polgar experiment book

• Books & Workbooks
• Free Courses
• Free Membership
• The Nomadic Scholar
• Persuasion Mastery
• Behavioural Mastery
• Testemonials
• Free Connection Call
• 15th March 2020
• 45 minute(s) read

How To Become A Genius- The Polgár Experiment

In this article I write about the unbelievable story of the Polgár’s. The family who successfully created three geniuses on purpose.

A girl walks into a bar…

In the summer of 1973, a father and his daughter walked into a chess club in Budapest.  1

The club was full of heavy cigarette smoke and elderly men who came there day after day to play chess.

The father approached the gentlemen.

The old men could not believe their ears when they heard László Polgár challenge them to play against his four-year-old daughter, Susan Polgár.

László put a pillow that he brought from home on one of the chairs so his daughter could reach the table.

The old chess foxes could not believe their eyes when little Susan won one match after another.

Who the hell was this kid?

The First Female Chess Grandmaster

Thirty years later Susan Polgár, the world’s first female chess grandmaster was ready to give her usual Thursday night lecture at the New York Chess club when she announced to the room, “I have a special treat for you tonight!“. 2

“Tonight, everyone will get to play me“ Susan, 36 said with a gentle, but confident smile on her face to all the other chess players in the room.

The atmosphere in the room tensed, everybody transformed from student to competitor.

Everyone except Susan.

They were playing blitz chess, a form of chess where they not only played against one of the best chess players of all time in Susan Polgár but also against the clock.

First in line, was a young Serbian who tried to play aggressively, Susan managed to beat him in no time.

The young man stood up, shook his head in confusion, and made room for the next one.

It took Susan minutes to defeat her next two opponents, the last one to beat was a reluctant and shy teenage chess student.

While defeating him, she mentored him by saying, “Once you have a winning position, play with your hands, not your head.  Trust your intuition“.

When Susan was the age of the boy, she already dominated the adult chess world and crushed competitor after competitor. 2

When she was 16 years old, Susan participated in the New York Open Chess competition, a prestigious tournament for the best of the best.

Although Susan was dominating her competition, as usual, there were two other participants in the tournament who caused quite the fuzz: Susan’s 11-year-old sister Sophia, and her 9-year-old sister Judit.

In particular, little Judit left the crowd in awe, when the 9-year old battled five players at the same time while being blindfolded.

The success of the Polgár’s did not go unnoticed, and Susan appeared on the cover of the New York Times shortly after the tournament.

By the time she was 21, Susan had become the first woman ever to earn the title of Grandmaster from the World Chess Federation.

In 2002, her sister Judit Polgár’, who by then was ranked as the eighth-best players in the world, would win against the reigning champion and living chess legend Gary Kasparov.

The same chess master who said earlier:

Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.“ Gary Kasparov

But did he have a point?  After all, only 11 out of the world’s 950 grandmasters are female. 3

Are the Polgár’s sisters born prodigies, who by a twist of genetic fate, were blessed with more talent than others?

This assumption could not be further from the truth…

Letters To Klara

47 years before Judit beat Gary Kasparov, László Polgár, a Hungarian psychologist and father of the three chess prodigies wrote a series of letters to a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara.

The letters were not filled with Shakespearean declarations of eternal love; instead, they revolved around a precise and unprecedented pedagogical experiment that László wanted to conduct with his unborn children.

After studying the lives and achievements of over four hundred of the greatest intellectuals of our time, László believed he had identified the secret ingredient to high achievement: early and intensive specialisation in a particular subject. 4

A genius is not born but is educated and trained….When a child is born healthy, it is a potential genius”.  -László Polgár

László rejected the idea of innate talent, and he believed that the public school system could only be successful in producing mediocre minds.

He had the idea that with hard work and the right kind of environment, everybody could become a genius.

László’s plan of proving the world wrong impressed Klara, and she got on board with the experiment of grooming three geniuses, and shortly after they got married and Klara got pregnant.

The Polgár’s decided that chess would be the perfect activity for their experiment; after all, only 1% of the top chess players in the world were women at that time.

In 1974, Klara gave birth to Sophie, 21 months later, Judit was born.

Soon after being born, the sibling’s curiosity was sparked by seeing their father teaching chess to Susan, the oldest of the three sisters.

They became interested in chess as a consequence, and with that, Polgár had not only one but three “subjects“.

So, how good did the three sisters do in chess?

Well, not bad, I would say.

After being recognised as the top-ranked female chess player in the world, Susan Polgár was the first woman in history to win the Chess Triple Crown, and the first one to qualify for the Men’s World Championship in 1986.

The second daughter, Sofia Polgár, went on to become a top ten female chess player in the world, and she also beat several other male grandmasters during her career.

Finally came Judit Polgár, born in 1976, she achieved the highest chess results among the three legendary sisters.

Judit is nowadays widely recognised as the strongest female chess player of all time.

She was also the one who broke Bobby Fischer’s record when she became at the age of 15, the youngest grandmaster of all time.

The childhood of the Polgár sisters was extraordinary, and it challenges the idea that nature trumps over nurture.

Are Geniuses Born Or Are They Made?

László’s crazy and maybe unethical experiment was successful in his attempt to “produce“ miracle children.

I would even go so far as to say that the Polgár family refuted the idea that geniuses are the mere consequence of biological flukes.

In that regard, László’s Polgár proved his theory that he made over 50 years ago, which states: genius-level performers are not born, they are made.

In case nobody ever told you this: there is a genius sleeping in your heart who waits to be awakened.

But it is not going to wake up by itself.

But what can you do to become everything you can be?

Before we discuss the psychological makeup of a genius, let us first identify what a genius is…

What Is A Genius?

If I am not for me – who is then for me; but if I am only for me – why do I live?” – The Talmud “The only geniuses produced by the chaos of society are those who do something about it.  Chaos breeds geniuses.  It offers a man something to be a genius about”.- B.F. Skinner “Genius is the recovery of childhood at will”.  – Arthur Rimbaud

While we, up to this day, have not agreed on a scientifically precise definition of a genius, we all know intuitively what a genius is. 5

Or so do we believe.

The first thing that comes to mind when we think of the word genius is a super nerd, a la Stephan Hawking or Albert Einstein, a person who is born with superior or intellectual talent, who was predestined to achieve what normal people could never achieve.

Many psychologists believed that the intellectual superiority of outstanding people has its origins in the anatomy of their brain.

After Einstein’s death, for example, a team of psychologists analysed his grey organ anatomically (weight, volume, and folding of the brain), but they did not find anything that was not normal. 6

So, if it is not the brain itself, what is it?

Since László Polgár dedicated his life to the idea that geniuses can be produced, let us listen to his parameters:

Genius = Work + Luck + Favourable Circumstances Every healthy child may be led to the summit.  The fact that the majority of children can learn a new language between the ages of 1 – 2 proves this.  Think about it, is this not an achievement of genius?  If they continue, at the age of 10, they can speak 5-6 languages.  This genius results firstly from education and self-education.  The opinion of world-famous geniuses also confirms this assertion.  Let me cite some examples: T.A. Edison: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. Ch. Chaplin: “Talent is nothing; discipline is everything”. Cuvier: “Genius is firstly attention”. Gorkiy: “Talent is the love of work”. J.S. Bach: “Anyone can achieve my level if he is a diligent as I have been my entire life”. J.W. Goethe: “Genius?  Probably merely diligence”.

de Balzac: “Every human talent consists of two parts: patience and time”.

According to László Polgár, being genius is not an inborn trait; it is a level everybody can achieve in theory.

Yes, also you.

He identified three different levels that a person has to overcome:

A fully realised genius is the same, in my opinion, as an outstanding person.  An outstanding person differs on the one hand quantitatively from the average (they know much more than the average person), and on the other hand, they realize in society a more valuable, more original creativity.  Being outstanding comes in different stages.  I distinguish three: Candidates or pre-geniuses (1-5% of every domain) Geniuses (0.2 -0.5 % of every domain) Super-genius (1 in every domain) Thus follows: The handicapped Idiots: very retarded mentally Imbeciles: moderately mentally retarded Feeble-minded: a little mentally retarded The normal Adequate people: minor capability Average people: natural Capable people: more capability The outstanding (geniuses) Unusually capable: candidate or pre-geniuses Super-capable: geniuses Extraordinarily capable: super-geniuses Of course, these divisions are only relative.  Obviously, every concrete person can move from one category to another.

What does this mean? 

This means that once you have identified an area of your life that you want to master, there are different milestones that you can achieve to work yourself up to the level of a genius.

Read that sentence again.

In the case of the Polgár’s, their parameters were, of course, chess related.

For chess, these success steps are precise and measurable; one of the reasons why Polgár choose this particular domain.

There is a system that is called “Elo Points“, and it measures how good a chess player is. 7

• –  Super-geniuses (above 2650 Elo Points)
• –  Geniuses (2550-2650 Elo Points)
• –  Candidate geniuses (2450-2550 Elo Points)

All three Polgár sisters had stretches where they were playing at a super-genius level.

This indicates that every domain has levels that we can climb, this means that no genius is just born, they climb the ladder, and they can fall off the ladder of success if they stop practising their craft.

The purpose of this article is for you to learn about Polgár’s blueprint and apply it to your personal domain of interest so that you can become a genius in your field.

In the following part of this article, we are going to deconstruct what characteristics you can emulate from the Polgár’s to maximise your potential,

The five-ingredients of a genius that you are going to find in the next part of this article, are derived from my observation of the beautiful story about this wonderful family, of course, they do not represent their ideas but mine.

Ingredient One – Rage To Master

Many things can be acquired with money, many by deceit, and many by falsehood.  But there is one thing that can be obtained only by honest labour, for which a king must work as hard as a coalman… and that is knowledge”.  – The Talmud “A true scientist lives a monastic life, separate from the affairs of the world, dedicating himself completely to his work. ” – László Polgár “Instruction without discipline is like a windmill without water ” – Comenius

While I mainly focused on the positive parts of Polgár’s experiment in this article, it is impossible to read about the three miracle sisters without acknowledging the amount of hard work they invested into the development of their craft.

The Polgár’s possessed something that Ellen Winner, a psychologist from Boston College, calls the “rage to master”.

A trait that can be defined as an unstoppable motivation to excel in a domain of interest. 8

I had an inner drive; I think that is the difference between the very good and the best”.  Susan Polgár

Was this rage to master something the Polgár’s were born with or was it something that was developed?

I believe it was the latter.

One way I can see the three children develop the rage to master, was when László Polgár put his children in a 24 Chess Marathon in Dresden:

In 1985 only Zsuzsa and in 1986 also her two younger sisters played in the tournament, Zsuzsa was 15, Zsofi was 9 and a half, and Judit 8).  According to the rules, they had to play 100 matches in 24 hours, so they had to keep attentive with great effort, practically without rest.  (There were only three short 20-minute pauses for food).  Added to this, they had to sit at the chess table after a 16-hour train journey. László Polgár

With challenges like this, it is no wonder that the children developed an extraordinary persistence.

It again shows that great people are not born; they are forged.

Every successful person has been a fanatic at some point in their lives; the Polgár’s are no exception.

Nothing was given to them; everything was earned.

If the chest pieces of the three sisters could talk, they would tell you about the endless hours of practice, the many moments where they did not feel like showing up but still did.

The pawns would sing about defeat, about sweat, about tears, about obsession, and about the heavy burden of being born to a father who has crushing expectations.

It is also impossible to overlook the insane work ethic of the father, László Polgár himself:

As concerns my view of life: I have worked 15 hours a day since I was 14.  For me, quality is the main thing.  I wish to do everything always at the highest level.  Mediocrity, the orientation to the middle, I refuse out of principle.  I strive for the summit despite obstacles, obeying the admonition of Michel de Montaigne: “In a great storm, sailors in ancient times invoked Neptune: O God!  You will save or destroy me according to your will.  But whatever you will, I will steer my ship as necessary!”

Human beings are imitators; we learn through observation.

The opinion of Albert Banduras, one of the most famous behaviourists of all time,  also confirms this assertion:

Fortunately, most human behaviour is learned observationally through modelling from others”.  – Albert Banduras.

In the video below, you will find The Bobo Doll, an experiment that shows that the quality of our behaviour often comes down to the quality of people we are surrounded by. 9

Ingredient Two – Deliberate Practice

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones”.  Confucius “Do not let the sun set without doing something”.  Latin Proverb “We must believe that we are talented in some area and we must absolutely attain it”.  M. Curie

In 1985, Benjamin Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, investigated the critical factors that contributed to talent. 10

In his book, “ Developing Talent in Young People” , he takes a deep look at the upbringing of 120 elite performers who had won international competitions.

Bloom found that there were absolutely no early indicators that could have predicted genius-level success, not even IQ.

What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn if provided with appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.“ Benjamin Bloom

The only difference Bloom found was that extraordinary performers had practised intensively, studied with dedicated teachers, and had been supported enthusiastically through their developing years.

Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argues that “extended deliberate practice” is the true key to success.

Ericsson interviewed  78 German pianists and violinists and discovered that by the age of 20, the most successful artists had spent approximately 10,000 hours on polishing their craft, on average 5,000 more than a less accomplished group. 11

Even the most motivated and intelligent student will advance more quickly under the tutelage of someone who knows the best order in which to learn things, who understand and can demonstrate the proper way to perform various skills, who can provide useful feedback, and who can devise practice activities designed to overcome particular weaknesses.” ― Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

All three of the Polgár’s had amassed over 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by the age of 12. 12

Deliberate practice does not mean to simply live in a cave and study blindly; watching every episode of Emergency Room will not make you a doctor.

When most people practise, they focus on the things they already know how to do; deliberate practice is different.

What all three Polgár’s had in common was that they were not only working hard but also smart.

After every loss, they deconstructed the match and investigated what they did wrong so they could weed out their weaknesses and become better incrementally.

While starting at an early age can definitively be an advantage, I find it unbelievably refreshing to learn that with hard work and the right strategy, we can actually climb the mountain of success.

Leo Tolstoy (1847–1910), once observed that the people who asked him if they had what it takes to write a book, never actually tried to write one.

Mainstream media is full of overnight success stories, but when we take a closer look at the admired “naturals“, we always find that they have spent an incredible amount of time and energy into the strategical improvement of their craft.

While this iceberg of work might feel intimidating, it is important to notice that the ladder of success is climbable and that it will not take forever to get to the top.

10,000 hours is not forever, so if you do not have anything better to do, why not start TODAY at mastering your craft.

Ingredient Three – Choice Architecture

A person who shapes his environment shapes his destiny, his society and himself. ” László Polgár “Other people are among the most elementary needs of the person. ” K. Marx “Through others, we become ourselves”. Lev S. Vygotsky

The second and most obvious reason for the Polgár’s extraordinary development was that they grew up in a chess factory.

Thousands of chess books were stuffed into the shelves, trophies and posters hung everywhere.

Entire walls were cluttered with records of previous games for unlimited analytical pleasure.

Paintings that depicted 19th-century chess scenes could be found in many rooms.

The Polgár’s home was like a carefully designed and permanent chess boot camp:

The motivation for succeeding in chess was just there in the atmosphere of our house” Susan Polgár

While motivation plays a big role in mastering any field, the environment we are surrounded by seems to affect us even more.

