Chess is known as a game of genius. The top young players tend to be whiz kids with the raw brainpower to memorize sequences, rapidly analyze scenarios, and see many steps ahead. If you want to build a championship chess team, your best bet is to do what Dalton did: recruit a bunch of child prodigies and put them through intensive training from an early age.
Maurice did the opposite: he started coaching a group of middle schoolers who happened to be interested and available. One was the class bully. They were mostly B students, and they weren't selected for any special chess aptitude. "We didn't have any stars on our team," Maurice recalls.
Yet as the final round played out, the Raging Rooks managed to hold their own. Two players scored big checkmates, and Kasaun was hanging in there against a much higher-rated opponent. Even if he could pull off an upset, though, the Rooks knew it probably wouldn't be enough. Their first match that round had ended in a draw.
A few minutes later, Maurice heard shouts at the end of the hallway. "Mr. Ashley, Mr. Ashley!" After a long battle in the endgame, Kasaun had defied the odds and beaten Dalton's top player. To everyone's shock, the leading teams had faltered, paving the way for the Raging Rooks to tie for first place. The players erupted in high fives, hugs, and cheers. "We won! We won!"
In just two years, the poor kids from Harlem traveled the distance from novices to national champions. But the biggest surprise isn't that the underdogs won—it's why they won. The skills they developed would eventually earn them much more than chess titles.
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Everyone has hidden potential. This book is about how we unlock it. There's a widely held belief that greatness is mostly born—not made. That leads us to celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But you don't have to be a wunderkind to accomplish great things. My goal is to illuminate how we can all rise to achieve greater things.
As an organizational psychologist, I've spent much of my career studying the forces that fuel our progress. What I've learned might challenge some of your fundamental assumptions about the potential in each of us.
In a landmark study, psychologists set out to investigate the roots of exceptional talent among musicians, artists, scientists, and athletes. They conducted extensive interviews with 120 Guggenheim-winning sculptors, internationally acclaimed concert pianists, prizewinning mathematicians, pathbreaking neurology researchers, Olympic swimmers, and world-class tennis players—and with their parents, teachers, and coaches. They were stunned to discover that only a handful of these high achievers had been child prodigies.
Among the sculptors, not even one was identified as having special abilities by elementary school art teachers. A few of the pianists won big competitions before turning nine, but the rest only seemed gifted when compared to their siblings or neighbors. Although the mathematicians and neurologists generally did well in elementary and middle school, they didn't stand out among the other strong students in their classes. Hardly any of the swimmers set records early on; the majority won local meets but not regional or national championships. And most of the tennis players lost in the early rounds of their first tournaments and took several years to emerge as top local players. If they were singled out by their coaches, it was not for unusual aptitude but unusual motivation. That motivation wasn't innate; it tended to begin with a coach or teacher who made learning fun. "What any person in the world can learn,almost all persons can learn," the lead psychologist concluded, "if provided with appropriate...conditions of learning."
Recent evidence underscores the importance of conditions for learning. To master a new concept in math, science, or a foreign language, it typically takes seven or eight practice sessions. That number of reps held across thousands of students, from elementary school all the way through college.
Of course, there were students who excelled after fewer practice sessions. But they weren't faster learners—they improved at the same rate as their peers. What set them apart was that they showed up to the first practice session with more initial knowledge. Some students got a boost from already having a grasp on related material. Others had parents teach them early or got a head start teaching themselves. What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.
