What they have in common? Skills that cannot be easily measured. This is the point of a very long article by Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker: Most Likely to Succeed in the Annals of Education section.
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
Gladwell’s newest book Outliers: The Story of Success is on my list now. Treatment of micro-skills that lead to success in such varied areas of football, education and investing deserve to be looked at with the detail that Gladwell lavishes on them.