While writing a chapter about the impact of our environment for my upcoming book, “ The Behaviour Architect” (coming soon), I interviewed Dr Anne Thorndike, a medical professor at Harvard University for The Psychology Podcast with Daniel Karim.

Dr Thorndike and her colleagues believe that it is possible to improve the eating habits of thousands of hospital employees and visitors without the slightest bit of motivational manipulation. 13

Dr Thorndike and her colleagues designed a six-month study where they altered the “choice architecture” of the hospital cafeteria.

They started by relocating the drinks in the room.  Before the study, the refrigerators stood next to the cash registers, and they were filled with soda only.

The research team now added water as an option to each refrigerator, and additionally placed a basket of bottled water next to each food station across the room.

While the unhealthy soda was still in the refrigerators, now the staff and visitors had the choice of taking water instead.

The image above shows you how Dr Thorndike and her colleagues manipulated the environment to get people to make healthier choices without even talking to them.  To the left, you see the room before the changes (Figure A), and to the right, you see the room after the changes (Figure A).  The dark boxes indicate where water was available.

What did they find?

Over the next three months, water sales increased by 25.8%, while soda sales dropped by 11.4%.

What we can learn from Dr Thorndike’s work and from the choice architecture of László Polgár, is that where we are, determines what we do.

B.F Skinner knew this almost 80 years ago when he said:

The ideal of behaviourism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behaviour that benefits everyone.“

A threatening realisation isn’t it?

After all, we all have been brought up with the idea of the American dream that states that the world is a fair and just place, and everybody can achieve their dream.

But in reality, our environment either makes or breaks us.

In 2018, my family had to learn that this principle cuts both ways.

At the end of that year, my father, a cigar connoisseur, bought himself a beautiful humidor.

Due to his love of cigars, my father believed it would be a good idea to invest a ton of money in giving his little babies a better home.

He placed the humidor on his English desk, where now, always in reach, he had an endless supply of perfectly freshly moistened cigars.

Pre-purchase, it was one of his rituals, to once a day, to leave his work behind and go to the cigar store to chat with his trusted cigar dealer about life and enjoy his break with a little puff.

After my father purchased the humidor, all he had to do was to spin his English chair around to grab a cigar whenever he felt like it.

One month after the purchase, my father was smoking four cigars a day.

Two months after the purchase, my father had a heart attack and found himself in the hospital.

Luckily, he survived.

Consciously, my father did not choose to smoke more, he knew very well that one cigar a day was risky enough, but because he chose to reshape his environment, unknowingly, he created an environment for himself which promoted smoking to the degree that nearly ended him.

What I am trying to say by this story: the results you currently produce are indicators for the quality of your environment.

Ask yourself right now:

To what kind of judgment would a stranger come to if they would observe your living environment?

If they would take a look at your room, what would they assume about you?

If they would take a look at your friends to predict your future, what kind of future would they prophesize for you?

Just like the Polgár’s transformed their home into a chess shrine, you need to align your living environment with your goals.

Here are a few ways you could redesign your environment:

• If you want to stop yourself from cheating on your diet, establish a no sweets policy at your home.
• If you want to get in shape, put your running shoes in front of your bed.
• If you want to drink more water, put two big full water bottles next to your bed.
• If you want to stop yourself from procrastinating, sell your TV.
• If you want to improve your speaking skills, join a debate team.
• If you want to get rid of your depression, get a dog.
• If you live with somebody who lives a pathological life, move out of the apartment.

Ingredient Four –  Specialisation

Human history is a contest between catastrophe and education”.  – H. G. Wells “Chance can create not only a thief but sometimes a great person”.  – G.C. Lichtenberg “A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere”.  Marcus Valerius Martial

During his time as a student, László Polgár was obsessed with studying the biographies of approximately 400 great intellectuals from Socrates to Einstein.

While reading those biographies, he had identified a common theme — intensive specialisation in a particular subject.

Polgár started to put this discovery into practice, and started to educate his three daughters before they were three years old; when they turned six, he started to ” specialise”  them. 12

Polgár decided to home school his children because he did not believe that our generalised school system could be successful in anything else but to produce mediocrity.

The first characteristic of genius education – I could say the most important novelty distinguishing it from contemporary instruction – and its necessary precondition, is early specialization directed at one concrete field.“ – László Polgár

So, to become a genius in something, the first step is to decide what one wants to be a genius in.

I am sure you have noticed, but this is the exact opposite idea of the generalised school system that we have in most countries of the world.

For that very reason, Polgár made the early decision to home school his children:

It is generally known that you are a pedagogy fanatic; however, you did not put your daughters in school; they did their studies as private students.  Why? The fact that I did not send my daughters to school is, of course, connected to the fact that I hold an unfavourable opinion of it.  I criticize contemporary schools because they do not educate for life, they equalize everyone to a very low level, and in addition, they do not tolerate the talented and those who diverge from the average. Let us take this step by step, and start with your first remark: schools do not educate for life.  Is the old Latin saying “One learns not for the sake of school, but of life” pointless? Contemporary schools are separate from real life in that they function sort of as laboratories.  There is no link with domestic or political or local public life or the everyday cares of living one’s life on the one hand, and school on the other. My daughters, who have never visited a school, grew up much more in the context of real life.  Contemporary schools do not promote a love of learning.  They do not inspire to great achievements; they raise neither autonomous people nor communally-oriented ones. Schools do not manifest or develop potential capabilities in people, at least as much as they could. It seems to me that the second point of your critique of schools is related to this.  That is, they equalize everyone to a very low level.  How would you clarify this? It’s a simple matter.  If all the schools in the country are of only one type, the model is like this: in each school, there are, besides a few outstanding people, many mediocre and weak people.  The mediocre are closer to the weak than to the outstanding.  Of course, a teacher cannot adapt to those few outstanding people, so the teacher presents material that is appropriate for the majority.  Thus, for the outstanding, class time becomes tedious.  Even if the teacher wished to, the teacher cannot “tailor” the study material for most of the students’ individual needs.  So, they cannot make each child work to their potential.  Too often they must make the whole class mechanically repeat more or less identical tasks.  In the current organization structure, they only speak about instruction providing problem-solving skills, but in practice, this is unrealizable.  Thus, both pedagogues and students suffer in school.“ László Polgár 13

And, Polgár was not the only expert who believed that our current school system is not only ineffective but harmful.  Here are a few famous people who failed at school, or in better words; were failed by the school system.

Billionaire and founder of the Virgin brand, Richard Branson, struggled in school with various learning difficulties but has since taken the world by storm.

Branson had enough of school and dropped out of it at the age of 16 in order create a magazine.  Today, he is the owner of more than 400 companies. 14

I think by the age of 16, for most they should have learnt all the basics that they need to get out into the outside world, ideally, they should go off and travel for a year, and if they want to go to university they should be able to go to a university course that is not longer than about two years.” – Sir Richard Branson

Thomas Mann failed three times during his school studies; he later became one of the most famous writers of his generation.

Another one who might surprise you: Albert Einstein.

Einstein was known as a notoriously bad student, and one of his teachers once noted, “He [Einstein] thinks slowly, is agitated, obsessed with stupid dreams”. 15

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education”. Albert Einstein

The great Charles Darwin often got in trouble for being lazy and day-dreaming.

Darwin himself stated, “I was considered by all my masters and my father, a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard of intellect”.

Darwin eventually became a huge figure in the field of Biology.

While I am light years away from the achievements of the gentlemen above, and maybe thank god for that, I know what it feels like to fail at school.

In Germany, when you hit the fourth grade, the teachers evaluate your potential and your capabilities and put you in a “fitting school category“.

There were three categories when I grew up:

• Gymnasium (For talented teens)
• Realschule (For mediocre teens)
• Hauptschule (For idiots)

I still remember how stupid I felt when I got the “Hauptschule Diagnosis“, not because I was labelled as untalented by my school authorities, not because I was separated from my friends or because I had to go home and tell my mom that I did not make it, I felt stupid because up to that point I thought I was a smart kid.

In Germany, graduating from gymnasium is a precondition to studying at any university, so with that diagnosis, my dreams of becoming a psychologist were crushed.

Stuck with incompetent pedagogues who hated their job, and surrounded by other angry and impoverished children, I began to resent school.

The campus became my prison, and I was looking for every possible chance to escape it.

I became an even worse student, and I had to repeat the eighth grade two times before they finally had it with me and kicked me out.

When I was seventeen years old, I had no high school diploma, and I was not allowed to attend any normal school in Germany because it is only allowed to repeat the same class twice.

Just as László conducted an experiment to turn his children into geniuses, my environment succeeded in turning me into a failure of epic proportions.

Academic Failure = Lack of Deliberate Practice, Dysfunctional Environment + Generalised School System + Subpar Educators + No fun + No Orientation Towards the Future + Bad Habits 

After years of blaming the living daylights out of myself, I began to understand that human beings are systematic creatures and that it was not only me who needed repair.

Bad apples usually grow on sick trees…

But what does a good system look like?

What would a day in the genius producing home-schooling system of László Polgár look like?

In his book “Raise A Genius“, he states:

4 hours of specialist study (for us, chess)

1 hour of a foreign language.  Esperanto in the first year, English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third.  At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 – in place of the specialist study – for 3 months.  In summer, study trips to other countries.

1 hour of general study (native language, natural science and social studies)

1 hour of computing

1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies (humour lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke-telling)

1 hour of gymnastics, freely chosen, which can be accomplished individually or outside of school. The division of study hours can, of course, be treated elastically. 16

If you take only one thing away from this article, let it be this: You can only be a world champion at one thing.

To win a game, you first need to decide what kind of game you want to play.

How many people do you know who graduated high school or even college, and have absolutely no idea what they are going to do with their life?

Should it not be the purpose of school to send us equipped with a sharp mind into the world to achieve our dreams?

For most of us, when we leave college, we are not only unprepared but crippled by the debt we had to drown ourselves in to attend university in the first place.

Jack Ma, Founder of the Alibaba group, once told his son:

You don’t need to be in the top three in your class, being in the middle is fine, so long as your grades aren’t too bad.  Only this kind of person has enough free time to learn other skills“.

I can confirm this statement.  When I got kicked out of high school, while at first, I felt like my educational journey was over, I found that I was indeed liberated.

I did not have to take a single course that did not interest me, neither did I have to listen to the teachers who told me I will never amount to anything, and I also did not have to be scared of getting beaten by other kids in my schoolyard.

I was free.

I began to study on my own, and my new teachers were Sigmund Freud, Leo Tolstoy, Viktor Frankl, Friedrich Nietzsche, B.F Skinner, and Carl Rogers, and I never heard a single word of discouragement from them.

Out of that journey of individuation, ensued a form of radical freedom that allowed me to study the only thing that ever interested me: the human condition.

I was specialised by accident.

The good thing about being labelled as a failure is that nobody expects anything out of you anymore, I was finally allowed to become myself.

Five continents and hundreds of devoured books later, I manage to find my way into your life, and I would like to thank you for your precious attention and ask you something:

Are you currently pursuing what is expected, or are you living an authentic and meaningful life? 

When I stumbled over the story of the Polgár’s, I was reassured that my path had turned out to be the correct one, but I was also worried… how many people are doomed for mediocrity because nobody told them that choosing a single field of mastery is not optional but a necessity?

If you have not already chosen a path that will lead you towards the ultimate goal, which is fully actualising your potential, I challenge to do this right now:

If you were to be sent to Polgár’s genius school TODAY, what kind of speciality would you choose to practice for six hours a day? 

In my interview with world-renowned behaviourist Dr Susan Weinschenk, I learned that people align their behaviour with their perception of who they think they are.

This means that your current results are a reflection of your current identity.

The most powerful asset that the three Polgár sisters   were equipped with was a high-quality identity: a Future Chess Champion.

Every identity, whether it is external or self-imposed, comes along with a set of habits, values, and belief systems.

When I was labelled a failure, I subconsciously acted according to that role.

I did not take care of my health because clearly, I was not a valuable thing… I got into fights to experience some sense of power… I developed all sorts of addictions because why bother preserving myself for a future that is going to be depressing anyway?

László Polgár gave his children a high-quality identity right away, and with that, they had a blueprint of what they had to do and who they have to become to reach a future that is worth suffering for.

Here are a few things you can do to align your identity with your goals:

• Investigate the identities of your heroes and adopt their habits, clothing, values, and belief systems (Of course, only emulate virtues that are relevant for your dream).
• Order posters of your heroes and put them on your wall.
• If you want to get better at your career, transform your bedroom into a library with books on your passion topic.
• Do not dress like the person you were yesterday, but like the person, you want to become tomorrow.
• If you want to lose weight, adopt the identity of an athlete.
• If you want to have more intimacy and connection in your life, identify yourself as a “people’s person“.
• If you want to become a better writer, start by calling yourself an author and write every single day.
• If you want to be more respected at your work, identify as a true professional and make it a self-imposed policy never to be late again.
• If you want to become a better basketball player, start by calling yourself a gym rat and truly dedicate yourself to the betterment of your game.
• If you want to become a better student, pride yourself on having a growth mindset and talk to your educators after every class about your flaws.

Your current results are a symptom of the current identities that you adopted, or that were forced upon you.

If you want to change, change the story about yourself first.

A high-quality identity, like the one from the Polgár’s (future chess champion), is a promise from the pedagogue to the student that states: If you follow the code of conduct that I am proposing, things are going to get better for you.

This orientation towards a meaningful future justifies that the pain of being is a basic spiritual need.

Viktor Frankl, the famous therapist and Holocaust survivor, confirms this theory:

 Why are you not ending your life?“

This was a question Frankl often asked his depressed patients right away.

He did so, of course, not because he wanted to promote suicidal thoughts, but because he wanted to find out what exactly it was, that makes life worth living for the patient.

Some patients answered that they had unfinished career goals.

Others said they have someone that they want to be there for.

Frankl would then attempt to reconnect his patients with their life’s purpose so that they could again look into the future and carry their burden properly.

In his time in the concentration camps, the psychiatrist understood that an orientation towards a meaningful future is, indeed, the most powerful motivational force there is. 17

[Speaking of his experience in a concentration camp:] As we said before, any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal…Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.  – Viktor Frankl

Have you ever been witness to a situation where an educator was asked, “Will this be on the test?“

Questions like this are indicators that the student is experiencing a lack of meaning, or in other words, they do not see how this educational investment is going to pay out for them in the future.

In our school system, we blame the student for such questions; we call them lazy and blame them for their disinterest.

In some cases, we even blame the biology of the student.

My good friend, Jeffrey, a young and brilliant creator, was once falsely diagnosed by his teachers with ADHD because he just could not stay attentive during his classes.

In his case, the educators did not only not take responsibility for the fact that Jeffrey and his other classmates could not make it through a single lecture without falling asleep, but they went so far as to blame his anatomy for it.

His class teacher, in collaboration with one doctor, ultimately forced him to take four different drugs just to stay attentive.

In the lecture below, Dr Jordan Peterson gives a variety of reasons why ADHD is over-diagnosed, and why prescribing ADHD medication does more harm than it does good.

