In any world, there will be more and less successful people. It’s probably not going to be the case that the modal person is going to be successful, given that institutions are skewed towards average, with a focus on lower average.
As a result, listening to large institutions and going about your life is not a recipe for wealth. Thus, people who generally follow rules and obey are unlikely to be especially successful. After all, institutions seem to look skeptically at wealth and power that sometimes contests theirs.
People who become rich tend to break out of the Matrix, and fundamentally dis-align themselves with the consensus of regular people. This comes with some pros and some cons. One of the bigger pros is that these people will find new ways of solving problems, and unhindered by social pressure, they’ll build cool shit that makes them powerful, because people want to use things that are good.
On the other hand, the baby often goes with the bathwater. Because you need to disregard a lot of social programming, some correlated aspects, such as affability and politeness are also likely to go. It’s not like you can adjust personality in only a business setting. Those who rise to the top are unlikely to be especially conformist, given that the steps towards success are often unpopular and not often done, almost by design.
There’s also a lot of survivorship bias which creates interesting dynamics and headrushes. Take someone like Tom Cruise. There’s like 4-10 people who are able to commandeer massive crowds, but entire generations look for work as actors. Imagine what it does to your head being one of the best. Of course you’re going to see yourself as a main character.
Thus, following social rules may be good at preventing you from falling into the cracks, but may be insufficient if you want to live very distinctly from other people. I’m not sure there’s a middle ground, but you probably want to think about the sort of person you’d like to be. With power and wealth, comes tradeoffs.
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