YOU CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BE

When I stumbled on an article, on the Forbes website on the success story of Judith Polgar, and lessons learned from it, I just couldn't resist the urge to post it here. This stems largely from the fact that it is closely related to a bit I posted recently: "THE PROBLEM OF TALENT". Besides, it highly resonates with the 'blog's theme'.

Given below is the article:-


«WHAT THE QUEEN OF CHESS CAN TEACH YOU ABOUT BEING SUCCESSFUL


This month the greatest female chess player in history decided to retire.

Judit Polgar has beaten the finest male Grandmasters of the modern era, including Kasparov, Karpov, Anand and today’s world number one, Magnus Carlsen.

She is so good, she rarely even bothered entering the women’s chess championships, preferring to duke it out with the men because it was more fun.

She has been the sole female in the men’s top 100 for an astonishing two decades. She even broke the record set by Bobby Fisher to become the youngest Grandmaster in history.

She is, quite simply, a chess genius.

But it’s how she became so great that is the tale most worth telling. Because every one of us could learn a lot from it, no matter what field we aspire to be successful in.

You see, Judit didn’t reach the very top of her world by natural talent. She was part of extraordinary experiment carried out by her father, Laszlo.

Although it is commonly believed that Chess Grandmaster’s are born not made, Laszlo believed that he could train anyone to become a Grandmaster. So he advertised for a woman to partner with him with the aim of having children that he could train to play chess. Incredibly, he found someone and 3 sisters were born. Laszlo then went about the task of teaching them everything he knew about the game, and designing training methods that would constantly enhance their skill levels.

> Here are the results. Incredibly, all three became Grandmasters. And Judit became the best female player the world has ever known.

What’s the lesson from this astounding story?

I think it’s the following. Don’t rely on your natural talents – they matter far less than society believes. You can learn virtually anything. Especially in the business arena. If you’re scared of doing sales calls, you can learn how to do it well and even learn to enjoy it. If you’re bad at business financials, you can learn to handle them excellently too. If you’re chronically disorganized that’s not a genetic trait. You can study time management and end up a world class productivity expert.

There are virtually no skills you cannot acquire, particularly business skills.

But the Judit Polgar story also shows that great skill only comes after three elements are added: a) great effort, b) many years of practice and c) aiming high. Without these three components our skill levels would still improve, but not to the point of mastery.

As authors Daniel Coyle, David Shank and Geoff Colvin have each shown with their meticulously researched books on high performance, there is a path to greatness and it sure ain’t about innate talent.

It’s about constant learning, huge aspiration and putting in the hours under an excellent teacher."

---Simon Reynolds

WHY CHESS?

 "Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency."
 ---Raymond Chandler
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My dad, after years of kicking against my 'addiction' with chess, realised I was inseparable from the game, and accepted it in 'good faith'. But he always wondered how a simple board game could take up so much of my 'study time'. One day, after having been at it, again, for several hours, he asked me a question which is pretty hard for me to forget to this day: "What are the practical applications of chess?" As I began to mumble my reply, "... it helps develop one's problem solving skills, ...enhances our intuition and pattern recognition, ...it...", I suddenly realised I had never given this any thought at all. However, not to be undone by this unexpected question, I kept on explaining the best I could, and listing as many advantages of playing the game that I could muster at the time. But we both knew I hadn't answered the question.

I probably would have stopped playing chess after that incidence, had it not taken hold already. I analyse chess openings for fun, the way others would watch a movie. I read chess books the way most others would a novel. The volume of work an individual needs to do to become a master is staggering! There is probably more literature on chess than there is on most regular disciplines. Then to do well at tournaments, one would have to be physically fit, psychologically balanced, and have as few 'everyday life' distractions as possible. You have to eat right too. Today we have computer chess engines that can process billions of variations in a second; but chess still isn't solved. There is no "truth" in chess. There are numerous general rules of thumb, principles and guidelines but they all seem to have exceptions, some in a staggering 35% of the cases.

"The old rule of always capture with a pawn towards the center is widely followed, but a good 30% of the time, it is good to capture away from the center."
-Jeremy Silman
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Why spend so much time on an endeavour which is so complicated and tasking, but has little or no practical application in actual living? The same though can be said for most other sports like soccer, ping-pong, lawn tennis, golf, basketball, etc.

Chess does aid cognitive reasoning. Research has shown that playing chess actively, pushes back Alzheimer's disease for about 10 years. The positive benefit for school kids are numerous. Children who play chess competitively are able to focus and concentrate at tasks much more than those who do not (generally speaking, of course).



"The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess then, we may learn:

1st, Foresight, which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action ...

2nd, Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: - the relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; ...

3rd, Caution, not to make our moves too hastily...."

---Benjamin Franklin

It is a fact that 'good' chess players have better memory and imagination. Playing chess certainly has it's merits!

THE PROBLEM OF TALENT

 “When I looked at the life stories of geniuses” during his student years, “I found the same thing….They all started at a very young age and studied intensively.”

---Laszlo Polgar

I got enganged in a discussion with a friend who seems to know, a little, at the very least, of everything. Chess being no exception. He had apparently read extensively about the Laszlo Polgar 'Experiment'. He doesn't play chess himself, but comes by the club where we do regularly. He has a vague grasp of what it must take to become a master at the game, but that was enough to get him wowed by the achievements of the Polgar sisters.

He is of the opinion, though, that we are all born with varied talents; probably the reason why Sofia wasn't as successful at chess as her sisters, Susan and Judith. This brings us back to the 'problem' Laszlo Polgar had set out to solve, or maybe understand, decades ago: Are we born with talents or do we acquire them as we develop, through nuture? I guess no one can honestly give this a straightforward answer. Are we born with a blank hard drive or do we have some apps/programs pre-installed?
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Children exposed to the same conditions turn out differently (at least marginally) ten out of ten times. This is true even for monozygote twins. Are certain people more suited to certain tasks from birth? Can we really say that they were exposed to exactly the same experience whenever we subject them to the same conditions? Do they end up assimilating exactly the same thing from the exact same experience?

I am of the opinion that an individual's eventual ability is influenced by talent (which is a difficult word to define) and environment. However, there is a third factor which most of us who have engaged in this debate usually fail to notice or mention. This factor, which in my own opinion, is as formidable as the other two, is CHOICE! We are not machines that can be easily predicted strictly based on input. Man's actions cannot truly be predicted.

Unfortunately, I have no conclusion on this matter, even if the considerations are strictly on my own thoughts and findings. This is the problem of 'talent'.