In Jeffrey’s case, his symptoms of hyperactivity, inattentiveness, and impulsivity were not symptoms of a brain disorder, but signs that his educators were unsuccessful in stimulating the young man’s talented intellect to the necessary degree.

He was also an extremely athletically gifted guy, who by nature had an awful lot of energy, but as his school physical education was only happening once a week, sitting quietly for nine hours a day was unnatural to him.

And if I am honest, I do not think that this kind of paralysing indoctrination is natural to anybody.

Research has shown, for example, that prescribing physical activity can be just as curative as prescribing pharmaceutical drugs. 18

I furthermore believe that this kind of denunciation of the student is originated by the lack of psychological understanding of emotional mechanics.

I asked myself recently:

Why was I so disinterested in my teachers while the Polgár’s soaked in every bit of information they could get?

The figure above, by Dr Jordan Peterson, is a good visualisation of the fact that human beings are goal orientated creatures.

Think of the Polgár’s, they all bought into the idea that becoming a chess champion was an attractive future destination.

When their father educated them, they knew that every hour of practice would move them closer to the place that they wanted to be.

Let us take a look at my own shortcomings…

When I had geography in the fourth grade, I asked my teacher why I had to study that subject; he told me: because you have to.

Not that geography is not important, but for me, it was not.

I even told my teacher that under no conditions will I ever work in the field, but still, he insisted that I had to study what everybody else studied, for years that is.

To be motivated as a child, one has to be convinced that the time and energy investment is worthwhile and will move one to a better place.

A professor once told me a bad joke that captures this principle…

Why did the chicken cross the road? Obviously, because the other side was better.

If you want to pause for a second and hold your belly from all that laughter, you can do that now.

The combination of daily failure and being imprisoned in a classroom that desperately tried to get me to a place that I did not find meaningful, caused me to avoid education entirely.

We can learn two things from this comparison:

• What is punished is avoided.
• What is rewarded is repeated.

If a student only experiences negative emotions in school, they either become a soulless puppet, or they will rebel against their spiritual tyranny and do everything they can to escape that prison.

The following experiment by John B. Watson, shows perfectly (and unethically) how we can learn to be afraid of neutral stimuli:

Why am I telling you all this?

The purpose of this chapter is to show you the importance of choosing a high-quality identity for yourself.

Only by architecting your ideal future identity can you evaluate your current life’s journey.  If you never invest the time and energy to define your aim, you have absolutely zero chance of hitting it.

But how do you find out what kind of identity you should try to adopt?

Carl Jung believes that the things that put us into flow state are nature’s indicators to guide us toward maximum development. 19

The questions below are derived from my understanding of Jungian psychoanalysis.  They are not direct quotes from him, obviously.

If you are not everything you can be, you will find the questions below helpful:

What makes you lose track of time? ⁠

What do you dislike in others? ⁠

What’s your definition of a “good” person? ⁠

What’s your definition of a “bad” person? ⁠

What did you want to become when you were a child?⁠

If money would not exist, what would you do with your life? ⁠

⁠If you would die next week, what would you regret? ⁠

What are the things in your life in need of repair? ⁠

Which experiences make you feel alive?⁠

Which area of your life do you find the most meaning in?⁠

Ingredient Five –  Love

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius.  Love, love, love that is the soul of genius”. ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ”The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind”.  — Khalil Gibran “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another”. — The Bible

The last, and in my eyes, the most important ingredient to forge a genius is love.

One thing that even the harshest critics of László Polgár’s radical pedagogical experiment cannot accuse him of is that he and his wife Klara did not care about their children.

László Polgár and his wife Klara literally had to fight for the education and realisation of their children.  In one instance, Soviet authorities stormed the house of the Polgár’s with a machine pistol because the Polgár’s refused to send their children to the public school system.

If that kind of commitment does not secure you the dad of the year award, I do not know what would. 20

The Polgár’s believed that love was indeed a precondition to outstanding achievement, in his book Raise a Genius, he states:

Genius = Labour + Luck Happiness = Labour + Luck + Love + Freedom “Let us not fear to raise our children with optimism and courage (without begrudging the material expense!).  Prodigies are not miracles, but natural phenomena; indeed, they must be formed as natural phenomena.  Parents and society are responsible for the development of the children’s capabilities.  A large number of geniuses are lost because they themselves never learn what they are capable of“.

Creating a genius is not a one-man job.  It is a collective effort to realise an individual fully.

Before the Polgár’s started their experiment, they examined the childhoods of histories many  most eminent people, and they noticed that behind every genius was a network of dedicated and caring educators:

We examined the childhoods of many eminent people and noticed that all who became geniuses specialized very early in some field, and we could also document that beside them always stood a father or mother, a tutor or trainer, who were “obsessed” – in the good sense of the word. So, on the basis of our research, we could rightly conclude that geniuses are not born one has to raise them.  And if it was possible to raise an outstanding person, we definitely needed to try this.  So, we did, and our attempt brought success.

The idea that behind every outstanding person stands one or many outstanding educators is hard to deny.

Let me give you a couple of case studies to prove this theory:

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922)

Bell reinvented the field of communications by creating the first telephone, but years earlier, he struggled in school.  Even though he was gifted at problem-solving, it is thought that he had trouble reading and writing, possibly as a result of dyslexia.  He was eventually home-schooled by his mother.  With her help, Bell learned to manage his challenges, and he went on to change the world. 21

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)

According to many accounts, the world-famous artist may have had dyslexia.

Don’t think I didn’t try [to learn at school]”, he said.  “I tried hard.  I would start but immediately be lost”.  – Pablo Picasso

Fortunately, his father, an art teacher, encouraged him to develop his artistic talents.  His unique vision of the world came through in his powerful works of art.  The rest is history. 23

Felix Mendelsohn (1809-1847)

The master musician would, in his short life span, came to be recognised as one of the most prominent composers of his time.

Felix’s mother, Leah Mendelsohn, a trained musician and artist, took care of his early musical education.

She made a continuous effort to developing Felix’s talent, and she regularly shipped in the world’s most eminent teachers to teach him.

Felix was, for example, from 1816 and 1817, tutored by Marie Bigot (a gifted and stimulating teacher who had been admired by both Haydn and Beethoven for her technique). 24

According to Radcliffe (2000), only on Sunday mornings was Felix allowed to wake up later than 5:00 am. 25

Thomas Edison(1847-1931)

Edison is today known as one of America’s greatest inventors and businessmen but was not always admired as a genius.

When Edison was in elementary school, he returned home one day with a letter from one of his teachers.

He said to her, ”Mom, my teacher gave this paper to me, only you are allowed to read it.  What does it say?”.

Nancy Edison’s eyes teared up as she read the letter to herself.

“Your son is addled [mentally retarded].  We will not allow him to attend our institution any longer”,

After gathering herself, she faced Thomas and pretended to read the letter to him:

Your son is a genius.  This school is too small for him and doesn’t have enough good teachers to train him.  Please teach him yourself”.

Edison’s mother did not give up on her son and designed an excellent home-schooling routine for her Thomas, and Edison left his school behind without a second thought.

By the time his mother died, Thomas had become arguably the greatest inventor of the century.  After her passing, Edison sifted through old family records and found an old brownish letter deeply hidden in his mother’s closet.

It was the letter from his elementary school that Edison’s mother received many years before.

Edison sobbed for hours, before writing with conviction in his diary:

Thomas Alva Edison was an addled child, that, thanks to the heroism of his mother, became the genius of the century.” 26

Moral Of This Story

You might ask yourself now: Well, I was not specialised in my early childhood, and a transcending educator did not groom me, so it is too late for me, isn’t it?

Not only is the answer to that question a clear no, but I would also argue that you have an advantage over all the eminent people that I wrote about in this long article.

I only need one word to tell you why: Technology .

The internet has caused a revolution that successfully democratised information.

If you were to travel back in time and tell somebody that future generations succeeded in developing a device that would you give you instant access to all pieces of knowledge ever collected, they would probably burn you at stake.

Technology, in that sense, is indistinguishable from magic.

While it is definitely advantageous to have parents who open doors for you, it is entirely possible to create your own success system around you.

In ancient times, only the most elite were given a chance to be tutored by experts.  Today, you are just one email away from sending a mentee pitch to one of your idols.

Self-actualised people are communal treasures who not only achieve happiness by living an authentic and fulfilled life; they make things better for everybody around them.

I firmly believe that the fact that a person like me, labelled as an academic failure, now speaks to thousands of people through his blog about the power of learning is an indicator that the notion that everything is possible is indeed true.

I wrote this article to show you that there is clearly more to you than meets the eye and that there is a level out there where all your dreams and potential are realised.

It is indeed true, however, that geniuses are rare things, not because there is a lack of talent, but because we, as a society, only raise them occasionally.

Luckily for me, I had two stubborn parents who preserved my love for books and people, and who never stopped their unconditional belief in me.

I have learned over the years that education has the power to transform every wall into a door.

Therefore, I would like to pass on this family tradition and tell you something from the bottom of my heart:

I believe in your potential.

If you discipline yourself, align your environment with your goals, adopt a favourable identity, and surround yourself with people who want the best for the best part of you, you are going to be the champion you were always meant to be.

Thank you for reading,

• Flora, C (July 1, 2005) The Grandmaster Experiment [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200507/the-grandmaster-experiment
•   Myers, Linnet (February 18, 1993). “Trained To Be A Genius, Girl, 16, Wallops Chess Champ Spassky For $110,000” . Chicago Tribune.
• Howard, B. (2014, June 19) Explaining male predominance in chess [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://en.chessbase.com/post/explaining-male-predominance-in-chess
•   Lundstrom, Harold (Dec 25, 1992).  “FATHER OF 3 PRODIGIES SAYS CHESS GENIUS CAN BE TAUGHT” .  Deseret News .
• Robinson, Andrew.  “Can We Define Genius?” .  Psychology Today . Sussex Publishers, LLC . Retrieved  25 February 2020 .
• Hughes, Virginia. (April 21, 2014) “The Tragic Story of How Einsteins Brain got stolen”. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2014/04/21/the-tragic-story-of-how-einsteins-brain-was-stolen-and-wasnt-even-special/
•   Elo, Arpad E (2008). “8.4 Logistic Probability as a Rating Basis”.  The Rating of Chessplayers, Past&Present . Bronx NY 10453: ISHI Press International.  ISBN   978-0-923891-27-5 . a Hungarian-American physics professor.

Kalb, C. (2018, May 1,). Exploring Characteristics of Prodigies. National geographic . Retrieved from  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/05/genius-child-prodigy-science-art-autism/

•   Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961): Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63 , 575–582.
• Ericsson, K. A., Prietula, M. J., Cokely, E. T. (2007, July): The Making of an Expert. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert
• Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R., Th., Tesch-Romer, C., (1993): Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 1993, Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406
• Dsouza, M. (201 9 ): “The Astonishing Success Story of the Genius Polgar Sisters“[Blog post]. Productiveclub .  Retrieved from https://productiveclub.com/polgar-sisters-story/
• Anne N. Thorndike et al., “A 2-Phase Labeling and Choice Architecture Intervention to Improve Healthy Food and Beverage Choices,” American Journal of Public Health 102, no. 3 (2012), doi:10.2105/ajph.2011.300391.
• Akass, E.(2019, Oktober) ”Richard Branson urges kids to leave school at 16” [Blog post]. Employee. Retrieved from https://engageemployee.com/richard-branson-urges-kids-to-leave-school-at-16/
• Vagin, M. (2019, April) ”Albert Einsteins Struggle with School”. Enlightium Academy . Retrieved from https://www.enlightiumacademy.com/blog/parent-center/entry/albert-einstein-s-struggle-with-school-1
• Polgár, L. (1989). Bring Up Genius! Budapest, H. v1.1 2017-07-31

Viktor Frankl:   Maria Marshall; Edward Marshall (2012).  Logotherapy Revisited: Review of the Tenets of Viktor E. Frankl’s Logotherapy . Ottawa: Ottawa Institute of Logotherapy.  ISBN   978-1-4781-9377-7 .  OCLC   1100192135 . Retrieved  16 February  2020 .

• Reddy, S.(2014, September 8):” Exercise Helps Children With ADHD in Study”. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/exercise-helps-children-with-adhd-in-study-1410216881
• C. G. Jung:  Gesammelte Werke.  7, § 266, 404.
• “Nurtured to Be Geniuses, Hungary’s Polgar Sisters Put Winning Moves on Chess Masters” .  People.com . May 4, 1987.
•  “The Bell Family”. Bell Homestead National Historic Site. Retrieved September 27, 2013.
•  “Picasso”. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language(5th ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2014. Retrieved 3 June 2019.
• Larry R. Todd, “Mendelssohn, Felix.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 30, 2013, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/51795
• Radcliffe, (2000). The Master Musicians: Mendelssohn. New York: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://mendelssohnincidentalmusic.weebly.com/early-development–education.html
• Cep, C. (2019, October 21): “The Real Nature of Thomas Edison’s Genius”. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/the-real-nature-of-thomas-edisons-genius

Susan Polgár

Susan Polgar  (born April 19, 1969, as  Polgár Zsuzsanna  and often known as  Zsuzsa Polgár ) is a Hungarian and American chess player. Polgár was Women’s World Champion from 1996 to 1999.

On the FIDE rating list of July 1984, at the age of 15, she became the top-ranked female player in the world. In 1991 she became the third woman to be awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE. She won twelve medals at the Women’s Chess Olympiad (5 gold, 4 silver, and 3 bronze).

Also a trainer, writer, and promoter, Polgar sponsors various chess tournaments for young players and is the head of the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence (SPICE) at Webster University. She served as the Chairperson (or co-chair) of the FIDE Commission for Women’s Chess from 2008 until late 2018.

László Polgár

László Polgár  (born 11 May 1946 in Gyöngyös), is a Hungarian chess teacher and educational psychologist. He is the father of the famous Polgár sisters: Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered to be the greatest female chess player ever as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Susan became the Women’s World Chess Champion.

He has written well-known chess books such as  Chess: 5334 Problems, Combinations, and Games  and  Reform Chess , a survey of chess variants. He is also considered a pioneer theorist in child-rearing, who believes “geniuses are made, not born”. Polgár’s experiment with his daughters has been called “one of the most amazing experiments…in the history of human education.” He has been “portrayed by his detractors as a Dr. Frankenstein” and viewed by his admirers as “a Houdini”, noted Peter Maas in the  Washington Post  in 1992.

