No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich
The differences between Western cultures and Asian cultures account for their attitude to work and performance of tasks.
Rice has been cultivated in China for thousands of years. It was from China that the techniques of rice cultivation spread throughout East Asia — Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Year in, year out, as far back as history is recorded, farmers from across Asia have engaged in the same relentless, intricate pattern of agriculture. The rigors of cultivating rice has entrenched the value of work and the need for perseverance in the Chinese DNA.
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills. The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily.
Cultural legacies matter, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first-century intellectual tasks.
The most striking fact about a rice paddy—which can never quite be grasped until you actually stand in the middle of one
— is its size. It’s tiny. The typical rice paddy is about as big as a hotel room. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer. It really matters that the field is perfectly leveled before you flood it. Getting it close to level but not quite right makes a big difference in terms of your yield.
We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have “it” or you don’t. But it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for 22 minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds. Doggedness is a cultural trait.
We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.