Early on in my career, I became interested in the dozens of qualities that make top professionals stand out. Then, a conversation with Laszlo, one of my mentors shifted my thinking. “Success seems to boil down to no more than about a half-dozen things,” Laszlo told me more than a decade ago. He was the vice president of a tech company at the time.

   After our discussion, I began to think about the topic in a different way. I had been looking for dozens of different factors, but is it really just a handful of core traits that make the difference? There is a pattern of behaviour among highly successful professionals and that studying what works can help young people grow successful without having to go through the same roadblocks.

   Laszlo’s ideas seemed to me to apply to all kinds of career disciplines. These are the seven traits that we discussed that day, which I’ve since come to believe encapsulate....