Sofia Polgár

Sofia Polgar (Hungarian:  Polgár Zsófia ,  pronounced  [ˈpolɡaːr ˈʒoːfiɒ] ); born November 2, 1974) is a Hungarian, Israeli and Canadian chess player, teacher, and artist. She is a former chess prodigy.She holds the FIDE titles of International Master and Woman Grandmaster and is the middle sister of Grandmasters Susan and Judit Polgár. She lives in Israel and has worked as a chess teacher and artist.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk

Susan Weinschenk has a Ph.D. in Psychology, and is the Chief Behavioral Scientist and CEO at The Team W, Inc, as well as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Susan consults with Fortune 100 companies, start-ups, governments and non-profits, and is the author of several books, including 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People, 100 MORE Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People and How To Get People To Do Stuff. Susan is co-host of the HumanTech podcast, and writes her own blog and a column for Psychology Today online. She has been interviewed for, and her work cited in media publications including The Guardian, Huffington Post, Brain Pickings, and Inc. Dr. Weinschenk’s area of expertise is brain and behavioral science applied to the design of products, services, experiences, and human interactions. Her clients include Disney, Zappos, the European Union, Discover Financial, and United Health Care. Dr. Weinschenk was a consultant on the Emmy nominated TV show Mind Field, and is a keynote speaker at conferences, including, South by Southwest (Austin Texas), Habit Summit (San Francisco), From Business to Buttons (Stockholm), and USI (Paris).

Dr. Anne Thorndike

Anne Thorndike, MD, MPH is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA. She is the Director of the Metabolic Syndrome Clinic at the MGH Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Center. Her clinical and research interests are the prevention and treatment of obesity and cardiometabolic disease through lifestyle modification.  Her research focuses on interventions utilizing behavioral economics strategies, such as traffic-light labels and choice architecture, to improve dietary intake and health outcomes in worksite and community-based settings. She has received research funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as several other foundations and government organizations.  She currently serves on the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association, and is a member of the expert panel for the U.S. News and World Report Best Diets Rankings.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German mathematician and physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. In the following decade, he immigrated to the U.S. after being targeted by the German Nazi Party.

His work also had a major impact on the development of atomic energy. In his later years, Einstein focused on unified field theory. With his passion for inquiry, Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

Judit Polgár

Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is generally considered the strongest female chess player of all time.Since September 2015, she has been inactive. In 1991, Polgár achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, at the time the youngest to have done so, breaking the record previously held by former World Champion Bobby Fischer. She was the youngest ever player to break into the FIDE Top 100 players rating list, ranking No. 55 in the January 1989 rating list, at the age of 12. She is the only woman to qualify for a World Championship tournament, having done so in 2005. She is the first, and to date only, woman to have surpassed 2700 Elo, reaching a career peak rating of 2735 and peak world ranking of No. 8, both achieved in 2005. She was the No. 1 rated woman in the world from January 1989 until the March 2015 rating list, when she was overtaken by Chinese player Hou Yifan; she was the No. 1 again in the August 2015 women’s rating list, in her last appearance in the FIDE World Rankings.

She has won or shared first in the chess tournaments of Hastings 1993, Madrid 1994, León 1996, U.S. Open 1998, Hoogeveen 1999, Sigeman & Co 2000, Japfa 2000, and the Najdorf Memorial 2000.

Polgár is the only woman to have won a game against a reigning world number one player, and has defeated eleven current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess: Magnus Carlsen, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustam Kasimdzhanov.

On 13 August 2014, she announced her retirement from competitive chess. In June 2015, Polgár was elected as the new captain and head coach of the Hungarian national men’s team. [8]  On 20 August 2015, she received Hungary’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Stephen of Hungary.

Psychology exercises for you

What Are You And How Many?

Allan watts and the story of the chinese farmer, related articles.

• 15th December 2022

How To Unlock Your Hidden Potential With Logotherapy

• 14th September 2023

The Count of Monte Cristo’s Wisdom: Your Guide to Life’s Storms

• 24th December 2022

How do we regain hope after we lost all faith in the future? – A Therapy Tool From Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl

Tabish Nadeem

October 7, 2022 at 5:40 pm

Beautiful article.. Thanks a ton

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Post Comment

FREE Habit Builder

Get my guide to tap into the power of habit formation for free.

Download the Habit Builder for free

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy

How to Make Your Child a Genius: Insights from the Polgar Experiment

Imagine a modest apartment in Budapest during the 1970s, where the air is filled with the scent of home-cooked meals and the soft sound of chess pieces clinking against a wooden board. Here, three young girls sit around a table, intensely focused on their next move, guided by their father, Laszlo Polgar. This scene is the birthplace of the Polgar Experiment, a groundbreaking study that challenges the very notion of innate talent and genius.

The Genesis of the Polgar Experiment

Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian educational psychologist, believed that geniuses are made, not born. He was convinced that with the right environment and upbringing, any healthy child could excel in any field. To test his theory, Laszlo and his wife, Klara, decided to homeschool their daughters—Susan, Sofia, and Judit—with a specialized and intensive focus on chess.

The Story Begins : Laszlo’s belief in the power of education was so strong that he declared his intention to raise geniuses even before his children were born. He meticulously planned their education and chose chess as the medium for his experiment, believing it to be an excellent tool for developing intellectual skills.

Early Days of Training

Early Exposure : From as early as they could sit up, the Polgar sisters were surrounded by chess. Laszlo created an environment rich in intellectual stimulation. Chessboards, books, and puzzles filled their home, turning it into a haven of learning and curiosity.

Structured Learning : Their education wasn't limited to chess alone. Laszlo ensured they had a well-rounded curriculum, but chess was always the centerpiece. Lessons were designed to be fun and engaging, maintaining their interest and enthusiasm. The girls were taught to view challenges as opportunities for growth, fostering a positive and resilient mindset.

Achievements of the Polgar Sisters

The results of the Polgar Experiment were nothing short of extraordinary:

• Susan Polgar : At the age of 15, Susan became the first woman to qualify for the Men’s World Chess Championship. She eventually earned the title of Grandmaster and won four Women's World Chess Championships.
• Sofia Polgar : Known for her creative and aggressive playing style, Sofia achieved the title of International Master and is remembered for her performance at the "Sack of Rome" tournament, considered one of the best in chess history.
• Judit Polgar : Often hailed as the greatest female chess player of all time, Judit became a Grandmaster at 15, breaking Bobby Fischer’s record. She was consistently ranked among the world’s top players and defeated multiple world champions, including Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand.

Lessons from the Polgar Experiment

Focused Practice : Intensive and focused practice is crucial. The Polgar sisters spent countless hours practicing chess daily, refining their skills through constant repetition.

Early Development : Early exposure to a subject can ignite a lifelong passion. The sisters were introduced to chess at a very young age, which played a significant role in their success.

Parental Involvement : Active parental involvement is vital. Laszlo and Klara's commitment to their daughters' education and their supportive environment were key factors in their development.

Growth Mindset : A belief in the potential for improvement through effort is essential. The Polgar sisters were taught to view every game, win or lose, as a learning opportunity.

Inspired Experiments

The success of the Polgar Experiment has inspired other educational initiatives and studies:

• Music Prodigies : Programs like the Suzuki Method use early and intensive training to develop young musicians.
• Sports Training : Many young athletes, like those in gymnastics and tennis, undergo rigorous training from an early age, leading to professional success.
• STEM Education : Early interest and intensive practice in fields like robotics and coding through camps and competitions nurture future innovators.

The Polgar Experiment is a remarkable testament to the power of targeted education and dedicated practice. By applying these principles, you can help your child unlock their potential and achieve greatness. The key lies in starting early, maintaining focus, providing a supportive environment, and fostering a growth mindset.

• Polgar, Susan. "Chess Tactics for Champions." (Book by Susan Polgar detailing her training and chess strategies)
• ChessBase. "The Polgar Experiment – The Making of Three Chess Prodigies." Available at: ChessBase

By learning from the Polgar Experiment, you can create an environment that nurtures your child’s potential, paving the way for their future success.

Written By Dr. Jash Ajmera

Found this useful, share with others on :, read more about:.

• Skip to content
• Skip to footer

| Slow Down to the Wisdom Within

Genius Child Development: “Raise a Genius!” by László Polgár (Book Summary)

By Kyle Kowalski · Leave a Comment

This is a book summary of Raise a Genius! by László Polgár ( Free Online ).

Premium members also have access to the companion post: 🔒 How to pursue Genius Education with “Raise a Genius!” by László Polgár (+ Infographic)

Quick Housekeeping:

• All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s paraphrased).
• All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
• Emphasis has been added in  bold  for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

About the Book & László Polgár

Socialization & society, contemporary school & potential genius, 20 characteristics of genius education, theses, principles, traits, & values, developmental ages & daily life, chess & happiness.

Genius Child Development: Raise a Genius! by László Polgár (Book Summary)

“I do not present a prescription, merely a point of view. I do not wish to exhort anyone to raise a genius. I wish to demonstrate that it is possible … I can only say that I have created something that up to now no one else has created .”

About the book:

“This book of mine appeared in Hungarian in 1989. In it I described and summarized my psychological and pedagogical experiments regarding my daughters’ and my 15-year educational experience .”

• “ I do not give a prescription, only a way of life , and I wish to persuade no one to raise geniuses. I merely wish to show that it is possible to raise geniuses .”
• “I can only pass on my pedagogical system, and guide everyone along the road that I followed, confident that it is possible and worthwhile to raise geniuses, for they can and indeed have become happy people .”
• “ The object of a pedagogical experiment can be nothing other than a person , and for their good one not only has the right, but even the duty of performing pedagogical experiments. In fact, all parents, even if not consciously, ‘experiment’ with their children. An intentional, humanistically organized experiment is much more likely to succeed .”
• “The essence of my pedagogical program is that in my opinion, every healthy child can be raised to be an outstanding person, in my words, a genius . When we began this work with my wife, we read through a large collection of books and studies. We examined the childhoods of many eminent people and noticed that all who became geniuses specialized very early in some field, and we could also document that beside them always stood a father or mother, a tutor or trainer, who were ‘obsessed’ – in the good sense of the word. So on the basis of our research we could rightly conclude that geniuses are not born: one has to raise them .”
• “The uniqueness of my experiment lies in that it is – one could say – a family group experiment, made possible by the birth of my three daughters . I have built my pedagogical optimism on this result.”

László Polgár on himself:

“I have a beautiful family, a happy marriage, three beautiful, healthy, happy, intelligent children, and I feel as well that in my work I can enjoy the pleasure of creation, for I have done something that will last. I believe that I am happy .”

• “As concerns my view of life: I have worked 15 hours a day since I was 14 . For me, quality is the main thing. I wish to do everything always at the highest level . Mediocrity, the orientation to the middle, I refuse out of principle. I strive for the summit despite obstacles .”
• “ (I’m) a person who shapes his environment, his destiny, his society, and himself . If I think through my life in my mind, I can deduce my character, my me-ness, from it. If I consider my personality traits, I can predict my destiny, because they are interrelated. Of course certain ethnic distinctives can be found in me, like over-strenuous working, over-emotionality, yearning for accomplishments, the central role of the family, the desire to develop the capabilities of my daughters, and from time to time possibly also a bit of aggression and noise.”
• “I think of myself as an honest, sincere, plain-spoken person, very sensitive about justice. I have a great love of freedom and thirst for knowledge . I am very happy that to my knowledge I have deceived no one. Regarding my work I have established very high requirements, although I also understand those people who live otherwise. Other people possibly consider me an extremist, but I prefer to call myself an optimistic realist .”
• “ I have raised my daughters to be true women . I have not only not hindered their feminization, among other things, but on the contrary: I very much expect that their psychosexual development is also normal and healthy .”
• “ I could not live otherwise than what I profess . Striving for harmony between words and actions, needing to put ideas into practice, is an integral part of my moral concept and practice.”

“In the end I would like to prove that socialization, development within society, and in that context the genius-izing of a person, depends firstly not on their native biological powers: their way of life is not decided from birth; it must be considered principally as a social product, in practice, a result of nurture . To express it provocatively, I often say, ‘Genius is not born, genius is raised .'”

Socialization:

“A healthy human has such an elastic cerebral system and flexible developmental structure that their efficacy can be developed to a high degree by pedagogical methods. The way is open for pedagogy, since children are developable, and from the viewpoint of the intellect they can be formed in any manner … Mental traits are unambiguously socially determined .”

• “ At birth every person is equal . After birth a person takes on so-called ethnic-psychological characteristics, adapting to cultural traditions and educational demands .”
• “Specific capabilities are not people’s endowments from birth, but one must make them manifest through education .”
• “One thing is certain: education also needs much more educated parents . One should devote more time to the children.”
• “ Parents and society are responsible for the development of the children’s capabilities . A large number of geniuses are lost because they themselves never learn what they are capable of.”
• “It is indeed decisive what kinds of influences reach a child in their family, what kind of example they see, in which direction they are raised – not only in what subject, but in what world view. I consider it a completely natural matter that parents will hand down their own world view: for indeed they can give nothing else .”

Society & social responsibility:

“In my conception, education is good for the individual and desirable and useful for society. A genius is a collective creation who becomes a communal treasure .”

• “A person is not born morally ready, does not bring moral values along from the womb, a maximum capability to become a moral being. But how they become, a loving family member or a hateful one, an altruist or an egoist, a humanist or a fascist – is not genetically fixed, but depends primarily on education and surroundings. As with all abilities, the moral ones can be and must be learned .”
• “Without moral values one lacks a compass for life … One should hand down in childhood fundamental moral values, which are generally human , so one does not need to restrict them, in the traditional sense, to any particular world view or political party.”
• “In my opinion genius is a notion about preserving values. I only consider those who realize socially useful actions to be geniuses … The more educated and the more talented someone is, the greater is their social responsibility .”
• “ Raising geniuses is one of the preconditions for social progress , and any society can be guided out of economic difficulty for the most part only by education and instruction.”
• “Naturally, society needs to be guided by geniuses. Geniuses should become accustomed to the idea that they should serve and, if necessary, direct.”

Guiding Questions:

“ Is this a nice feeling for a child? Yes, it is nice. Is it useful for the child? Yes, it is useful. Is it useful for society? It is useful.”

“When my wife and I investigated the outcomes and ways of life of extraordinary people, we decided that to fulfil our educational duty we would not choose the traditional form, but we would teach our children privately .”

Contemporary school:

“The fact that I did not send my daughters to school is of course connected to the fact that I hold an unfavorable opinion of it. I criticize contemporary schools because they do not educate for life, they equalize everyone to a very low level, and in addition they do not tolerate the talented and those who diverge from the average .”

• “In contemporary schools students do not understand why they are learning .”
• “ Contemporary schools are separate from real life in that they function sort of as laboratories. There is no link with domestic or political or local public life , or the everyday cares of living one’s life on the one hand, and school on the other. My daughters, who have never visited a school, grew up much more in the context of real life. Contemporary schools do not promote a love of learning . They do not inspire to great achievements ; they raise neither autonomous people nor communally-oriented ones . Schools do not manifest or develop potential capabilities in people , at least as much as they could.”
• “Contemporary schools are disadvantageous for unusually capable children … They hinder the development of talented children in that school instruction is tedious for them .”
• “It is not easy to make average people inclined to accept geniuses . Even in school talented children are often excluded from their classmates . Teachers do not succeed in making the class like the talented student. Many times even the teacher does not recognize the talent, and even hinders its development.”
• “School groups are also very unstable ; peripheral children are susceptible to the influence of mass opinion .”

Potential genius:

“ I see a potential genius in each individual born healthy … Every healthy person has the capacity from birth for it, and genius is a normal result of the development of this potential.”

