异类――不一样成功启示录.docVIP

异类――不一样成功启示录 　　试问谁不想成功呢?于是,此书似乎就成了通往成功之路的宝典。但细细品味,你会发现作者笔下的成功秘密更多的是我们早就熟悉的内容,比如说熟能生巧、比如说勇于付出。当然,观察入微的作者,也发现了一些前人不曾提到的细节,例如为什么比尔?盖茨和史蒂夫?乔布斯都出生在1955年?为什么英超球员大部分在9到11月出生?读完此书,你会得出一个结论,原来真的没有偶然的成功。 　　 　　Chapter 8 Rice Paddies and Math Tests (Excerpt) 　　第八章 稻田种植与数学考试 (节选) 　　 　　Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer. 　　 　　That statement may seem a little odd because we have a sense that everyone in the pre-modern world worked really hard. But that simply isn’t true. All of us, for example, are 1)descended at some point from hunter-gatherers, and many hunter-gatherers, by all accounts, had a pretty leisurely life. The Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, who are one of the last remaining practitioners of that way of life, 2)subsist in large part on the Mongongo nut, an incredibly plentiful and protein-rich source of food that lies thick on the ground. They don’t grow anything, and it’s growing things―preparing, planting, weeding, harvesting, storing―that takes time. Nor do they raise any animals. Occasionally the male Kung hunt, but chiefly for sport. All told, Kung men and women work no more than 12 to 19 hours a week with the balance of the time spent dancing, entertaining and visiting family and friends. That’s, at most, a thousand hours a year of work. 　　 　　Or consider the life of a peasant in 18th century Europe. Men and women in those days probably worked from dawn to noon 200 days a year, which works out to about 1,200 hours of work annually. Working in a rice field is 10 to 20 times more labor intensive than working on an equivalently-sized corn or wheat field. Some estimates put the annual workload of a wet rice farmer in Asia at 3,000 hours a year. 　　 　　Think for a moment about what the life of a rice farmer must have been like. Three thousand hours a year is a staggering amount of time to spend working. 　　 　　What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, h