The population distribution of ambition and intelligence 

(This post is hypothetical - I have no data)

My intuition is that career outcomes have some correlation with an individual's score on the attributes of ambition and intelligence.

The values of these scores have some sort of skewed distribution. The lower end of the distribution is truncated, and the upper end of the distribution is subject to large outliers; the bulk of the population (the center of the distribution) falls below the mean on both these attributes.

An individual, simply having an "average" score for both these attributes would have a relatively high likelihood of career success.  If an individual's score for either of these attributes falls into the upper end of the distribution, certain paths seem much more likely.  An individual with both these attributes in the far upper end of the distribution is, by definition, "deviant."