honesty by quality of their friends and peers, but you just can’t know for sure until you become friends with them.

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Those are the four un-trainable qualities I seek out, at least, in future friends, employees, business partners, mentors, etc. I’m very curious if you know of more un-trainable qualities, so please leave them in the comments. I thoroughly enjoy opinionated, insightful commentary!

The next important and related topic for thought is: where do you find these future wildly-successful people to begin with? I don’t have a good answer for you yet - but what I can say is that while they’re randomly dispersed geographically, you probably are connected to them in closer ways than you think. Ask friends for tips, who are connected in a particular domain of interest, and who are spread across geographic regions. Meet as many people as possible, and don’t be shy to send someone a message or an email who you’re interested in getting to know! Dale Carnegie has some great tips on how to get started in that regard ;-)