In his book Unreasonable Success, investor and author Richard Koch reveals what he thinks is the most important trait of the very-successful. He looks at 20 people, from Churchill to Madonna, Bob Dylan to Margaret Thatcher, to flesh out his arguments.

This trait is so important because it’s often all a person has at the start. They don’t even know how they will achieve their goal, just have a sense they can and will.

“Self-belief can start - as it did in about half the people I studied - with a vague general belief in their ‘star’ or destiny.” Richard Koch

Many had this feeling early in life, when there was no rational reason for having it.

According to biographer Andrew Roberts, Winston Churchill told a friend that he would come to London’s rescue when it was attacked: “in the high position I shall occupy, it will fall to me to save the capital.” 

Churchill was 16 at the time.

Of course, Churchill had an illustrious ancestry: he was related to the Duke of Marlborough who had won the battle of Blenheim and been lavished with honors by the British state. Churchill’s father Lord Randolph Churchill was part of the Tory establishment.

Koch: “There is nothing more conducive to self-belief than belonging to a homogenous elite.”

And yet, Koch says, “For seventeen of our twenty players, heritage and background are irrelevant to their self-belief. Instead, it comes randomly yet naturally, as soon as the individual begins their career.”

It can “start with a vague but deep sense of being special.”