• “Every healthy child is born with enough general endowment that from them can come a high level personality .”
• “Every child born healthy is potentially a genius, and if one pays enough attention, they will in fact become one … whether they become so or not depends on circumstances, on education, and on themself .”
• “I am convinced that if child prodigies do not become ‘adult prodigies,’ conditions were not favorable for healthy and structured work . In good conditions every child prodigy becomes an adult prodigy.”
• “ Intellectual capability is in principle educable in any direction ; by appropriate methods a genius can be formed in any field .”
• “ The journey from potential genius to actual genius is a battle for liberation, a process of freeing the genius . Future society will very likely be composed of evolved, self-realized, free individuals, and genius will be considered a normal, everyday existence, and not as an individual ‘extravagance.'”

The essence is always the same:

“Both at home and at school one must teach each part carefully, and everything always solidly . Half efforts make no sense, since the next stages will lack a foundation on which to construct the material to be assimilated. In addition it seems to me that one of the deficits of Hungarian teaching is that one does not construct knowledge upon other knowledge . I consider it a further error that – mainly because of the lack of intensive instruction – after three weeks the child forgets what they learned earlier … If the instruction is good, one has no need of giving grades .”

Featured in the Premium companion post: 🔒 How to pursue Genius Education with “Raise a Genius!” by László Polgár (+ Infographic)

These are the guiding strategies behind genius education.

5 theses…

Thesis 1: The role of natural and societal, from birth or acquired, hereditary and ‘educational’ factors. The personality of the person is a complex union of three factors:

• An endowment of nature: Biological endowments from birth. In the first months of life, biological effects dominate.
• An effect of the environment: Things received by acquisition throughout life (the crucial link is the effect of environment, of society; from the viewpoint of the development and freedom of the personality, the deciding link is seen through the passage of time to be one’s existence in a society). For the first ten years, society is undoubtedly increasingly emphasized.
• A creation of the individual: Responses fought out and ‘sweated’ out from oneself. Later, the activity of one’s own personality strengthens.

Thesis 2: The interpretation of existence in a society. In this I call out two aspects:

• The immediate surroundings of a person (family, friends, etc): mediates imitative ‘heredity.’
• Their more distant circumstances: mediates socio-cultural ‘heredity.’ Thus, aside from biological heredity, it is also the effect of the family model and the historical-cultural heredity of the larger society that determines the nature of a person. A member of society shares in human nature. The individual lives out their own development under the effects of societal forces like self-realization. From this it follows that education must consider a child also as a co-author.

Thesis 3: The way to develop creativity. Every healthy person is born with sufficient biological endowments to be able to specialize these general endowments in some concrete form of action:

• As opposed to many other pedagogues and parents, I see the task of education not in exploring or finding in the child ‘innate’ or hidden capabilities. If we assume the existence of a general endowment in each child, I start from this: that we must develop in them some special capability.

Thesis 4: One can and must consciously organize the development of geniuses, and it is not sufficient to leave them to chance:

• Self-evidently, education in itself is not all-powerful, for it depends also on concrete social conditions. But the fact that its effect is enormous empirically proves my results. Pedagogical effects stand under the influence of the social environment: and such is the social need, the demand, that creates the general practice of education.

Thesis 5: Pedagogical humanism, according to which the essence of the formation of personality is the striving for as perfect self-realization and as complete happiness as possible:

• Every person should strive to attain the greatest result attainable by them, and realize oneself – this can bring about one’s own happiness and also that of others. The pedagogue’s task is also to aim for – as it is possible – not the average, but the peak. Considering outstanding achievements positively, one should fix human happiness as the ultimate goal for oneself. Therefore it is possible and necessary to raise geniuses, because, among other things, this guarantees the most certain road to happiness.

Principles:

Among my pedagogical principles some that occupy an important place are: awakening and holding the interest of the child, requiring accomplishments from the child, trust in them, and praise and admiration for their accomplishments .

• Be an example: live such that others follow you!
• Learn and work hard, be demanding on yourself and others!
• Be willing to love, give and receive love!
• Live with yourself and others in peace, live a healthy and moderate life!
• Strive for happiness and endeavor to make other people happy!
• Have humanistic ideas and fight against prejudice!
• Preserve peace and tranquility in the family, raise your children as perfectly as possible!
• Be honest, respect your and others’ freedom!
• Trust the development of people, nurture small and large communities!
• And finally, the wild card, that is, everything that you think moral and current, but which is not in the other nine points.

Among the goals of education I and my wife consider of first importance the formation of the following traits :

• Belief, courage, strength, persistence, enthusiasm, the objective evaluation of persons and objects, standing up to failure and also the temptations of success, insistent striving for goals, patience, inventiveness, tolerance of criticism even if false, being able to let go of stresses, enduring conflicts (a higher level of tolerance for frustration), discipline, planning, the need for challenging work, establishing realistic goals, conscious management of rest, freedom from conventions, searching for new paths, keeping oneself in an appropriate state of humor (good humor, calm and aggressive at the same time).

In addition we also aim for these kinds of values, world views and moral standards :

• The love of siblings, parents and teachers, respect for elders and the aged, realistic evaluation of peers and adults, and that children not prefer the pleasure of physical life, the symbols of the social status of creative work, etc.

“Successful education is not possible without a great deal of work. Education only bears fruit after 10-20 years . But if we begin it only ten years from now, we will have results after only 20-30 years.”

Developmental ages & stages:

“ The most difficult problems in education would be for the most part solved, if one could begin instruction soon enough … If we want to satisfy the demands of the future, we must begin with children at the earliest possible age.”

• Preschool (Ages 3-6): Early childhood, the period between 3 and 6 years (the preschool years) occupies a central place—more important and principally much more in need of utilization than thought of in the current specialist literature. Early childhood is entirely not early from the viewpoint of learning, even as it concerns specialization. Firstly, foreign languages. This does not hinder the child in the development of thinking; it does not spoil the parental language; on the contrary, it even enriches the personality. In multilingual regions, children of very young ages can already speak multiple languages with full fluency and without mixing them.
• Ages 3-4: Parents should choose a specific field at their discretion. It is only important that by the age of 3-4 some physical or mental field should be chosen, and the child can set out on their voyage.
• Ages 4-5: By my didactic principle, one should begin instruction, which is in my concept nothing other than a serious game, at the age of 4-5 (a disadvantageous environment causes in the first 4-5 years more damage than later impoverished development during the next 10-12 years).
• Ages 5-6: I sent my daughters to a Russian-language kindergarten, and at the age of 5 all of them fluently spoke Russian as well as Hungarian. At the age of 5-6, if the activity is sufficiently interesting, success can also function as a strong incentive. Stimulation, encouragement, and instilling passion and trust are very important. The ability to learn by play decreases after 6 years of age, when assimilation of information becomes more difficult mental work.
• Age 10: In practice an intensive collaborative contact between the child and an adult must be formed, in which the child does not feel ‘subordinate.’ Think how advantageous it would be if the child already understands at the age of 10 that they know a great deal, that they are a person of the same value as an adult, and that in their life there is at least one field they master as well or better than adults.

Stage (vs age) peers:

“One should not neglect the nature of the developmental stage in evaluating creativity! … Make everything appropriate to the stage ! With regard to the content of instructional materials and also the duration of instruction, one should start from the traits of the age of the child, and tailor the tasks for the optimum ability of the child … It is not primarily important for a child to have suitable companions of the same age, but preferably to have spiritually (mentally) appropriate partners, friends worthy of the level of their intellectual capabilities. If the social relationships of a child are exclusively or for the most part limited to groups of the same age, this will slow the progress of an exceptionally capable child.”

Typical daily schedule:

“It is not by chance that every prominent chess player also practices some physical sport as a supplementary activity. My daughters play table tennis or swim 1.5 to 3 hours a day .”

• 4 hours of specialist study: Starting from age 4-5 they played chess 5-6 hours a day.
• 1 hour of a foreign language: Esperanto in the first year, English in the second, and another chosen at will in the third. At the stage of beginning, that is, intensive language instruction, it is necessary to increase the study hours to 3 – in place of the specialist study – for 3 months. In summer, study trips to other countries.
• 1 hour of general study: Native language, natural science and social studies.
• 1 hour of computing
• 1 hour of moral, psychological, and pedagogical studies: Humor lessons as well, with 20 minutes every hour for joke telling.
• 1 hour of gymnastics: Freely chosen, which can be accomplished individually outside school. The division of study hours can of course be treated elastically.

We can describe happiness with the following formula: happiness = work + love + freedom + luck . · Under profession: work, accomplishments, creativity. · Under love: feelings given to others and reciprocated. · Under freedom: the potential and capability of a person to become an independent, autonomous, and creative individual. · Under luck: the union of random external (recognition, peace, family environment, etc.) and internal (health, strength, physiological endowments, spiritual and material goods, etc.) factors.

Sport & Chess:

“When we began the practical foundation of our genius-educating theory, at first we planned to experiment with mathematics, chess and foreign languages. Influenced by several factors, we decided in the end in favor of chess … In the end, we decided that chess in itself is a complex, very valuable, and beautiful activity: a game, a science, an art, a sport, and a psychology simultaneously .”

• “ Sport is one of the best educational methods that parents have, because they hardly have to make an effort; in almost every child there is a desire to move, to actively compete . At the same time the practice of sports makes one used to observing certain rules, and contributes to right conduct, a regulated way of life, and discipline. Plus it is very useful if the members of the family play sports together, if they do anything together. If the family plays sports, they pass more time together, and this is incomparably beneficial.”
• “ Chess develops characteristics like those of athletes: willpower , competitiveness, the drive to win, a strong physical state, a competitive routine, etc.”
• “ Psychologically founded competition can seriously help in the development of personality traits : it forms the will and emotions, increases persistence, self-discipline, competitiveness, etc.”
• “ By means of chess I also want to form the personalities of my daughters . I always say to them that it is more important that they are people – virtuous, honest people. From this it follows that my daughters always play fairly.”
• “ Chess is also useful because it satisfies some societal need of the person ; it is a spiritual entertainment, a sport, a game, an art. Chess satisfies these needs – with scientific demands.”

“ The first and essential condition for becoming happy is for one to want happiness . Many people want to make their children happy, want to see them thus, but they do not do enough, or even very little. They let themselves be guided by accidents of education. I, on the contrary, have the principle that one should approach and perform education very intentionally for happiness .”

• “ Happiness is a complex phenomenon (a process and a state), which also contains components of genius. It consists of several elements: enjoyment of work, honesty, health, wisdom, material conditions, cheerfulness, love, optimism, courage, tranquility, lack of worry, fulfilment of duties, the satisfaction of spiritual and material needs, a sense of joy, satisfaction, perspective, a correct view of life, a full experience of love, rest after work done well, creativity, success, establishing goals, high-level needs, and I could continue for a long time…”
• “ The future of our children is on my heart, and my chief aspiration is to make them happy. But is not enough to merely desire the happiness of our children; we must create and develop in them the capability to be happy. Many ways lead to happiness, although not all with the same certainty, but among them the most certain and guaranteed is – in my opinion – that of genius education.”
• “Genius education – according to my definition – aims for the development of personality, happy people, and the development of socially and morally progressive individuals. Therefore I say: genius education, education for happiness, and humanism are unified things; one does not develop one without the others .”
• “ The all-encompassing goal is undoubtedly happiness, and in relation to this genius education can be considered a method, but also it is about a dialectical process: in real life one grows through the other, that is, they prepare and strengthen each other reciprocally. Achievements lead to feelings of happiness, and happiness gives new motivational strength for higher achievements. Thus the method is formed from the goal and the goal from the method.”
• “ Which one considers the greatest result depends on the viewpoint. I would choose the happiness of our family. ‘Harmony and love reigning’ in our home, although important, is not the only factor in our happiness. I can declare one thing with definite certainty: without a good family background and loving family relationships my daughters’ successes would never have happened.”

A final thought from the mother, Klara Polgar:

“ I believe that my daughters live at least as happily as any of their peers. But I might claim that they live even more happily. In my opinion they are balanced and have very rich internal lives. Many doubt that they had and have real childhoods. I feel that they have not only real childhoods, but also those that prepare them for all of life and are foundational for their happiness. A person is truly happy when they do what they are willingly occupied with. They have found themselves, and are also respected for it. They have been doing from infancy things that are close to them, about which they are self-confident, and doing which they feel good about themselves … I always wanted to live a beautiful, peaceful family life, and to make my children good, honest people, who achieved at a high level.”

You May Also Enjoy:

• See all  book summaries  &  book recommendations / reading list
• “The Inner Game of Tennis” by W. Timothy Gallwey (Book Summary)
• “The Art of Learning” by Josh Waitzkin (Book Summary)
• “Ultralearning” by Scott Young (Book Summary + Infographic)
• “Range” by David Epstein (Book Summary)
• “A Synthesizing Mind” by Howard Gardner (Book Summary)
• “Livewired” by David Eagleman (Book Summary)

About Kyle Kowalski

👋 Hi, I'm Kyle―the human behind Sloww . I'm an ex-marketing executive turned self-education entrepreneur after an existential crisis in 2015. In one sentence: my purpose is synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development . But, I’m not a professor, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, mystic, or guru. I’m an interconnector across all those humans and many more—an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator" (in other words, it's just me over here, asking questions, crossing disciplines, and making connections). To keep it simple, you can just call me a "synthesizer." Sloww shares the art of living with students of life . Read my story.

Sloww participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you purchase a book through an Amazon link, Sloww earns a small percentage at no additional cost to you. This helps fund the costs to support the site and the ad-free experience.

Reader Interactions

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Popular Posts

🆕 synthesizer course.

🔒 Sloww Premium

📧 Sloww Sunday

Join 10,000+ downshifting into deeper living (free newsletter + bonus ebook):

💬 Sloww Social

• Skip to main content
• Skip to footer

Larry G. Maguire

Essays on the meaning and purpose of daily work

How To Create A Genius

14th March 2020 by Larry G. Maguire Leave a Comment

László & Klara Polgár believed they knew how to create a genius. They married and took steps, even before their children were born, that paved the way for their future success. And applying László's theory of creative genius, they turned their three daughters into world champion chess players. Would you go to the same lengths to ensure your children's success?

Hungarian psychologist László Polgár [1] made quite a unique marriage proposal to his long-distance girlfriend Klara, a language teacher from Ukraine. During their early courtship, he wrote to Klara explaining that using his education and training methods; he could turn any child from any background into a genius. But he had one major problem… he had no children of his own.

So he asked Klara to marry him, and she agreed!

They were later married and moved to Hungary. Here they had three daughters and considered the fields in which they could train their children. They discussed languages, mathematics, and several other fields but settled on the male-dominated field of chess. Once decided, they immediately began executing their plan to mould their children into world-class players.

Before he met Klara, László wrote a book titled  Bring Up Genius ( Nevelj zsenit!)[2], where he outlined his theories based on his study of hundreds of creative geniuses such as Einstein and Socrates. He says in the book, “Genius equals work and fortunate circumstances… geniuses are made, not born” and was convinced of the legitimacy of his hypothesis. So with their method, equipment, materials and subjects in place, László and Klara set out on their lengthy task.

The Polgárs began their experiment in the late 1960s under the premise that any healthy child can become a genius in any field of sport, science or the arts, as long as their education begins around the age of three and they start to specialise at age six. But their work was controversial, and they met with resistance from neighbours and local authorities.

