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<p>Personality type is hugely important – as well as your temperamental suitability to your chosen field. I worked in a consulting firm for a few years where I was simply more intelligent than 80% of the people I worked with if not 99%. (There were a lot of accountant drone types at the firm since it was associated with an accounting firm). The thing is for a lot of what the firm did the accounting drone personality was a better fit, so there were people not as smart as me who were in that context more talented than me and set up to make more money. And then there were the people as smart or smarter than me whose personalities did fit the job and they were the ones who were shooting up like rockets 'cause everyone could see they were really switched on.</p>
<p>There is absolutely, broadly speaking, a correlation between brains and income, but it’s by no means a perfect correlation. It is mediated by other questions of temperament and personality type. </p>
<p>Decoupling the correlation one more degree: there are a lot of extremely smart people who didn’t go to top 20 schools. Take for example the CEO of Hewlett Packard. He got a BBA at some relatively unknown college. He’s just damned smart and has the right temperament and broad capabilities for his job, and he has proven these things over time.</p>
<p>If the OP really thinks he or she is screwed by not going to a top 20 school, he or she could fight to get in to one and then do what some people who go to one of those do – i.e. spend his or her entire life mentioning his/her affiliation with that school as a means of trying to prove what his/her life beyond apparently doesn’t, specifically that he/she is smart. One can always tell the people who doubt their own talents or suitability for success; they so often brandish such markers of status so visibly. In the consulting firm where I worked, there was one sad sack partner who couldn’t talk to the copy machine boy let alone anyone else without throwing into the conversation that he was a partner. And there were genuinely talented partners that never needed to tell you – you either knew or suspected they were partners because they were demonstrably effective and authoritative.</p>
<p>If you don’t have the goods to get into a top 20, find out what you do have the goods for and go for it. Chances are if you have real talent, eventually you’ll run into a Harvard grad in your chosen field who can envy what you’ve accomplished.</p>
<p>And if you don’t have a talent that translates well to income, learn to be happy with what you have and can do. Because in the end happiness is what it all comes down to. If you really get to liking what you do on a day-to-day basis, you have most of the world beat.</p>