The average IQ in the country shows efficiency educational system. The number of Nobel laureates speaks of her place in the intellectual arena of the world. Based on these two indicators, we decided to compile a list of the smartest countries ...

First place

IQ: Hong Kong

According to two studies by professors Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen - "Intelligence quotient and the wealth of nations", as well as "Intelligence quotient and global inequality", the first places in IQ are occupied by East Asian countries, and the administrative district of Hong Kong is in the lead. There average level The IQ of the country is 107 points. True, the number and high density of the population (6480 people / km²) play a certain role here. Roughly speaking, the opportunities to provide uniform education throughout the country are much easier than, say, in Russia.

By number of Nobel laureates: USA

But in terms of the number of Nobel laureates, the United States is far ahead of everyone. According to the statistics of the Nobel Committee, there are 356 laureates for the period from 1901 to 2014. In many ways, this is determined by the opportunities that are provided for research by scientists. different countries in American institutions and research centers.

Second place

By IQ: South Korea

In second place in terms of intelligence is South Korea with a rating of 106 points. Here is one of the most demanding and rigorous education systems in the world, in which the greatest preference is given to exact sciences. They finish school there only at the age of 19, followed by a university.

In South Korea, there is terrible competition for admission to higher educational institutions. During the entrance exams and sessions, according to statistics, mental stress reaches such intensity that people simply can not stand it. But the result is obvious - South Korea, one of the smartest countries in the world.

Number of Nobel laureates: UK

In second place in terms of Nobel laureates is Great Britain, whose residents receive awards every year. In total, the Nobel Prize was awarded to 121 Britons.

Third place

By IQ: Japan

Japan is third with 105 points. This is not surprising, given that today the Land of the Rising Sun in the development of high technologies has run far ahead of all other countries in the world. Real Japanese quality will give odds even to pedantic Germans.

The University of Tokyo is today considered the best in all of Asia and is included in the list of the 25 best universities. educational institutions peace. The literacy rate in the country reaches 99%, and in addition to IQ tests, the Japanese do an excellent job of learning accurate and natural sciences.

By number of Nobel laureates: Germany

Third place with Japan is shared by Germany with 104 Nobel Prizes in various fields.

Fourth place

By IQ: Taiwan

And again, a country from Asia, a partially recognized state of the Republic of China, often referred to by the name of the island - Taiwan. Its inhabitants were also able to make "intelligence" their trademark, which provided them with a worthy place in the world and in the market.

Today, Taiwan is one of the main suppliers of high-tech products, especially in the information and electronic industries. The country's leadership plans to turn Taiwan into a "green silicon island" or an island of science and technology.

By number of Nobel laureates: France

But in terms of Nobel laureates, as opposed to Asia, the West is in the lead. France ranks fourth on this list, being one of the leaders of fresh ideas in art, philosophy and literature.

Fifth place

IQ: Singapore

Singapore ranks fifth in IQ. It is much easier for a city-state to establish an education system than for giant countries. On the other hand, it is in first place among the richest and most prosperous countries, according to Forbes.

A country with a population of 5 million people demonstrates a GDP of $ 270 billion. The results are involuntarily correlated with high IQ test scores. Singapore has been named the best place to do business by the World Bank.

By number of Nobel laureates: Sweden

In fifth place is Sweden - the birthplace of Nobel and the permanent seat of the headquarters of the Nobel Committee. Among the Swedes, 29 distinguished people who received the Nobel Prize in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics, and literature.

Sixth place

By IQ: Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands

Sixth place is shared by Austria, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands with the same score - 102. Perhaps Italy stands out the most from this list, the inhabitants of which are known for their southern and windy character. And yet, for a siesta that stops all life in the regions of Southern Italy for several hours in the middle of a working day, Italians do not forget about science and art.

It is enough to look at the history of Italy once to understand that since the Roman era, this country has been the first in Europe in terms of the number of geniuses “per capita”.

By number of Nobel laureates: Switzerland

The honorable sixth place is occupied by Switzerland. The requirements at local universities are high, especially in the field of natural sciences. It was in it that since 1975 seven Swiss received nobel prizes. In total, there are 25 awards per country.

