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In a recent survey of nearly 1,000 CEO candidates, researchers found that 45 percent had made at least one mistake in their career that either ended in them losing their job or was extremely costly to their business. However, more than 78 percent of those people ended up getting the top job. They also found that educational pedigree in no way correlated with performance.

Only 7 percent of high-performing CEOs went to an Ivy League college for their undergraduate degree — and 8 percent of them never graduated from college at all. The survey's results indicated, strangely, that traits that make a board more likely to choose a candidate as CEO, such as high confidence, might not even correlate to better job performance in the role.