"Instead, the data suggests that we miss out on a really importance piece of the success picture if we only focus on personal characteristics in attempting to understand the determinants of success."

"About half of the differences in income across people worldwide is explained by their country of residence and by the income distribution within that country,"

"The chance of becoming a CEO is influenced by your name or month of birth,"

"Those with last names earlier in the alphabet are more likely to receive tenure at top departments,"

"The display of middle initials increases positive evaluations of people's intellectual capacities and achievements,"

"Females with masculine sounding names are more successful in legal careers."

"In their prior work, they warned against a ""naive meritocracy"", in which people actually fail to give honors and rewards to the most competent people because of their underestimation of the role of randomness among the determinants of success."

"The Italian researchers stuck a large number of hypothetical individuals (""agents"") with different degrees of ""talent"" into a square world and let their lives unfold over the course of their entire worklife."

"The 20 most successful individuals held 44% of the total amount of success, while almost half of the population remained under 10 units of success (which was the initial starting condition)."

"Also, the most successful agents were mostly at least average in talent. So talent mattered."

"In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals."

"The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives."

"As the authors note, ""even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune."""

"Many meritocratic strategies used to assign honors, funds, or rewards are often based on the past success of the person. Selecting individuals in this way creates a state of affairs in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (often referred to as the ""Matthew effect"")."

"The authors suggest that funding strategies that focus more on targeting diversity than ""excellence"" are likely to be more productive to society."

"They concluded that ""both in terms of the quantity of papers produced and of their scientific impact, the concentration of research funding in the hands of a so-called 'elite' of researchers generally produces diminishing marginal returns."""

"Starting at the bottom of the list, you can see that the least effective funding strategies are those that give a certain percentage of the funding to only the already most successful individuals."

"The ""mixed"" strategies that combine giving a certain percentage to the most successful people and equally distributing the rest is a bit more effective, and distributing funds at random is even more efficient."

"In the universe simulated at the top, a number of medium to highly talented individuals were able to reach very high levels of success, and the average number of medium-highly talented individuals who reached at least above average levels of success was quite high."

"The results of this elucidating simulation, which dovetail with a growing number of studies based on real-world data, strongly suggest that luck and opportunity play an underappreciated role in determining the final level of individual success."