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In real life, the main difference between people who achieve and people who do not isn’t as exciting or mysterious, but it is as important. It is simply conscientious. People who approach things with order, common sense, consistency, and persistence will ultimately succeed.

In the early 1950s, Lillian Vernon spent five hundred dollars on her first advertisement. She offered monogrammed belts and handbags, and when she was finished filling the first round of orders, she had made thirty-two thousand dollars in profits.

From her first successful ad to fifty years later, Lillian Vernon has been selling household items and gifts and steadily expanding her sales. Her company now generates more than two hundred fifty million dollars in sales every year and is one of the fifty largest companies owned by a woman in the United States.

Lillian met with her share of skeptics: “There were naysayers along the way, but I couldn’t be defeated. Because all it really takes is commonsense intelligence and hard work.” Which for the seventy-one-year-old businesswoman still means a six-day workweek.

In a study of recent business school graduates, employee conscientious was five times more likely to predict supervisor satisfaction than was employee intelligence.