The Book of Life

but couldn’t finish the machine in time. When the deadline passed, the tribesmen rushed at him with spears. Looking closely, he noticed that each spear had a hole near its tip. As he was staring at this, he woke up. That was the clue he needed. He put the hole at the tip of the needle, like the spear, and passed the thread through it. Now the problem was solved. The machine that hadn’t worked with the hole at the top worked perfectly once the hole was moved to the lower side. Howe’s difficulty was that he couldn’t rise above conventional thinking. He assumed that what people had done for thousands of years must be right. When his subconscious showed him another possibility, he understood at once and solved the problem. When a person throws himself fully into a task, he can discover its hidden secrets in the same way Howe did. THE CONDITION FOR SUCCESS A s of 1990, at the time of this writing, Japan is widely recognized as an economic superpower. In the past, military strength was what made a nation a superpower. But Japan proved by its own example that a nation can also reach that status through economic development. Moreover, a country that becomes powerful through its