The starting conditions behind big success

How successful people actually made it.

Laid out by what each person actually had going in, not the story they tell about it.

How to read a record

Cost of failure

What a single stumble would actually have cost them. A ten means nothing underneath to catch a fall.

Headwinds

What who they were in their era carried on top of the money. Hand-coded on its own scale, never blended in.

Then the evidence

Both scores are two calls made by hand, not formulas. Under them sit the coded fields, each with a source and a stated confidence.

High Medium Low

Start with the hardest starts

The map

Every person on two axes: where those who made it actually landed, not the odds of landing there.

Method

How the two scores are assigned, what counts as a source, and where the coding is deliberately kept coarse.