There is actually a simple, science backed study for how your birthday affects your chances of success and it has nothing to do with your horoscope.
A 2012 study found that 5.8% of S&P 500 CEOs were born in July. That’s a pretty small statistic considering that July is a high birth month, yet the same study found that 12.5% of CEOs were born in March. Turns out those four months really make the difference in your future success.
Remember how in elementary school there was a cut off age for your grade? Some kids would be younger and some kids would be older than the rest. Logically, being born earlier in the year would make you older, but being born in the summer would make you one of the youngest in your grade. Turns out, it pays to be one of the older kids in your grade (unless you were held back or something). According to University of British Columbia finance professor Maurice Levi, who conducted the study:
“Older children within the same grade tend to do better than the youngest, who are less intellectually developed… Early success is often rewarded with leadership roles and enriched learning opportunities, leading to future advantages that are magnified throughout life.”
Even more, Duke University researchers Philip Cook and Songman Kang tracked groups of children in public schools and consistently and very clearly found that the older kids out performed their younger peers.
“Those born just after the cut date for starting school are likely to outperform those born just before in reading and math in middle school, and are less likely to be involved in juvenile delinquency. On the other hand, those born after the cut date are more likely to drop out of high school before graduation and commit a felony offense by age 19. We also present suggestive evidence that the higher dropout rate is due to the fact that youths born after the cut date have longer exposure to the legal possibility of dropping out.”
Professor Levi went on to explain that this phenomenon is simply just the way our academic system organized children to enroll and school, and that “We could be excluding some of the business world’s best talent simply by enrolling them in school too early.”
Thinking about enrolling your kid in school later so they get that older advantage? Unfortunately, that doesn’t work and another study found that “redshirted” kids tend to end up having lower IQs and lower life-time earnings.