People said the Polgárs were destroying their children, and they had to battle school authorities to win the right to homeschool their three girls. However, they persevered, and from their small Budapest apartment cluttered with chess-related material, Zsuzsa, Sofia and Judit underwent their tuition despite opposition. In fact, it may have been that very opposition which brought them closer together and reinforced the girls’ learning.

“When I looked at the life stories of geniuses, I found the same thing….they all started at a very young age and studied intensively” László Polgár

Like Reading This Article?

Every week I'm working on new content on the psychology or creativity , expertise and human performance. Best of all, it's free! If you like what I'm creating, subscribe for the weekly newsletter.

Men had dominated the world of chess for centuries, but the Polgár girls were about to change things. In 1973 at age four, Zsuzsa won her first competition and by age fifteen was ranked one of the top women chess players in the world. Later she became the first woman to be awarded the title of Grandmaster via the same path that all previous male awardees are required to take.

Third daughter Judit became a Grandmaster at age fifteen, making her the youngest person ever to be awarded the accolade. The middle girl, Sofia, although gaining enough points to secure the award, was never granted Grandmaster status which some suggested was for political reasons. However, her achievements were nonetheless impressive, having been ranked sixth best female chess player in the world.

László and Klara Polgár’s experiment was by all external measures a success. Although, you might suggest at what cost to their three girls? Reports from the girls in subsequent years suggest that their learning and practice was fun. They say they were curious about chess and chose to play it — never forced. And they spoke of a “very special atmosphere” in their home.

“In the beginning, it was a game. Later, chess for me became a sport, an art, a science, everything together. I was very focused on chess and happy with that world. I was not the rebelling and going out type, I was happy that at home we were a closed circle and then we went out playing chess and saw the world.” Judit Polgár

The level of the girls’ immersion in the game was intense. Apparently, once late at night, László found his daughter Sophia in the bathroom with a chessboard on her knees. He told her to leave the pieces alone and go back to bed. She apparently replied, “Daddy, they won’t leave  me  alone”. She and her sisters had become committed and obsessed with the game.

In his 2017 book  Peek; how all of us can achieve extraordinary things ,[3] Anders Ericsson explains that Zsuzsa, Sofia and Judit took a path that all high performing creative geniuses appear to travel. He says that an expert’s development passes through three stages from the onset of curiosity to fully fledged creative genius. Typically, he says, the process begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues for at least ten years until the child reaches expertise.

And from there it continues. In a relentless pursuit of perfection and answers to burning questions, the expert keeps pushing the boundary of their abilities. Eventually, they break not only their personal limits but also the limits of the domain and bring to the world a unique and eminent contribution. Ericsson outlines the three stages of the creation of a genius as follows.

Stage 1: Curiosity

At early stages of development, curiosity drives a child. Or perhaps  drawn by curiosity , would be a better way to phrase it. Because curiosity feels like a vacuum into which we are being taken rather than being driven or pushed. The child wants to investigate everything. Their desire and motivation is their own and objects in the world serve as a means of exploration. It was at this early stage that the Polgárs made a concerted effort to influence their children.

Zsuzsa Polgár explained in a magazine interview how she remembers her first interaction with chess. “Yes, he could have put us in any field, but it was I who chose chess as a four-year-old…. I liked the chessmen; they were toys for me. Later it was the logic that fascinated me, and the challenge”.

Ericsson says that at this stage, the parent plays a crucial role in the child’s development. Through affording their child love, time, attention and encouragement, they steer the focus of the child’s interest. As time passes, the parent introduces the benefits of self-discipline, dedication and responsibility into the mix while maintaining the vital aspect of play. Reinforcement of the behaviour is then achieved through praise and reward. Reinforcement is also achieved through younger children’s observation of the older ones.

In their progression, the child forms deeper connections with the game. For Zsuzsa, it was when the logical and strategic component took over from the broader play aspect. This is the point when the child moves on to stage two.

Stage 2: Becoming Serious

Ericsson says that in the years preceding adolescence, and after the child shows significant promise, they seek a teacher or a coach and encounter deliberate practice  [3] for the first time. Play still forms part of the subjective experience, but deliberate execution and refinement of specific tasks become the focus.

The teachers don’t necessarily need to be expert performers themselves; they just need to be reasonably proficient. László Polgár wasn’t a brilliant chess player, and his daughters became much better than him very quickly. But he was, as Judit said in an interview, “a great motivator and visionary”.

These teacher attributes are critical for the young student. Their teachers must possess the ability to coach and encourage their students to higher levels of skill, development and performance. Ultimately though, the child’s motivation, (or yours no matter what your age), must be internal. The study of human performance has shown that extrinsic motivation rarely endures, so to travel the long road to creative expertise, we must be self-motivated.

We know that any kind of extended practice, Ericsson says, alters the brain’s neurological systems that lead to increased abilities in the skills practiced. He wonders then if there is a neurological basis for effects on motivation and enjoyment. At present, it’s unclear. What we do know is that experts gain great pleasure from their work — they love to do it.

When I consider this, it seems to me that the person and the work at some stage become one entity. They somehow blend with the work and vibrate quite literally at the same frequency as the activity. Regarding those in peak-experience, Maslow states in  Toward A Psychology of Being   [5];

“The person in the peak-experience feels more integrated, unified, whole, all-of-a-piece, than at other times. He also looks to the observer more integrated, less split or dissociated”. Abraham Maslow | Psychologist

Stage 3: Making A Commitment

It is in the early teenage years that future geniuses decide to go all-in. They make a conscious decision to dedicate their lives to becoming the best that they can be. They commit, and they drop all other activities not lending themselves to their expert development. The prodigy seeks the best schools and tutors, and if required, even leave for another country to access them.

Money helps — a lot. Training can be expensive with costs into tens of thousands per year. Ericsson cites a 2014 article by  Money Magazine  who suggested $30,000 per year for a child to access elite tennis training. However, the creation of a genius doesn’t always need deep pockets. Parents with little money and generous support, like the Polgárs, can make up the difference. In fact, plenty of money and no support will often lead the student nowhere.

Another critical aspect of the development of expertise in children is the harnessing of the momentum of growth in the body. If they do not develop specific skills in youth, they rarely do in later life. For example, for ballet dancers to gain the specific ranges of motion for their performance, they must do so as children. Bones mature, and joints solidify with age, and developing the necessary ballet skills becomes impossible. Shoulders, hips, knees etc. can be sculpted towards particular ends, but it must be done early.

We must harness the momentum of brain development early too. Studies have shown that certain areas of the brain are more developed in artists than in non-artists. Musicians also have enlarged areas of the brain not seen in non-musicians. We see this particularly in musicians who began in early childhood. The research appears conclusive; if you want your child to excel, start them early.

It’s a delicate and important learning period for the child, and where the ambition is primarily with the parents, the child can suffer. Nevertheless, if a young and talented teen commits to perfecting their skill, enlists the coaching of an equally committed tutor, then they may reach the heights of their field.

Would you do what Polgár and his wife did so that your kids excel at a given discipline? Or was it that Polgár was utterly obsessed with chess and his theory and was prepared to go to extreme lengths to prove himself right?

I think what’s critical here is that the Polgár girls wanted to play chess — they weren’t dragged kicking and screaming to the chessboard. László and Klara created a playful and enjoyable atmosphere around the game. In the face of disagreeable external forces, they were even more unified in their family life — it was them against the world.

Later, as the story goes, Polgár wanted to adopt three non-white children from a third world country to further prove his theory of genius accurate. He had financial backing from a billionaire businessman, but the plan never materialised. It seems that pressure from Klara and realising life was not only about chess, László decided not to proceed.

Reflecting on the Polgár story, I wonder about my intent for my kids. I consider my children’s future, how I might aid their happiness and success, and so on. Pointing them one way or the other, suggesting to them things that might interest them. I try to recognise where their interests lie and fuel that.

So I cannot avoid influencing them, but ultimately, I want them to choose for themselves. They will have many elements vying for their attention, and I want to help them focus. But it’s their life, and I want their curiosity to grow organically rather than through my design.

I can’t help but feel that Polgár pursued his own ambition through his children, and that may be somewhat of a shadow on the whole affair. However, as noted above, the girls have said they chose chess and they seemed to have a good family life, so who am I to judge.

The Polgárs showed that given the range of variables that existed for them, their meagre surroundings and pressures to conform to normality, sculpting genius-level expertise in their children was possible. The ends justified the means.

So, should we follow suit? Should we form our children’s lives with greater intent, or let them develop by default?

• László Polgár. (2019). Retrieved 6 November 2019, from  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Polgar
• Polgár, L., & Farkas, E. (1989).  Nevelj zsenit! . Budapest: Interart.
• Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016).  Peak  (1st ed.). London: 2017.
• Ericsson, K., Krampe, R., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.  Psychological Review ,  100 (3), 363–406. doi: 10.1037//0033–295x.100.3.363
• Maslow, A. (2018).  Toward A Psychology of Being  (1st ed.). New York: Wilder Publications.

Author | Larry G. Maguire

Reader Interactions

Leave a reply cancel reply.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Read The Sunday Letters Newsletter

Subscribe to the newsletter that discusses life, work, and the pursuit of happiness.

Read Sunday Letters

The Grandmaster Experiment

How did one family produce three of the most successful female chess champions ever.

By Carlin Flora published July 1, 2005 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016

The world's first female grandmaster was ready to deliver her regular Thursday-night lecture. Susan Polgar was perfumed, coiffed, made-up and dressed in a sleek black pantsuit, an elegant contrast to the boys and young men hunched over their boards in her Queens, New York, chess club. "I have a special treat," Susan, 36, announced in her gentle Hungarian accent. "Tonight, everyone will get to play me." Blitz chess it was—each opponent received five minutes on his clock to Susan's one. She first sat across from a young Serbian man. The two began slamming pieces and punching down their side of the clock, creating a percussive sound track to their lightning-fast moves. Susan beat him with a good 30 seconds to spare. He shook his head and avoided her eyes. A retired bartender and a 14-year-old boy succumbed almost as quickly. A reluctant 9-year-old suffering from an allergy attack was then coaxed to step up to the challenge. "Don't worry about your eyes—everybody loses to her anyway," his mom said helpfully. The boy's minutes slipped away to inevitable loss. "Once you have a winning position," Susan said, "play with your hands, not your head. Trust your intuition ."

When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition . At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The tournament was abuzz not just with the spectacle of one pretty young powerhouse: Susan's raven-haired sister Sophia, 11, swept most of the games in her section, too. But the pudgy baby of the family, 9-year-old Judit, drew the most gawkers of all. To onlookers' delight, Judit took on five players simultaneously and beat them. She played blindfolded.

In 1991, when Susan was 21, she became the first woman ever to earn the designation Grandmaster, the World Chess Federation's title for top-ranked players. Judit picked up the honor the same year, at age 15. She was a few months younger than Bobby Fischer was when he won the title.

Judit, who is now the top-ranked woman and eighth overall player in the world, would go on to win a match in 2002 against reigning champion Garry Kasparov, who has said that "women by nature are not exceptional chess players." But the Polgar sisters may be the exceptions that prove Kasparov's point: Only 11 out of the world's about 950 grandmasters, including Susan and Judit, are female. The sisters' saga may cast light on the knotty question of why so few women are elite performers in math and the hard sciences. But in the Polgars' case, a unique upbringing and the idiosyncrasies of chess itself further complicate the picture.

Judit, Susan and Sophia grew up in a veritable chess cocoon spun by their father, Laszlo, the intellectual equivalent of Serena and Venus Williams' autocratic tennis dad, Richard. Some people consider Laszlo's role in shaping his daughters' careers to be absolute; others call it a happy coincidence. Raw talent and a childhood with all the advantages account for success in many fields, and chess is no exception. But the paths Susan, Judit and Sophia took as adults illuminate many intangibles in the achievement equation. An aggressive streak, birth order , a chance encounter that leads to a marriage on the other side of the world—these factors and changes of fortune are just as critical in determining whether a person rises to the top of his or her game.

Forty years ago, Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian psychologist, conducted an epistolary courtship with a Ukrainian foreign language teacher named Klara. His letters to her weren't filled with reflections on her cherubic beauty or vows of eternal love. Instead, they detailed a pedagogical experiment he was bent on carrying out with his future progeny. After studying the biographies of hundreds of great intellectuals, he had identified a common theme—early and intensive specialization in a particular subject. Laszlo thought the public school system could be relied upon to produce mediocre minds. In contrast, he believed he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy. He had already published a book on the subject, Bring Up Genius! , and he needed a wife willing to jump on board.

Laszlo's grandiose plan impressed Klara, and the two were soon married. In 1973, when she was barely 4 years old, Susan, their rather hyperactive firstborn, found a chess set while rummaging through a cabinet. Klara, who didn't know a single rule of the ancient game, was delighted to find Susan quietly absorbed in the strange figurines and promised that Laszlo would teach her the game that evening.

Chess, the Polgars decided, was the perfect activity for their protogenius: It was an art, a science, and like competitive athletics, yielded objective results that could be measured over time. Never mind that less than 1 percent of top chess players were women. If innate talent was irrelevant to Laszlo's theory, so, then, was a child's gender . "My father is a visionary," Susan says. "He always thinks big, and he thinks people can do a lot more than they actually do."

Six months later, Susan toddled into Budapest's smoke-filled chess club. Aged men sat in pairs, sliding bishops, slapping down pawns and yelling out bets on their matches. "I don't know who was more surprised, me or them," she recalls. One of the regulars laughed when he was asked to give the little girl a game. Susan soon extended her tiny hand across the board for a sportsmanlike victory shake. It was an ego-crushing gesture. Soon thereafter, she dominated the city's girls-under-age-11 tournament with a perfect score.

In 1974 Susan was in the middle of a chess lesson when Laszlo received the call that Klara had given birth to another daughter, Sophia. Just 21 months later, Judit was born. As soon as they were old enough to feel the pain of parental exclusion, the younger girls peeked through a small window into the room where their father taught Susan chess for hours each day. Laszlo seized upon their curiosity. They could come in and watch, he told them, but only if they also learned the game. With that, Laszlo gained two additional subjects.

Laszlo battled Hungarian authorities for permission to homeschool his children, and he and Klara then taught them German, English and high-level math. (All three are multilingual; Susan speaks seven languages, including Esperanto, fluently.) They swam occasionally and played Ping-Pong, and a 20-minute breather just for joke telling was penciled in each day. But their world was largely mapped onto the 64 squares of the chessboard. "My dad believed in optimizing early childhood instead of wasting time playing outside or watching TV," Susan says.

Laszlo believed that the girls' achievement in chess would bring them not only success. More importantly, it would make them happy. Klara took care of the pragmatic aspects of her family's intense home-life, and in later years, coordinated their travels to tournaments in 40 countries. "They complemented each other perfectly," says Susan. Laszlo initiated the great plans, but, as Klara said, "I am always part of the realization. The thread follows the needle. I am the thread."

