What It Would Take To Be Google’s Larry Page? [Infographic]

It can be hard to fathom how much money, power and influence someone like Google’s Larry Page has, and harder still to fathom how he got there.

But most captains of industry aren’t really all that different from any of us. While their successes hinged on existential qualities like ingenuity and opportunity, a major factor among most successful people is education.

Sure, there’s the occasional high school dropout that gets super lucky and sells a social network for $1.1 billion, but that’s what we call an outlier. That’s not to take anything away from Tumblr’s David Karp, who sold his microblogging platform to Yahoo! for a reported $1.1 billion without having ever gotten his high school diploma.

But if you look at the spread of successful individuals, it’s certainly true that more people with an education are better off than those without.

Take a look at the infographic from GetARealDegree below and see what I mean. In it, captains of industry like Warren Buffett, Larry Page and Marissa Mayer (the latter two, fun fact, used to date) are broken down to their barest resumes, and to be honest, there’s not a lot there that anyone with a good work ethic and solid education doesn’t also have.