Range - David Epstein Page 0,6

police threatened to throw Laszlo in jail if he did not send his daughter to the compulsory school system. It took him months of lobbying the Ministry of Education to gain permission. Susan’s new little sister, Sofia, would be homeschooled too, as would Judit, who was coming soon, and whom Laszlo and Klara almost named Zseni, Hungarian for “genius.” All three became part of the grand experiment.

On a normal day, the girls were at the gym by 7 a.m. playing table tennis with trainers, and then back home at 10:00 for breakfast, before a long day of chess. When Laszlo reached the limit of his expertise, he hired coaches for his three geniuses in training. He spent his extra time cutting two hundred thousand records of game sequences from chess journals—many offering a preview of potential opponents—and filing them in a custom card catalog, the “cartotech.” Before computer chess programs, it gave the Polgars the largest chess database in the world to study outside of—maybe—the Soviet Union’s secret archives.

When she was seventeen, Susan became the first woman to qualify for the men’s world championship, although the world chess federation did not allow her to participate. (A rule that would soon be changed, thanks to her accomplishments.) Two years later, in 1988, when Sofia was fourteen and Judit twelve, the girls comprised three of the four Hungarian team members for the women’s Chess Olympiad. They won, and beat the Soviet Union, which had won eleven of the twelve Olympiads since the event began. The Polgar sisters became “national treasures,” as Susan put it. The following year, communism fell, and the girls could compete all over the world. In January 1991, at the age of twenty-one, Susan became the first woman to achieve grandmaster status through tournament play against men. In December, Judit, at fifteen years and five months, became the youngest grandmaster ever, male or female. When Susan was asked on television if she wanted to win the world championship in the men’s or women’s category, she cleverly responded that she wanted to win the “absolute category.”

None of the sisters ultimately reached Laszlo’s highest goal of becoming the overall world champion, but all were outstanding. In 1996, Susan participated in the women’s world championship, and won. Sofia peaked at the rank of international master, a level down from grandmaster. Judit went furthest, climbing up to eighth in the overall world ranking in 2004.

Laszlo’s experiment had worked. It worked so well that in the early 1990s he suggested that if his early specialization approach were applied to a thousand children, humanity could tackle problems like cancer and AIDS. After all, chess was just an arbitrary medium for his universal point. Like the Tiger Woods story, the Polgar story entered an endless pop culture loop in articles, books, TV shows, and talks as an example of the life-hacking power of an early start. An online course called “Bring Up Genius!” advertises lessons in the Polgar method to “build up your own Genius Life Plan.” The bestseller Talent Is Overrated used the Polgar sisters and Tiger Woods as proof that a head start in deliberate practice is the key to success in “virtually any activity that matters to you.”

The powerful lesson is that anything in the world can be conquered in the same way. It relies on one very important, and very unspoken, assumption: that chess and golf are representative examples of all the activities that matter to you.

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Just how much of the world, and how many of the things humans want to learn and do, are really like chess and golf?

Psychologist Gary Klein is a pioneer of the “naturalistic decision making” (NDM) model of expertise; NDM researchers observe expert performers in their natural course of work to learn how they make high-stakes decisions under time pressure. Klein has shown that experts in an array of fields are remarkably similar to chess masters in that they instinctively recognize familiar patterns.

When I asked Garry Kasparov, perhaps the greatest chess player in history, to explain his decision process for a move, he told me, “I see a move, a combination, almost instantly,” based on patterns he has seen before. Kasparov said he would bet that grandmasters usually make the move that springs to mind in the first few seconds of thought. Klein studied firefighting commanders and estimated that around 80 percent of their decisions are also made instinctively and in seconds. After years of firefighting, they recognize repeating patterns in the behavior