The brain has three tasks to carry out when contemplating a chessboard. It must comprehend the rules, as each piece moves according to its own powers and restraints. Then it must analyze potential moves, which involves envisioning different configurations on the board. Lastly, it must decide which move is most advantageous. Here the game requires critical thinking in the visual-spatial realm. Visual-spatial processing is the single biggest ability gap between men and women—the glimmer of truth behind the stereotype of men-as-road-trip- aces who deftly follow maps and fit the luggage into the car. The visual-spatial processing center is located in the right side of the brain; among elite chess players (Kasparov included), there is a much higher proportion of left-handers, who have dominant right brains, than chance would predict.

Testosterone accelerates development of the right brain and may slow development of the left side. But the effects aren't binary: Regardless of its sex , each brain falls on a continuum between "male" and "female" extremes in an array of traits. Furthermore, the neural pathways that allow for chess's cognitive pyrotechnics develop in response to environmental influences and are most malleable in young children. Estrogen , in fact, enables neural plasticity —women tend to recover better from strokes than men, for example—and the hormone primes women for neural growth and change, points out neuropsychiatrist Mona Lisa Schulz, author of The New Feminine Brain. By teaching his daughters chess at a young age, Laszlo essentially molded their brains, enriching their visual-spatial centers and closing any gap that gender may have broached.

Gender differences do emerge, however, in the way kids look at chess. "Girls can learn how to play just as well as boys," Susan says. "But they often approach the game differently. Girls would rather solve chess puzzles than play against one of their friends," she says. Boys will always choose to compete.

These orientations can long influence a player's style, says Paul Truong, captain of the U.S. Women's Olympiad chess team and coauthor of Susan's forthcoming book, Breaking Through: How the Polgar Sisters Changed the Game of Chess . "When I play Susan," he says, "I look for the quickest, most brute force way to win—even if it's a very typical checkmate. She looks for a more elegant, unusual way." As a teacher, Susan indulges girls' preference for conflict-free mental challenges and supports sex-segregated events for beginners. There are so few girls in attendance at national coed tournaments, she says, that their self-consciousness often squashes their enthusiasm for the game.

Susan's feminine touch is apparent at her club, where tea and cakes are served to the mostly male members. "It's rare to have someone of Susan's stature interacting with amateurs like us. You wouldn't see Kasparov sitting here, talking to a normal person," notes Ruth Arluck, a retired teacher. Truong agrees. "Susan even insisted on wooden instead of plastic chess pieces. It takes a woman to notice these things," he says.

Anders Ericsson is only vaguely familiar with the Polgars, but he has spent over 20 years building evidence in support of Laszlo's theory of genius. Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, argues that "extended deliberate practice" is the true, if banal, key to success. "Nothing shows that innate factors are a necessary prerequisite for expert-level mastery in most fields," he says. (The only exception he's found is the correlation between height and athletic achievement in sports, most clearly for basketball and volleyball.) His interviews with 78 German pianists and violinists revealed that by age 20, the best had spent an estimated 10,000 hours practicing, on average 5,000 hours more than a less accomplished group. Unless you're dealing with a cosmic anomaly like Mozart, he argues, an enormous amount of hard work is what makes a prodigy's performance look so effortless.

Critics dismiss Ericsson's doctrine as the "drudge theory" of genius. It is reasonable to assume, they say, that the musicians who logged more hours did so because they had more innate ability and therefore obtained better results from their practice sessions. But Ericsson protests that talent's effects level off. Deliberate practice is not mechanically repeating tasks that come easily, but rather targeting and attacking specific areas that need improvement.

"My father believes that innate talent is nothing, that [success] is 99 percent hard work," Susan says. "I agree with him."

The Polgars' high-rise apartment in downtown Budapest was a shrine to unremitting chess practice. Thousands of chess books were stuffed onto shelves. Trophies and boards cluttered the living room. A file card system took up an entire wall. It included records of previous games for endless analytical pleasure and even an index of potential competitors' tournament histories. Framed prints depicting 19th-century chess scenes served as decor in the main room, where the girls often sat cross-legged on the floor, playing blindfolded blitz games that lasted mere minutes.

Such a regimen tempts accusations of light torture had the children been unwilling pawns. But blindfolded speed chess was the sisters' idea of fun. And while they had a few friends in the neighborhood, the girls were perfectly content to pass their days training with elderly male grandmasters. "I had an inner drive," recalls Susan. "I think that is the difference between the very good and the best."

Ellen Winner, a psychologist at Boston College, calls this drive the " rage to master." She thinks it's what propels prodigies through grueling years of training. "The rage to master is a prodigy's primary motivation ," she says. "Mastering a certain activity is more important to them than socializing, than anything else." Winner believes that infusing a child with the rage to master is impossible: "You can force your kids to work harder, but you can't get them to have that level of passion. The sisters could have just as easily rebelled against Laszlo."

In fact, they couldn't be stopped. Laszlo once found Sophia in the bathroom in the middle of the night, a chessboard balanced across her knees. "Sophia, leave the pieces alone!" he said, shaking his head. "Daddy, they won't leave me alone!" she replied.

What are the chances, though, that three girls destined for stellar achievement would be born to a man convinced that geniuses are made?

"The Polgar sisters are a beautiful coincidence," says Ognjen Amidzic. A neuroscientist in Switzerland, Amidzic once aspired to become a professional chess player. He had the "rage to master" and even moved to Russia as a teenager to study intensively with grandmasters. But he reached a plateau at age 23 and had to quit. Reeling from his wrecked dreams , Amidzic went into cognitive science to understand what went wrong. Through the use of brain scans, he discovered a marked difference between grandmasters and highly trained amateur chess players like himself: When grandmasters play chess, the areas responsible for long-term memory and higher-level processing are activated.

Chess titans have anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 configurations of pieces, or patterns, committed to memory. They are able to quickly pull relevant information from this mammoth database. With a mere glance, a grandmaster can then figure out how the configuration in front of him is likely to play itself out.

Amateurs, by contrast, use short-term memory while playing chess. When they take in new information, it stays in the "small hard drive" of working memory without passing over into the "zip drive" of long-term memory. "Amateurs are overwriting things they've already learned," says Amidzic. "Can you imagine how frustrating that is!"

Amidzic's research suggests that chess whizzes are born with the tendency to process chess more through their frontal and parietal cortices, the areas thought to be responsible for long-term memory. Players whose medial temporal lobes are activated more will be consigned to mediocrity. He hasn't yet been able to follow children over time to see if their processing ratio of frontal-and-parietal cortices to medial temporal lobes indeed remains stable, but his retrospective analyses of older players show that their ratio corresponds to their highest historical chess rating, as would be expected if the ratio truly predicts chess performance. And he doesn't think that gender influences this proclivity. He had scanned the brain of a 22-year-old female chess beginner and found her ratio to be far above average. If she sets her mind to it, Amidzic believes, the young woman has the potential to become a master-level player.

Amidzic's own chess-processing ratio, on the other hand, is about 50-50. "I'm the Salieri of the chess world," he says. "I'm talented enough to admire and also to know what I will not achieve. It's better to be ordinary and not know."

Susan, Sophia and Judit were all extraordinary at a game that was essentially thrust upon them. "It's like an arranged marriage that worked out well," says Josh Waitzkin, eight-time national chess champion and subject of the book and film Searching for Bobby Fischer. But eventually, each sister grew into herself.

"The beauty of chess is that your personality can come across on the board," says Waitzkin. "Sophia was lighthearted, very funny and coquettish. As a teenager she was stunningly beautiful. Men adored her left and right, and she enjoyed that. She was a brilliant speed player, sharp as a tack. But she didn't work as hard as the others."

"Sophia is the artist of the family," Susan concedes. "She liked playing chess, but the analytic part was a burden for her. Chess is artistic when the pieces combine in a beautiful, original way. This is what held her back: She was striving too much to find beauty in the game. She didn't develop the other side—defending—which means accumulating small advantages." Sophia had a glorious moment in a 1989 Italian tournament when she finished ahead of five grandmasters in a record-breaking performance that became known as the "Sac of Rome." But she also had a reputation for making careless blunders. Other interests pulled at her attention.

"It's not that chess was too much for me; it was too little," Sophia says. She quit competing shortly before marrying an Israeli grandmaster (and orthopedic surgeon) in 1999. She studied painting and interior design and is now a full-time mom to sons Alon and Yoav. She was the sixth-best woman player in the world at the height of her career —an astounding exit point for the supposed "weak link" of the family. "I may go back to playing professionally," she says. "It's just, at this stage in my life, it's not the right time. I don't have any regrets. There's a lot I can thank chess for. I met my husband through chess."

Everyone agrees that Sophia was the most talented of the three, the one most likely to possess Amidzic's ideal processing ratio. "Everything came easiest to her," says Susan. "But she was lazy." People don't always derive the most enjoyment from the things they're best at. Adults tag children who show promise and watch their progress with vested interest, causing some kids to falter under the weight of great expectations. "The most gifted kids in chess fall apart," says Waitzkin. "They are told that they are winners, and when they inevitably run into a wall, they get stuck and think they must be losers."

Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford University, has found that people's beliefs about their abilities greatly influence their performance. When she praised children's intelligence after they succeeded at a nonverbal IQ test, they subsequently didn't want to take on a new challenge—they preferred to keep looking smart. When they were forced to complete a more difficult exercise, their performance plummeted. In contrast, some children were praised for "how" they did a task—for undergoing the process successfully. Most of the children in this group wanted to take on a tougher assignment afterward. Their performance improved for the most part, and when it didn't, they still enjoyed the experience.

Laszlo's staunch belief that talent is irrelevant may have protected his daughters from losing motivation when they failed. Defeat is inevitable as one moves up the chess ladder—as soon as a player achieves a higher rating, he or she is paired with stronger opponents. By keeping his daughters focused on the learning process, says Dweck, Laszlo also kept them from worrying about a precious gift they would have to sit and polish.

"The motivation for succeeding in chess was just there in the atmosphere of our house," says Sophia. "Susan was such a strong player that Judit and I wanted to be like her. But I could give up easier than Judit. I never worked as hard as she did."

Judit launches aggressive attacks as often as she creates elaborate defenses and "artistic" combinations. She may freely use emoticons in e-mail correspondence, but on the chessboard she is nothing short of macho. She is known for her laserlike focus and unladylike desire to crush her opponents. Kasparov once described chess as "the most violent of all sports." The only goal is to prove your superiority over the other guy, he said, and "women are weaker fighters." When Judit was 15, Pal Benko, a former Hungarian chess champion who coached the Polgar sisters, said of the tall teen with flowing red hair: "She is dangerous. She does not play chess like a woman."

"Judit was a slow starter, but very hardworking," says Susan. She was also born into a chess factory that had worked out its production kinks. She is, without a doubt, the best woman chess player the world has ever seen and at the age of 29 still has a shot at winning the world championship. Like Kasparov, Judit considers chess a sport more than an art or a science and dedicates every spare moment to training. Just as no player can capture the other side's king without sacrificing some important pieces, she is willing to give things up for chess glory. "If I felt a sacrifice was too much, though, I would stop," Judit says. "I feel happy with my life the way it is." She lives in Hungary with her husband, a veterinarian, and gave birth to her first child, a son, Oliver, in August 2004.

Judit's face adorns billboards selling cellular phone service in Budapest, where she is a household name. "I believe that I am as tough as other women who are very successful and have had to prove their abilities over and over again," Judit says. "My colleagues have finally accepted me, but years ago they did treat me differently. Susan once said she never won against a healthy man. What she meant was that men always had some excuse after losing a game to a woman: "It must have been my headache."

There exist some downsides to being a female chess player that Kasparov may not be aware of. "There were many times when I felt faint at matches because of menstrual cramps," Susan says. "When I was about 16, I did faint. I fell off the chair." A room filled with older male adversaries is a horrible place for a girl to experience Judy Blume-esque moments. Tournament games are often six hours long, and extra time for trips to the ladies' room is not allotted. In a game where every point is precious, even one minute of discomfort could jeopardize a woman's score, Susan insists. (Mother Nature may have equipped female chess players with a compensatory measure, however: The extra estrogen surging through a woman's body during menstruation aids concentration .)

Of course, women in chess face more public challenges as well. In 1986, at age 17, Susan was the first woman ever to qualify for the Men's World Championship. The world chess federation, FIDE, would not let her go. She was devastated. (The federation eventually changed its policy and renamed the tournament the World Championship.)

The Polgar sisters also had strained relations with the Hungarian chess federation, which wouldn't let them travel abroad for fear of defection. Laszlo ruffled bureaucratic feathers by encouraging his daughters to skip many of the all-women tournaments so they could spar with better-trained male players. But in 1988, when the girls were 19, 14 and 12, the federation allowed the family to go to Greece to compete in the Women's Olympiad. Playing together as a team, Susan, Sophia and Judit brought home the first win against the Soviets in history for Hungary, or as some joked, for "Polgaria." The Independent described the scene after the big victory: "The three girls of various sizes, a plump mother and Laszlo, gnomelike, with a cloth cap covering his balding head, they looked like the happy scene at the end of a fairy story."

"It was one of those few things that permanently changes your life," Susan says. "Until then, we had a lot of doubters and bad-wishers. After that, we became national heroes." Sponsorships poured in. "We could have a summer house and a car. It was almost like winning the lottery." Except, of course, that the Polgars had earned it.

"I wanted to be champion of the world," Susan says. "That won't ever happen now, but I was able to pave the way for Judit, and I'm very proud of that." (The gender divide in chess is such that even as the second-best woman in the world, Susan ranks in the hundreds overall.)

In 1994 Susan married an American computer programmer and left her cushy existence in Hungary to join him in Queens. "It was a downgrade for me," she says, with a hint of disappointment.

"I would not have to work if I were in Hungary. Here, I am not at all set financially." When she was pregnant with her first son, Tommy, FIDE would not allow her to postpone defense of her title. She later sued the organization and won a settlement.

Susan stopped playing professionally for three years after the birth of sons Tommy in 1999 and Leeam in 2000. She considered the average three-week tournament too long to be away from her boys. "Children are a part of life," says Susan. "Because of that, there will always be fewer women playing chess than men. In many professions, it's OK to be good, or very good; there is no need to be the best. But only the very best can make a living at chess. While it's tough for any new mother to go back to work, it's much tougher when you're trying to be world-class."

In 2002 her marriage fell apart, and she now faces the logistical and emotional challenges of single motherhood. She plays chess just a few hours a week with her sons, and is not nearly as methodical with them as Laszlo was with her. "It's hard without the support of both parents—my mother was there taking care of things. I can't always raise my sons the way I'd like... It's a sad situation."

Susan did, however, realize a lifelong wish when she opened up her chess club in 1997. She is now chess's ambassador at large, promoting the game in schools, especially for girls. "Chess teaches children concentration, logic and creativity . It also teaches them to be responsible for their actions," Susan says. "There are no take-backs—just as in life. You must think before you move."

As Laszlo steered his daughters' careers, he kept one simple fact in mind: Most female chess players do not set their sights high enough. In order to achieve parity with their male counterparts, they, too, need a vision of world domination. Susan now wants to raise chess's stature in the United States to that of golf or tennis, and in 2004 led the U.S. women's team to win a silver medal in the Olympiad in Spain. A live television broadcast of the Anna Kournikova and Tiger Woods of the chess circuit facing off as Budweiser banners wave in the background is hard to envision. But 32 years ago, when Laszlo first taught Susan chess, it was just as difficult to imagine a woman posing a legitimate threat to any male chess champion.

