Born Entrepreneurs, Born Leaders

Your Genes Help Determine Your Success

Genes affect everything about you, including intelligence and personality. This means your professional accomplishments do not depend solely on how hard you work, or on your education, training or expertise. Some of your professional results are due to your genetic makeup. Your success depends on your capabilities, temperament and behavior, which correlate with your DNA. While genes do not directly cause behavior, they do influence it.

Business writers seldom report about these scientifically verifiable findings. The fact that your genetics can profoundly affect your career – and thus your subsequent success or failure – does not fit with the prevailing philosophy that “free will and self-made behavior” are the primary reasons people succeed. Most folks easily accept that genetics determine hair color, height, eye color and so on. But they do not like to think that their genes play a role in their behavior or their attainment of status and goals. Nevertheless, genes affect work behavior, which in turn affects whether people do well in life.

Environmental factors – that is, “everything other than one’s genes” – also strongly...