Let’s take a look at a happier result of cultural legacy. Why are South Asians so good at math? Because they come from a culture where rice is grown. What?!
Gladwell loves making connections that seem nonsensical on their face, and then unraveling the connections so that they become believable. Here’s how growing rice and ace-ing calculus are connected. Rice-growing, it turns out, is really hard work and involves pretty sophisticated manipulation of the variables affecting rice propagation. According to Gladwell, it’s ten to twenty times harder than working a corn or wheat field of the same dimensions. The more effort a rice farmer puts into his crop, the better yield he gets, so there is a clear relationship between effort and reward. The farmer has to understand and correctly manipulate things like transplanting seedlings by hand, the slope of the paddy bottom, irrigation, distance between seedlings, weeding, removal of bugs from each plant by hand, etc. Harvesting done quickly allows one to plant another round of crop for more rice from the same paddy. Altogether, an Asian rice farmer spends about 3,000 hours a year working the paddies. When the farmer isn’t tending his rice paddy, he is busy with other activities that support his family.
Contrast this with the western independent farmer, who spends about 1200 hours a year growing his crop, aided by machinery, working less hard during the long winter months. In the “formative years” in which western culture developed, farmers were largely serfs who followed orders and didn’t have much control over decisions affecting their crops. They didn't have to think for themselves, in other words.
Thus, children of south Asia grew up in a culture that practiced and valued hard work that never ended and required hard thinking, whereas European and American children grew up in a culture in which some fields were left fallow to allow them to rest and become reinvigorated, farmers had slack periods during the winter months where they did less work, and people left complex decision-making in the hands of authority figures. Gladwell follows up this information with the observation that Asian students have a reputation for spending more time in campus libraries, studying, than other students and says, in the same paragraph, “Virtually every success story we’ve seen in this book so far involves someone or some group working harder than their peers …Working really hard is what successful people do (p. 239).”
Before I continue, I feel the need to make a personal observation here. I am the grandchild of Ohio farmers. My mother’s people raised geese, chickens, and cows, and worked a large kitchen garden. My stepfather’s people grew corn, timothy, hay, and beans and raised chickens and cows. When the men weren’t tending to animals and crops, they were busy with maintenance on the equipment and buildings, and held down paying jobs doing things like selling farm equipment or managing a railroad crew. My maternal grandmother was a nurse when she wasn’t busy raising children, weeding, canning, and caring for animials. So I take exception to Gladwell’s characterization of western farmers as people who were less hard-working than their Asian counterparts. But that’s just me.
Success is a function of persistence and willingness to work hard, to not be defeated by frustration. I read someplace (can’t remember where) that the degree of one’s success is influenced by the amount of discomfort one is willing to endure in the beginning (i.e., “paying dues”).
Gladwell gives us the example of how students perform on the TIMSS, a math and science test given to elementary and middle school student globally every four years. Before they begin answering the math and science questions, students are confronted with a 120 item questionnaire. There is a direct correlation between how many items students answer, and their math ranking on the TIMSS. An exact correlation. “Countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire and the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems (pp. 147-8).” These countries are: Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. “What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. (pp 148-9).”
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