Seventh place

IQ: Switzerland

And again Switzerland, which, in terms of average IQ (101), is a step below that of its scientific elite. Switzerland is one of the leading countries in terms of the number of people with higher education. It also ranks second in the ranking of the most prosperous countries in the world, according to experts from the Prosperity Index.

By number of Nobel laureates: Russia

Seventh place is shared with her by Russia with an IQ of 97 points and 23 Nobel laureates. Our compatriots managed to excel in many areas: literature, quantum electronics, electromagnetic radiation, semiconductors, superfluid liquids and other things in which few people understand anything from ordinary people.

IN Everyday life we easily make judgments, recognizing some people as smart, while others, to put it mildly, not very much. However, attempts to scientifically interpret the meaning of such assessments face serious difficulties. There is still no generally accepted definition of intelligence. There is no clarity with the criteria for its evaluation: for example, should success be considered as such in certain undertakings? Moreover, it is not even clear whether intelligence is a single characteristic of a person, or is it just a combination of many different abilities? Despite this, psychologists have been measuring intelligence for more than a century.

Try, without using the Internet and dictionaries, to answer a few simple questions. Who is Velvet Joe? What is Wyandot? Is the goatbeard a snake, a fish, a lizard, or a plant? Why is Rosa Bonheur famous? In which city are overlands made? And keep in mind that at the beginning of the 20th century, a person who did not answer these questions could well be declared mentally retarded ...

These questions are taken from the intelligence test, which at the beginning of the last century, it was necessary for immigrants arriving in the United States to pass. Originally designed for American soldiers, the test has been recklessly applied to everyone, including newcomers who barely speak English. There was a period when only a few of them managed to successfully pass the test, while the rest, as mentally retarded, were denied the right to enter the country.

Dimension of the mind

In 1865, the English scientist Francis Galton published an article "Hereditary talent and character", in which he substantiated the provisions of the new science, which he called "eugenics". After analyzing the genealogies of many British families, Galton came to the conclusion that a person’s talent and, in general, all mental properties are inherited like bodily ones. People have long learned to obtain breeds of animals with the necessary qualities through artificial selection. Similarly, Galton believed, the human race should be improved by breeding a new generation of people who would be healthier, stronger and, most importantly, smarter than their ancestors.

But if the parameters of animals - speed, weight, milk yield - are easy to measure, then how to objectively assess the mental properties of a person? Asking this question, Galton founded the first anthropometric laboratory in London, where he began measuring the capabilities of various human senses, believing that intellectually gifted people should have increased sensory sensitivity.

In 1890, American psychologist James McKean Cattell, who worked in Galton's laboratory, developed and published the first intelligence tests for college students. By the way, it was in this article that the word “test” was first used to refer to psychometric methods. Cattell measured 50 different parameters. Among them were muscle strength, speed of movement, sensitivity to pain, the ability to distinguish between weight, visual and auditory acuity, eye accuracy, reaction time, memory ability, and even lung capacity. Cattell's work caused a huge outcry. Numerous laboratories for testing intelligence began to appear around the world.

Cattell, like his teacher, adhered to the idea that intelligence is an innate quality. Returning to America, in 1891 he opened a test laboratory at Columbia University, became the first professor of psychology in the United States, published many scientific journals (including the well-known journal Science), and was also elected president of the American Psychological Association. All his life, this most authoritative scientist convinced everyone that the influence of the environment on the intellect is negligible, therefore, marriages between healthy and intellectually full-fledged people should be encouraged and “underdeveloped” should be sterilized. He even offered each of his seven children a thousand dollars (at that time a lot of money) if they could find a mate among the children of university professors.

Selection of the gifted

However, Galton and Cattell had an opponent - the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911), who categorically disagrees with the fact that intelligence is an exclusively innate quality and cannot be developed in any way. He wrote: “We must do everything possible to counteract such a pessimistic point of view ... The brain of a child is like a field in which an experienced farmer, through cultivation, can implement the changes he has conceived and, as a result, get fertile land instead of barren.” Binet began to criticize the tests of Galton and Cattell in every possible way for excessive attention to sensory and giving too much of great importance ability to special types activities. He argued that in order to assess intelligence, it is necessary first of all to test memory, imagination, attention, quick wits, suggestibility and aesthetic feelings.

