Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell

If you were a peasant farmer in Southern China, by contrast, you didn’t sleep through the winter. In the short break marked by the dry season, from November through February, you busied yourself with side tasks. You made bamboo baskets or hats and sold them in the market. You repaired the dikes in your rice paddy, and rebuilt your mud hut. You sent one of your sons to work in a nearby village for a relative. You made tofu and dried bean curd and caught snakes (they were a delicacy) and trapped insects. By the time lahp cheun (the “turning of the spring”) came, you were back in the fields at dawn. Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field. Some estimates put the annual workload of a wet-rice farmer in Asia at three thousand hours a year.