What if they succeeded despite their attitude not because of their attitude? Don't confuse correlation and dependencies. I'm too lazy to collect the sources but

What if they succeeded despite their attitude not because of their attitude? Don't confuse correlation and dependencies. I'm too lazy to collect the sources but I think the general conclusion is that these "ass holes" made it because they had a well established family and a resilient personality, not because they treated people poorly. Also I'm not sure if looking at the top alone is a good way to learn how to improve your own upward mobility. If these people at the top already been their since their birth they might not be able to teach you much about how you can get up from the ground. What I would do is looking at people that are very likely coming from a worse background and how they made it to the top (or even the middle). If you are in an IT company in the US or UK and you have an Indian coworker you might be able to learn more from him then from Steve Jobs. If you look at successful female, black artists (music, movies, etc) you might be able to learn also something, because in general this social group is considered to be at the bottom by many statistics.