When France introduced universal school education, it became necessary to quickly and objectively distinguish children capable of learning from lazy and unwilling to study, from those who, due to various birth defects, could not study in a regular school. The French Ministry of Education entrusted the development of a methodology for testing children to Alfred Binet, who, together with Theodore Simon, created in 1905 a series of tests to test the intelligence of children. It was in the Binet-Simon test that the so-called intelligence quotient (IQ) was first used.

The test items were grouped by age - from 3 to 13 years. The test began with tasks corresponding to the chronological age of the child. If he completely coped with them, he was given tasks for the older age group. On the contrary, if the subject could not solve a single problem for his age, he was given those that are intended for more junior group, until the age was revealed, all the tasks of which he is able to solve. This is how the "mental" age of the child was determined. By dividing it by chronological age and expressing the result as a percentage, the IQ was obtained, which by definition is 100 when the mental age is exactly the same as the chronological age. If earlier children could be divided only into three groups: gifted, normal and mentally retarded, now it is possible to classify them much more accurately according to the degree mental development. Later, based on this test, Stanford University professor Louis Theremin created a new intelligence test, known as the Stanford-Binet, which is still actively used today.

Flynn effect

More than a century has passed since the creation of the first intelligence test. During this time, huge statistics have been accumulated on IQ norms for different times and different countries. In 1984, James Flynn processed the intelligence data of Americans from 1932 to 1978 and found that average IQ test scores steadily and quite substantially increase over time. Every 10 years, the average IQ increases by about three points, which is why psychologists have to constantly adjust the value of the norm in tests. Moreover, the increase in the average IQ is especially noticeable for non-verbal tasks, and in verbal tasks it is not so pronounced.

The growth rate of average intelligence is not constant over time. For example, in the United States, intelligence increased very rapidly among people born between 1890 and 1925. For those who grew up during the Great Depression, the “norm” also rose, albeit more slowly. IN post-war years growth rates increased sharply, and then began to decline slightly. A similar surge in the growth rate of intelligence in the postwar years (1945-1960) was also found in Western Europe, New Zealand and Japan. The reasons for the Flynn effect are still completely unclear. Perhaps it is associated with the gradual disappearance of hunger in developed countries, improved medicine, a decrease in the number of children in families, improved education, as well as an increase in the information complexity of the environment that surrounds a person from early childhood.

army test

The Binet test was originally intended only to assess the intelligence of children, mental capacity which are highly dependent on age. For adults, a different approach was needed, and it was not long in coming. When the United States was preparing to enter the First World War, it was necessary to massively test recruits, weeding out the mentally retarded. The military turned to psychologist Robert Yerkes for help. As a result, the first intelligence tests for adults appeared - the Army Alpha Test (for the literate) and the Army Beta Test (for the illiterate). The first consisted exclusively of verbal tasks for understanding the meaning of what was read, searching for synonyms, continuing the sequence of numbers, etc. By the way, the questions given at the beginning of the article were taken from this test. The "beta" option included non-verbal tasks, for example, to put the cubes according to the model, to complete the image, to find the way in the drawn labyrinths. IQ was determined by the number of successfully completed tasks.

Behind a short time nearly 2 million recruits were tested. It was then that the US public was shocked to learn from psychologists that the mental age of the average conscript is 13 years old. Numerous journalistic articles began to appear, the authors of which spoke about the intellectual degradation of the nation. On a wave of hysteria, intelligence testing for immigrants was introduced to prevent the mentally retarded from entering the country, the sterilization of criminals and the mentally ill was allowed. Similar processes have also unfolded in Canada, Australia, Japan and Western Europe. They were especially zealous in getting rid of the "inferior" countries of Northern Europe,

Great Britain (by the way, Winston Churchill, Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells), and, of course, eugenic ideas began to be most actively applied in Nazi Germany. The well-known consequences led to the fact that after the Second World War eugenics turned into a marginal scientific direction, and the idea that intelligence is an exclusively innate quality began to be perceived as fascist.

