Anyway, the initial question was 'what are the characteristics of a pilot?' - not 'what are the characteristics of a good pilot?'
The link began to diverge into 'high flying rich businessmen', 'A' type personality, high achievers, therefore drawn to aviation as a high achieving pastime/job/hobby/sport. It is not so simple. As said before aviation brings a whole host of 'types', some good, some brilliant, some bad, same as life, same as business.
A good pilot will prepare the flight, and execute it, in a manner which ensures (as far as possible) that his cockpit workload never becomes unmanageable.
However, a fair number of these good pilots, perish, because somewhere along the line, things go wrong. Preparedness, or not as the case may be sometimes just is not enough. Accidents happen. So what are the characteristics of a pilot? It is like asking what are the characteristics of a doctor - diligence, intelligence, I like doing it, my mum wanted me to be one??