I wanted to make a chart that told the following story: Although the top athletes make a lot of money and those are the athletes you see on TV, if you care about how much money you make, you’ll have better odds becoming an accountant.

To tell this story, I thought I would show the average earnings of pro athlete and accountant and use error bars to show the range. The range would demonstrate that the downside to accounting is much more tolerable than the downside to being a professional athlete. Well, this chart sucks.

I have to use a logarithmic scale on the Y axis to make this even readable, but it dilutes my point that the average athlete earns far less than the average accountant. I really need to visually demonstrate that the vast majority of athletes make very little, but I’m not sure how to best show it. I’m trying to dash the hopes of a 12 year old, so you know where I’m going with this. Let’s say this data is accurate

Income Athlete CPA 1 10 – 10 2 – 100 2 – 1,000 50 – 10,000 25 1 100,000 5 98 1,000,000 3 1 10,000,000 2 – 100,000,000 1 – 100 100

It’s not, but lets say it is. How you would chart it to convince a pre-teen to eschew the hoop dreams and start studying algebra?