However, in Europe and the United States, after the war, intelligence research continued. By that time, evidence had accumulated that intelligence was influenced not only by heredity, but also by the environment. For example, it has been statistically proven that IQ is positively associated with the educational level of parents and the socio-economic status of the family: children whose parents are uneducated and poor, IQ, as a rule, are lower. It also turned out that intelligence is associated with the number of children in the family and the order of their birth. The fewer children in the family, the more parents are involved in each of them and the higher their intelligence, and the older brothers and sisters have an average IQ higher than that of the younger ones. It is also higher among residents of large industrial cities in comparison with the inhabitants of rural areas. And yet it remained unclear in what proportions heredity and environment determine the level of intelligence.

From pedology to the exam

In the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s, intelligence testing became very popular. It gained its greatest scope within the framework of the so-called pedology - a science that combines pedagogy, psychodiagnostics and child psychology. A network of pedological institutions was created, a lot of literature was published, conferences and congresses were held. Hundreds of thousands of children have been tested, published great amount scientific articles. However, after certain patterns were discovered that contradicted Soviet ideology (for example, that children from families of workers and peasants have less intelligence than from families of the intelligentsia), pedology began to be actively criticized. As a result, on July 4, 1936, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution “On pedological perversions in the system of the People’s Commissariat of Education”, after which the concepts of pedology and testing were not only banned, but also acquired an odious meaning. Development stopped for at least half a century domestic works in the field of psychological measurements of intelligence, and already created developments and achievements were forgotten. As a result, Russia lags far behind the world culture of using tests, an illustration of which is the practice of introducing the Unified State Examination, which instead of specialists in testology and psychodiagnostics was developed by ministerial officials - with an understandable result.

The Cyril Burt Affair

In the middle of the 20th century, the most authoritative researcher in the world on the influence of the environment and heredity on the intellect was the English psychologist Cyril Burt (1883-1971). He became famous in psychology for his comparative studies of twins, in which he convincingly proved that intelligence is 80% determined by heredity and only 20% by environment. Fully adhering to the eugenic ideas of Galton, Burt actively implemented them for several decades. As a member Municipal Council London, he created in England a system of elite education. Children aged 11 years were divided into three categories according to the test results. Those who were recognized as the most capable were trained at a higher level and received access to higher education. For his services to society, Burt was even awarded title of nobility, and in the psychology of the intellect he was considered one of the greatest scientific authorities. Many popular theories of intelligence in the 1960s and 1970s (for example, Arthur Jensen and Hans Jurgen Eysenck) were based on his research.

However, after the death of Burt, in the mid-1970s, in scientific world a scandal erupted. It turned out that the results of most of his studies are fabricated. Moreover, it turned out that for more than 30 years he published numerous articles on behalf of the non-existent Miss Howrd and Miss Conway, in which he praised his theories in every possible way, reinforcing them with fabricated data. As a result, the credibility of the theory of innate abilities in the scientific world was completely lost, since even its most zealous adherent, as it turned out, was unable to substantiate it convincingly. The system created by Burt for dividing students into streams depending on their abilities was finally canceled, and scientists in their works began to remove references to his research.

However, Burt's opponents did not triumph for long. Numerous studies of several thousand pairs of monozygotic and dizygotic twins were soon carried out, some of which lived in the same family, and some lived separately from each other from birth. The intelligence of native and adopted children, who were brought up in the same family from birth, was also studied. These studies convincingly proved that heredity does influence intelligence, although, of course, not as strongly as Galton, Cattell and Burt claimed.

It has now been established that the influence of congenital factors on the IQ is only about 40-50%. The remaining 50-60%, which fall on the environment, is quite a lot, especially when you consider that these figures were obtained by comparing people living and growing up in relatively similar conditions. If we compare twins living separately in a radically different environment (for example, Big City economically developed state and a small closed rural community), then the influence of the environment on intelligence will be even greater. On the other hand, if we could place all people in the most favorable conditions for the development of intelligence, then here leading role it would be genetic factors that would play, since everyone could develop to their “ceiling”, which, as a rule, does not happen in life.

