試問誰不想成功呢？於是，此書似乎就成了通往成功之路的寶典。但細細品味，你會發現作者筆下的成功秘密更多的是我們早就熟悉的內容，比如說熟能生巧、比如說勇於付出。當然，觀察入微的作者，也發現了一些前人不曾提到的細節，例如為什麼比爾·蓋茨和史蒂夫·喬布斯都出生在1955年？為什麼英超球員大部分在9到11月出生？讀完此書，你會得出一個結論，原來真的沒有偶然的成功。
Chapter 8 Rice Paddies and Math Tests (Excerpt)
第八章 稻田種植與數學考試 (節選)
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.