An ex-Google data scientist studied thousands of successful people on Wikipedia - here's what they have in common

The question on Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's mind is: What does it take to actually attain that level of prominence?

Stephens-Davidowitz is a former Google data scientist and Harvard-trained economist. He's also the author of the book "Everybody Lies," which presents research on how internet searches can get at people's innermost thoughts.

Instead of calling people into a lab, Stephens-Davidowitz prefers to look at what the masses are confessing to Google at 8:36 p.m. on a Wednesday. This data can also be harnessed to learn a few things about what makes people successful.

To do that, Stephens-Davidowitz downloaded all of Wikipedia - "You can do that sort of thing nowadays," he wrote - and plucked more than 150,000 editor-approved entries about individuals to comprise his initial dataset. His metric for success was simply that the included individuals had their own Wikipedia page.

Here's what he found.