Polyhedral g-factor

Back in 1923, the American psychologist Edwin Boring gave a joking definition: “Intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.” But what do these tests actually measure?

Surprisingly, psychologists have not yet decided on what is meant by the term "intelligence". For example, in Gestalt psychology (Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer) it is considered as the ability to form generalized visual images. In the school of the Swiss biologist and philosopher Jean Piaget, this is the most perfect form of adaptation of the organism to the environment. The American psychometrician Louis Leon Thurstone considered intelligence as the ability to self-regulate mental activity. The list of definitions is endless.

Another question that has a centuries-old history: is intelligence a single quality or is it a combination of various independent abilities? At the beginning of the 20th century, the English psychologist Charles Spearman developed a new method statistical processing called "factorial analysis". Applying it to the results of different tasks in tests of intelligence, he found that they all correlated with each other. From this, Spearman concluded that there is a certain general factor of intelligence, which he called the "factor G" (from the English general - "general"), which manifests itself in all types of tasks at once. And to explain some of the differences between test scores in people with the same general intelligence, Spearman introduced a second factor, which he called S (from English specific), which serves as an indicator of a variety of specific abilities.

Several secondary concepts are based on Spearman's two-factor theory of intelligence, emphasizing various aspects of the G factor. Thus, Raymond Cattell singled out two components, which he called crystallized and fluid intelligence. The first reflects knowledge about the world and past experience, and the second reflects the amount of RAM, the speed of mental processes and other characteristics that are more dependent on heredity. Spearman's student John Raven also divided the G factor into two components, but in a different way, highlighting productive intelligence (the ability to identify connections and relationships, come to conclusions that are not explicitly presented in a given situation) and reproductive (the ability to use past experience and learned information). Donald Wexler proposed to divide general intelligence into verbal and non-verbal.

Multiple intelligence

Other researchers believed that intelligence is actually a set of different abilities. This was most clearly formulated in 1938 by Louis Thurstone in his multifactorial theory of intelligence, according to which there is no general intelligence, but there are seven independent primary abilities: the ability to operate in the mind with spatial relationships, detail visual images, perform basic arithmetic operations, understand the meaning of words, quickly select a word according to a given criterion, memorize and identify logical patterns.

Thurstone's approach has been developed by other researchers. So, Howard Gardner in 1983 identified eight independent types of human intelligence: musical, visual-spatial, naturalistic (the ability to observe natural phenomena), verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal (wealth of spiritual life). In the works of John Carroll (1976), 24 factors of intelligence were distinguished, and in the study of Edwin Fleischman (1984), 52. But even earlier, in 1967, a record number of independent intellectual abilities (as many as 120 varieties!) Was postulated by Joy Gilford in his structural model of intelligence . It became unclear what reflects all this diversity: the real nature of intelligence or the peculiarities of the methods used to study it?

The response to this crisis was the emergence in the late 1980s and early 1990s of a new generation of theories that viewed intelligence not as a combination of different abilities, but as a hierarchy of various cognitive processes. Of the modern hierarchical theories of intelligence, perhaps the most interesting is the Grand Design model proposed by the Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Boris Mitrofanovich Velichkovsky. According to his concept, the mechanisms of human intelligence work at six levels, forming a global architecture based on neurophysiological mechanisms. At the lower levels, processes that are much older in evolutionary terms than those measured by IQ tests take place. They are responsible for reflexes, coordination of movements, consideration of the environment - and only at the upper levels do speech structures and self-awareness appear. The value of Velichkovsky's theory is that it throws a bridge between physiology and human consciousness, and the intellect in it ceases to be a "black box". But it is still unclear how to apply this theory in applied problems, and therefore, in practice, traditional tests based on phenomenological theories of intelligence half a century ago are still used in practice, which sometimes leads to rather unexpected results.

