Authors:
  • Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.

    "Secrets of their success". Interview with Jennifer Reingold, archive.fortune.com. November 19, 2008.