This summer, for the first time in 10 years, the sisters will appear together in an exhibition in Las Vegas. Susan, Sophia and Judit will take on 100 opponents simultaneously. In relay style, Susan will make the first move on each board, Sophia will follow with the second, Judit will make the third and so on.

Laszlo harbored one final, grandiose hope that never came to pass. "About 15 years ago," says Susan, "we had a sponsor, a very nice Dutch billionaire named Joop van Oosterom. He was fascinated with the idea of whether genius is the result of nature or nurture. He wanted to enable my parents to adopt three boys from a developing country and raise them exactly as they raised us. My father really wanted to do it, but my mother talked him out of it. She understood that life is not only about chess, and that all the rest would fall on her lap."

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Self Tests NEW
• Therapy Center
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

When we fall prey to perfectionism, we think we’re honorably aspiring to be our very best, but often we’re really just setting ourselves up for failure, as perfection is impossible and its pursuit inevitably backfires.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

Recently Visited

Top Categories

Children's Books

Discover Diverse Voices

More Categories

All Categories

New & Trending

Deals & Rewards

Best Sellers

From Our Editors

Memberships

Communities

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

The Polgar Sisters, Training or Genius? Paperback – January 1, 1992

• Print length 178 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date January 1, 1992
• ISBN-10 0713468718
• ISBN-13 978-0713468717
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Henry Holt & Co (January 1, 1992)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 178 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0713468718
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0713468717
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.8 ounces
• Best Sellers Rank: #2,059,782 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Cathy forbes.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 38% 27% 35% 0% 0% 38%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 38% 27% 35% 0% 0% 27%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 38% 27% 35% 0% 0% 35%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 38% 27% 35% 0% 0% 0%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 38% 27% 35% 0% 0% 0%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort by reviews type Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Registry & Gift List
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Chess Grandmastery: Nature, Gender, and the Genius of Judit Polgár

László Polgár raised all three of his daughters to become chess prodigies.

In the late 1960s, a Hungarian teacher named László Polgár resolved to try an educational experiment.

The author of a brassy parenting book called Bring Up Genius! , he sought to prove that, as one of his kids later put it, “any healthy child—if taught early and intensively—can be brought up to be exceptionally successful in any field.” He married a fellow teacher who shared his views, and together they had three daughters. When the eldest took an interest in his chessboard as a toddler, László realized the game—with its objective measures of success—would make an ideal test of his method.

He could not have set the stakes higher. Top-level chess had long been considered a domain in which women were mentally incapable of competing. But László and Klara Polgár scorned the received wisdom. “Women are able,” László insisted, “to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to [those] of men. Chess is a form of intellectual activity…. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect.”

With the help of elite coaches, the Polgárs drilled their daughters in the art of chess. All three turned into prodigies.

In 1991 Zsuzsa (Susan) became the first female grandmaster in the history of the sport. The second child, Zsófia (Sofia), became an International Master. And the third, Judit, topped them all. At age 15 she became the youngest player ever to reach grandmaster status. As an adult she racked up victories against the likes of Boris Spassky, Magnus Carlsen, and Garry Kasparov, who had once declared that “women by their nature are not exceptional chess players.” At her peak she was ranked No. 8 in the world.

Was there a genetic component at work? Possibly—but Klara was a nonplayer, László an average talent whom Judit could beat by age five. Is Judit the rare successful product of an experiment at which other families fail in obscurity? Maybe. But how many such families could there be? Few Western parents coach their toddler daughters relentlessly in anything, let alone chess. Even fewer declare, and make good on, their intent to raise a certain type of genius.

If the Polgárs’ experiment had been even a little less successful—if all three daughters had “only” become masters, or if one had become an obscure grandmaster while the others lost interest—you might call it a fluke, or evidence of a ceiling for female chess players. But Judit became one of the top ten players on the planet. She beat the best human player of all time. She became, for a brief spell, the greatest chess prodigy in human history. She blitzed to the forefront of a game at which women were considered hopeless, exactly as her parents had envisioned before she started playing. Most of us can only dream of being so right about something.

The Polgárs’ story is more than inspiring: it’s the most remarkable “nature vs. nurture” anecdote I know.

And while it is only an anecdote—no conclusive proof of anything—it drives some recent theories of group cognitive inequality into a tight corner. Study its implications and you start to smell checkmate.

The theories in question are now linked forever in the public mind with Larry Summers. Summers’ suggestion, in 2005, that gaps in “intrinsic aptitude” might explain the gender gap in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math) plunged him in deepening controversy until his resignation as president of Harvard the following year. Defenders cast him as a martyr to ivory-tower pieties; critics charged that his speculation was, at the very least, obnoxious in the absence of hard evidence.

Want more stories like this one?

Get your fix of JSTOR Daily’s best stories in your inbox each Thursday.

Privacy Policy   Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.

Chess isn’t an academic discipline, but like STEM fields its gender imbalance is often attributed to differences in analytical, spatial, and calculation skills—in short, intellectual disparities. In the same year as the Summers gaffe, researchers Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn published a paper concluding that “different proportions of men and women with high IQs…may go some way to explain the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds for which a high IQ is required, such as chess Grandmasters, Fields medalists for mathematics, Nobel prize winners, and the like.”

Immediately we notice that these achievements “of various kinds” don’t seem to extend to the humanities (Nobel-winning authors aside). Is high IQ less important in these “soft” fields, where women have successfully struggled for greater parity? Could it be that fields in which men still dominate are reflexively defined as more cerebral?

In any case, these hard rationalists may have overlooked a more logical reason for the gap. In a 2009 paper for the Royal Society’s biology journal—provocatively titled “ Why are (the best) women so good at chess? ”—Merim Bilalić and his co-authors advance “a simple statistical explanation” for modern chess demographics:

…the extreme values in a large sample are likely to be greater than those in a small one. Although the performance of the 100 best German male chess players is better than that of the 100 best German women, we show that 96 per cent of the observed difference would be expected given the much greater number of men who play chess.

Bilalić immediately notes that this same explanation “may also be the main reason why women are under-represented at the top end” of science. But since “greatness” in science is pretty subjective—in fact, often distorted by systemic prejudice (were Watson and Crick greater than Rosalind Franklin?)—he focuses on chess, whose scrupulous ratings system permits fair comparisons.

In naming participation rates as the culprit, he anticipates a rebuttal: “Women may be inferior in the intellectual abilities that are important for successful chess playing. This innate disadvantage may lead women to give up on chess in greater numbers than more successful men.” But the numbers don’t bear it out: Bilalić points to a 2006 study showing similar chess dropout rates for boys and girls. Instead the gender gap seems to start “in the early stages” before tournament play.

Bilalić’s conclusions are backed by a similar 1996 study in  Psychological Science , which attributes both “Russian and Male Dominance in Chess” to unequal participation. Even those girls who participate in competitive chess are often barred from playing against men, as Judit Polgár herself recently lamented to The Australian.  Polgár blames [the gap on] a worldwide reluctance to let girls compete against boys. “The problem is in chess that all the girls should be not competing between themselves—they should always compete in a higher level so they can improve faster,” she said.

Have the game’s male gatekeepers confused cause and effect here—or been “reluctant” to see it clearly? According to Polgár, women aren’t rare in high-level chess because they lack the necessary skills; they lack those skills because they’re rarely allowed to compete at high levels. ForBilalić the major culprit is sheer non-participation, starting at a young age despite women’s initial parity in talent.

Bilalić believes “there is little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for” beyond this statistical underrepresentation. But what about cultural explanations for the underrepresentation? Might more attention and resources be lavished on young boys who take an interest in chess? Might girls be deterred by condescension from figures like Kasparov? Or the late Bobby Fischer, who claimed: “They’re all weak, all women. They’re stupid compared to men”? Or Judit’s own coach, who once told her she was “an exception, not a girl”?

Old-fashioned coaches aren’t alone in imagining geniuses as superhuman “exceptions,” blessed with ethereal gifts. Yet more and more research indicates that all mastery, all brilliance, is to a startling extent the product of gritty persistence.

In a 2006 Scientific American article on “The Expert Mind,” Philip E. Ross wrote: [Herbert A.] Simon coined a psychological law of his own…which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music, and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by studying earlier and working harder than others. According to this view, the proliferation of chess prodigies in recent years merely reflects the advent of computer-based training methods…

That the proliferation of chess prodigies started a few years after the Polgárs’ rise makes you wonder if it reflects their example too. Indeed, Ross cites Judit as the world’s first proof that “grandmasters can be reared.” He acknowledges that such findings challenge our conception of specialness:

Surely, [skeptics] will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence to substantiate it. In 2002 [Fernand] Gobet conducted a study of British chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and found no connection at all between their playing strengths and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-memory tests.

“Visual-spatial abilities” also come up a lot in discussions of the STEM gap. Men typically test better on them than women, and unlike chess, some STEM fields (chemistry, engineering) undeniably require them. Michigan Tech’s Sheryl Sorby has shown, however, that focused training in spatial tasks dramatically improves test scores, and that women who receive it not only catch up but are more likely to remain in STEM fields. So nature’s claims shrink further: a disparity once thought to separate grandmasters from wannabes, male scientists from struggling female peers, turns out to be eminently surmountable by nurture where it matters at all.

Why do women’s scores lag at the outset? One predictor of initial success, Sorby has found, is “play as children with construction toys such as Legos, Lincoln Logs, and Erector Sets.” Any progressive parent will see where I’m going here; we’ve grown more sensitive to the dangers of such pigeonholing, but it’s hardly been flushed out of the culture. A 2010 American Association of University Women report on the STEM gap (pdf)  quotes Joshua Aronson, a path-breaking researcher on gender stereotyping:

Girls do every bit as well in their graded work [as] boys [do], but girls lose confidence as they advance through the grades….One reason for this loss of confidence is the stereotyping that kids are exposed to—in school and the media and even in the home—that portrays boys as more innately gifted [in math]. Without denying the fact that boys may have some biological advantage, I think that psychology plays a big role here.

Again we see the almost Freudian importance of early life, early lessons, including lessons others may not realize they’re teaching. But the vast gulf Freud imagined between male and female minds—the Victorian phrenologists’ gloating over gender and skull size—the old saw that men are rational by nature and women emotional: what’s left of them? Modest, provisional assertions about mental rotation tasks and women clustering closer to the center of the bell curve.

Let’s be clear about what this isn’t. It isn’t a claim about overall intelligence. Nor is it a justification for tolerating discrimination between two people of equal ability or accomplishment. Nor is it a concession that genetic handicaps can’t be overcome. Nor is it a statement that girls are inferior at math and science: It doesn’t dictate the limits of any individual, and it doesn’t entail that men are on average better than women at math or science. It’s a claim that the distribution of male scores is more spread out than the distribution of female scores—a greater percentage at both the bottom and the top.

That’s William Saletan defending Larry Summers in 2005 . True, the jury is still out on this claim, along with the Darwinian explanations posited in support of it. (Nature might have selected against risky genetic “extremes” in women, whose successful reproduction mattered more to early tribes’ survival—then again, culture, too, often lumps women together.) Yet the broader trend leaves you skeptical. In one century the domain of purported male intellectual superiority has narrowed from “all academic disciplines” to “the sciences” to “the hard sciences” to “a few mental abilities that may favor a few men in the hard sciences.” (And certain board games.)

Given this pattern, it’s unclear why even the admirable Aronson seems reluctant to discount “some biological advantage.” At what point does the burden of proof—and clarification—shift onto those proposing “some” such factor? When does simple intellectual equality become the working hypothesis?

The footage of Kasparov’s loss to Polgár is striking. He stares glumly at the board till the inevitable moment. He turns his head almost completely away, shakes her hand for a millisecond, and leaves the table. He never looks her in the eye.

Later the great champion recovered a measure of grace. In his book How Life Imitates Chess , he acknowledged that “the Polgárs showed that there are no inherent limitations to their aptitude—an idea that many male players refused to accept until they had unceremoniously been crushed” by one of them.

Now that all chess players are crushed by the raw calculating power of computers, it’s worth glancing back at the richly human history of the game. Pastime of kings and park-bench hustlers, its cultural role has shape-shifted through the ages. In “ False Play: Shakespeare and Chess ,” William Poole notes that “chess was the medieval and Renaissance symbol of courtly, aristocratic entertainment, even of sexual equality.” Surveying “ The Politics of Chess in Renaissance Italy ,” Patricia Simons finds allegories of the gameboard as “a site of potential temptation, overarching competitiveness or lascivious meetings”; of “martial action,” “feminine lust,” or fraught encounters between the sexes:

The symbolism of a competitive battle of wits and assertion of mastery could lend itself to gender politics. So several Italian depictions of chess contrast male and female players at the same board, continuing the tradition of certain medieval romances.

Then there’s that most famous literary chess match, the one in  The Tempest . Raised on a desert island, Miranda delights in squaring off against her new love Ferdinand, the first young man she’s ever met. As more of his fascinating kind approach, she exclaims: “…O brave new world,/That has such people in’t!” To which her father retorts: “‘Tis new to thee.”

Marveling over the Polgárs, a writer risks sounding like wide-eyed Miranda. When I first came across their story it bowled me over. I’d never lent much credence to the Larry Summers hypothesis, but these women seemed to have finished it off and smacked the gameclock. That impression turned out to be bolstered by a rising stack of research, some of it two decades old—but, ‘twas new to me.

None of this makes their achievement less thrilling—less ringing a testament to human potential. Of course nature still counts for something; Judit stood out even among her sisters. It’s just that the plasticity, the amazing educability of the mind turns out to be so common a part of our human natures. So humbling, too: because it’s not an exclusive privilege, and because it can be squandered. The superstitions by which we impute superior talent to this or that group, credit this divine spark or that sacred puff of wind, so often seem defensive reactions to the circumstances of our own early training.

This summer Judit Polgár announced her retirement, ceding the title of No. 1 female player to Hou Yifan, who became a grandmaster at 14. For the first time a woman has just won the Fields medal in mathematics; for the first time a woman reigns as the world’s most powerful economist. Anecdotes, scattered data points—but they’re plotting something, shaping a hazy scene…

One half of the species plays chess against the other and, at long last, looks up. Meets the other’s eyes. Feels a boyish anxiety, but also a sense of relief. Any bystander can see—without believing in brave new worlds or happily-ever-afters—that the match is remarkably even; the competition is only a diversion; the rivals are in league.

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Get Our Newsletter

More stories.

The Two Worlds of Patrick White

Theologies of Emotion in Medieval Europe

Xenophilia: Golden Rule of the Stranger

Making Scents of Jesuit Missionary Work

Recent posts.

• Wilhelm Reich: Twice Burned
• Recovering the Malay Manuscripts of South Africa
• Cleopatra’s Nose
• Firearms and Family Violence
• Was the Story of Cortés Plagiarized from Arabic?

Support JSTOR Daily

Sign up for our weekly newsletter.