Francis Galton - a descendant of Yaroslav the Wise

Usually the name of Francis Galton (1822-1911) is associated only with eugenics, but his contribution to science is much larger. He invented a printing telegraph (teleprinter), a helioscope (a traveling periscope), a "wave machine" (a power plant that uses the energy of sea waves). The history of scientific meteorology begins with him: he discovered anticyclones and developed the first meteorological maps. Galton is also the founder of a number of branches of psychology - psychodiagnostics, psychogenetics and differential psychology. He was the first to substantiate and develop the method of fingerprinting, which is widely used in forensic science. He also provided big influence on the development of mathematical statistics, having developed, together with his student K. Pearson, correlation and regression analysis. Since Galton claimed that mental abilities are innate, biographers were not too lazy to trace his own ancestry almost to the fiftieth generation. The grandfather of Galton (and Charles Darwin) was the famous philosopher, naturalist and poet Erasmus Darwin, and among the more distant ancestors - the emperor of the Franks Charlemagne, the English king William the Conqueror and even Kyiv prince Yaroslav the Wise.

The Mensa Paradox

In 1946, lawyer Lancelot Wear, together with his lawyer friend Roland Burrill, created a closed society called Mensa (from the Latin mensa - "table"). The main entry requirement was to pass an intelligence test with a score better than 98% of people. Despite these stringent requirements, the society has grown rapidly, with chapters virtually all over the world, and now has over 100,000 members in more than 50 countries. About 30 more similar closed clubs are known, and in most of them the requirements for intelligence are even more stringent. So, to join the Intertel society, you need to be smarter than 99% of people, in order to become a member of Colloquy, you must prove that you belong to the smartest 0.03%, and the Triple Nine society ("triple nine") is so named because its members bypass the tests intelligence of 99.9% of people. Finally, there is the Mega society, which only has a one in a million chance of joining, as it requires an IQ greater than 99.9999% of people.

It would seem that if the smartest people on the planet come together, they will be able to solve or at least suggest a solution to many of the problems facing humanity. Alas, instead, members of such societies are mainly concerned with finding out who has a higher IQ, holding puzzle-solving tournaments, and also coming up with more and more difficult tests to assess their own intelligence.

Although all high-IQ societies proudly post lists of celebrities from their ranks on their websites, it should be noted that they are negligible compared to total number participants. So, of the Mensa members, perhaps only four are known in our country: science fiction writer and science popularizer Isaac Asimov, cell phone inventor Martin Cooper, ZX Spectrum computer creator Clive Sinclair, and the already mentioned falsifier psychologist Cyril Burt. The remaining 100,000 "super intellectuals" never did anything that would affect the development of civilization.

Does this mean the IQ test doesn't work? Not at all. Studies show that outstanding scientists have a very high IQ - an average of about 160 points. But why, then, do many people with even higher scores never succeed in science? There are several explanations for this phenomenon, known as the Mensa paradox.

First, discoveries in science often depend on chance, on being in right time in the right place. It is clear that someone who is lucky enough to work in a large university, where there is a creative atmosphere and there are no problems with scientific equipment, has a better chance of making an important discovery than working in the provinces with antediluvian devices, surrounded by people who have long been disillusioned with science. Secondly, in addition to high intelligence, other personal qualities are also important: perseverance, high motivation, as well as some social skills. Without them, the intellectual runs the risk of spending his whole life waiting in the wings, lying on the couch. And finally, the device itself modern society is such that people who could potentially accomplish the greatest scientific discoveries, often prefer not to go into science at all, but choose the more prestigious and better paid professions of a doctor, lawyer, financier, journalist, as evidenced, for example, by the composition of the Mensa society. If we lived in the 20th century, we would only have to shrug and complain about the inefficient waste of intellectual resources. However, progress information technologies allowed many people with high IQ, without changing their habitual way of life, to participate in the work of expanding, accumulating and ordering the knowledge of civilization, for example, in various online open encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Answers to the test questions at the beginning of the article

Velvet Joe is a character from an early 20th-century American pipe tobacco advertisement. Wyandotte is an American breed of chicken, bred in 1870. Goatbeard is a flowering plant of the Asteraceae family. Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) was a French animal painter, one of the most famous female artists of the 19th century. American cars of the Overland brand were produced at the beginning of the last century in the city of Toledo (Ohio).

