I did some spot checking. In general, the odds seem lowish. Some are surprisingly reasonable, some seem absurd. I would've liked to see sources. Below I assume

I did some spot checking. In general, the odds seem lowish. Some are surprisingly reasonable, some seem absurd. I would've liked to see sources. Below I assume a U.S. population of 300 - 310 million (rounding as convenient). > Goes to law school: 1 in 80 That's about 3 million people. It's vague wording. Does it mean going to graduate law school? Being accepted? Or does it just mean have a declared major of law at some point? I can accept the latter, as ambitious / high-earning jobs generally have an over-abundance of declared majors by freshmen/sophomores (who change their major every semester). But I don't think that many people actually get into graduate law school, or else they would rival business majors (the most popular major). > Works as a Google engineer: 1 in 2,500 That means Google has employed 124,000 engineers over it's modest 14 years. Currently they only employee 33,000 (according to Wikipedia), and I can't imagine more than 1/3 of those being engineers (consider marketing, finance, managers, maintenance staff, sales, support, etc). And they only really grew in size in the past 8 or 9 years. They'd have to have always had over 2/3 of their staff as engineers and be turning over an entire fresh set of employees every year to have a chance at making those odds. > Plays in the NFL: 1 in 15,000 At first I thought this sounded low, but not necessarily: This would mean we have about 21,000 NFL players, past or present. There are 32 teams and I counted 91 players on the Giants' roster (seriously, 91!?), so that estimates to about 3,000 players active. That means we have a full 7 independent generations worth of NFL players alive. Considering that a lot of players only play for a year or two and that even those with long careers usually retire by 40, this actually seems reasonable. > CEO of Fortune 500 company: 1 in 60,000 There are 500 companies on the list, and year-to-year most of them stay the same. That means we have 5,000 present or past such CEOs in our country. No more than 500 can be active at any time, so we have a full 10 sets of CEOs alive. From a survey (http://www.forbes.com/2003/03/31/cx_wt_0401exec.html http://www.forbes.com/2003/03/31/cx_wt_0401exec.html) of the top 100 companies, it looks like the the average time spent as CEO is only 3 or 4 years and the average age achieved is 50. Assuming a lifespan of 80, that checks out even if the vast majority of the Fortune 500 list remains static.