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Top Posts

The founder of Toyota, Sakichi Toyoda, used the five whys all the time. In all incomprehensible situations, he used this method, and that always helped him.

Here is the rule. For example, you want a fur coat.
You ask yourself: why do I want a fur coat? This is the first why. You answer: because I want to surprise everyone. Okay, the second "why": Why do you want to surprise everyone? Answer: Because I want to be noticed. Third “why”: Why do you need to be noticed? Answer: Because I feel insecure. Fourth "why": Why do you feel insecure? Answer: Because I can't realize myself in any way, because I'm sitting in one place. Fifth "why": Why can't you realize yourself? Answer: Because I do what I don't like. And tell me now, what does the fur coat have to do with it?

Sakichi Toyoda taught that the answer to the fifth "why" is the root cause, which, at first glance, is not visible. The fifth "because" brings to light what is hidden. If you like, the fifth "because" is the real you. This is a very effective way to check what you are really hiding, what you are afraid to admit even to yourself, what you really want and what, in fact, is just tinsel.

Thanks to Mr. Toyoda not only for Toyota.

2024 472 45 ER 0.1540

61-year-old Australian farmer wins super marathon because he didn't know you could sleep during it

The distance of the Australian Super Marathon from Sydney to Melbourne is 875 km, which takes more than 5 days from start to finish. The race usually features world-class track and field athletes who train specifically for the event. The majority of athletes are under 30 years of age and are sponsored by major sports brands that provide athletes with uniforms and running shoes.
In 1983, many were perplexed when 61-year-old Cliff Young appeared at the start on the day of the race (biography on Wikipedia). At first, everyone thought that he had come to watch the start of the race, as he was not dressed like other athletes: in work overalls and galoshes over boots. But when Cliff went to the table to get the number of the race participant, everyone understood that he intended to run with everyone.
When Cliff got the number 64 and got on the line with other athletes, the film crew, making a report from the start, decided to take a short interview from him. They pointed the camera at Cliff and asked:
- Hey! Who are you and what are you doing here?
- I'm Cliff Young. We raise sheep on a large pasture near Melbourne.
Are you really going to run this race?
- Yes.
- Do you have a sponsor?
- Not.
Then you won't be able to run.
- No, I can. I grew up on a farm where we couldn't afford horses or a car until very recently: I only bought a car 4 years ago. When a storm came up, I went out to herd the sheep. We had 2,000 sheep grazing on 2,000 acres. Sometimes I caught sheep for 2-3 days - it was not easy, but I always caught them. I think I can run the race, because it is only 2 days longer and is only 5 days, while I run after sheep for 3 days.

When the marathon began, the professionals left Cliff in his galoshes far behind. Some spectators sympathized with him, and some laughed at him, as he could not even start correctly. On TV, people watched Cliff, many worried and prayed for him that he would not die on the way.
Every professional knew that it would take about 5 days to complete the distance and for this it was necessary to run 18 hours a day and sleep 6 hours a day. Cliff Young did not know this.
The next morning after the start, people learned that Cliff did not sleep, but continued to run all night, reaching the town of Mittagong. But even without stopping to sleep, Cliff was far behind all the athletes, although he continued to run, while still managing to greet people standing along the race track.
Every night he got closer to the leaders of the race, and on the last night Cliff beat all the world class athletes. By the morning last day he was way ahead of everyone. Cliff not only ran a super marathon at the age of 61 without dying, but also won it, breaking the 9-hour running record and becoming a national hero.
Cliff Young completed the 875 km race in 5 days, 15 hours and 4 minutes.
Cliff Young didn't take a single prize. When Cliff was awarded the first prize of $10,000, he said he didn't know there was a prize, that he didn't run the race for the money, and without hesitation decided to give the money to the first five athletes who ran after him, $2,000 each. Cliff didn't keep a cent for himself and all of Australia fell in love with him.
Many trained athletes knew whole techniques about how to run and how much time to rest on a distance. Moreover, they were convinced that it was impossible to run a super marathon at the age of 61. Cliff Young did not know all this. He didn't even know that athletes could sleep. His mind was free from limiting beliefs. He just wanted to win: he imagined a fleeing sheep in front of him and tried to catch up with her.

1922 209 40 ER 0.1315

Lifelong marathon

Terry Fox runs in bloody shorts during the Marathon of Hope across Canada, July 1980. He ran for 143 days until he died. Terry Fox was born in Canada in 1958. In 1977, Terry began to feel pain in his right knee, he was diagnosed with bone cancer.
Doctors had to amputate his right leg above the knee. Three years later, the young athlete decides to run across the country from ocean to ocean. The purpose of the run is to collect donations for cancer research. When organizing the Marathon of Hope, he dreamed of raising one dollar from every Canadian citizen. For more than a year he trained daily, because he understood well that even a healthy person could not overcome such a distance without preliminary preparation.

Terry Fox started the "Marathon of Hope" on April 12, 1980, by dipping his foot in the Atlantic Ocean, and intended to dip it a second time in the Pacific Ocean in Vancouver. He ran an average of 42 km a day, but the disease progressed and he ran in constant pain, with a prosthetic leg instead. Only great willpower and the desire to help millions of fellow sufferers moved him forward.

He failed to complete the marathon. The cancer spread to the lungs, and Terry Fox was forced to break the race on September 1, 1980. He stopped near the city of Thunder Bay (in northern Ontario) after 143 days of non-stop marathon, running 5,373 km through the provinces of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario. Ten months later, short of his 23rd birthday, Terry passed away.
By February 1981, it had raised just over $24 million, but, most importantly, it managed to attract the attention of the general public. Now in Canada and more than 50 other countries around the world, Terry Fox charity runs are held annually for donations to cancer research. Terry Fox Run holds the record for being the biggest single-player fundraiser in the world. Now, after 25 years of development, the Terry Fox Foundation has grown to $360 million, so with the help of millions of people, Terry Fox's efforts have not been in vain.

The Canadian authorities have named the icebreaker after Terry Fox. The ship was launched in 1983.

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In November 2011, in the museum of the German city of Dortmund, a cleaner destroyed a work of contemporary art insured for 800,000 euros. The work entitled “When it starts to drip from the ceiling” was a basin containing, as it were, sediment from dripping from the ceiling. The cleaning lady saw the dirty basin and carefully wiped it, thus performing one of the most powerful artistic acts in the history of modern art. Showing that even if it cost 800 thousand euros - and in fact, in fact, ordinary dirt.

In February 2014, history repeated itself in Italy. At the Bari Museum, a cleaning lady threw away a couple of crumpled paper exhibits and also swept cookie crumbs from the table, which, as it turned out later, were part of an installation worth 10,000 euros.

And now - you will not believe it - history repeated itself for the third time. And again in Italy. In the city of Bolzano, a museum cleaning lady saw the installation “Where will we dance tonight?”, which consists of champagne bottles, cigarette butts and confetti scattered on the floor. And, of course, she threw it all out of the room ....

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Before his death, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent called the commander-in-chief of the army and expressed his three wishes to him:
1. He bequeathed that his coffin (tabut) be carried by the best doctors of the Ottoman Empire of that time.
2. His second desire was that gold coins and precious stones would be scattered along the entire path along which his coffin would be carried.
3. He bequeathed that his hands stick out of the taboo and be visible to everyone.
When the commander-in-chief of the army, confused by what he heard, asked him the reason for such wishes, Suleiman the Magnificent (Kanuni) explained everything as follows:
- Let the best doctors carry my tabut and let everyone see that even the best doctors are powerless in the face of death.
- Scatter the gold I have earned, let everyone see that the wealth that we receive from this life remains in this world.
- Let everyone see my hands and learn that even the Padishah of the whole world - Sultan Suleiman Kanuni left this life empty-handed.

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