How Children Succeed

piece or a positional advantage. On the fifty-ninth move, Lapshun resigned.

Afterward, on the upper floor, James went over his game with Spiegel, and Lapshun was gracious enough to analyze the game with them, occasionally adding some dark, fatalistic observations that were made somehow darker by his heavy Eastern-bloc accent: “Eet ees hopeless,” he would say, indicating the board. And then, a few moves later, with a mournful shake of his head, “Here I am feenished.” James demonstrated, move by move, how he had blocked off every chance Lapshun had to escape the paralyzing traps he had set for him, and Spiegel was impressed. He had done more than beat an international master; he had outplayed him from start to finish. It was, she told him, “exceptionally deep chess.”

With the victory over Lapshun and some other strong games that fall, James’s rating soared past 2150. His short-term goal was to reach 2200, which is a crucial marker for chess players. When you hit 2200, you are certified by the U.S. Chess Federation as a national master. Justus had become a national master in September, a month before James beat Lapshun. In fact, Justus was the youngest African American ever to make master. It looked for a while as though James, who was five months younger than Justus, would beat Justus’s youngest-black-master record with ease. But then James’s rating seemed to hit a plateau; it actually slipped down to almost 2100 in January, and then it bounced around for a couple of months in the low 2100s. By the time he got on the bus for the trip to the Columbus tournament in April, James had lost his shot at Justus’s record, and his rating was stalled at 2156.

7. Mastery

In Columbus, James didn’t go over his games with Spiegel; instead, he analyzed them with Matan Prilleltensky, a twenty-three-year-old competitive chess player from Miami who had been working that year as a part-time assistant coach for the IS 318 team while he studied for a master’s degree in special education. Prilleltensky’s interest in special ed had its roots in his own diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, when he was a child. He had struggled in elementary and middle school, unable to concentrate in class or on his homework for longer than a few minutes. And then he discovered chess. It was, he told me, the first time he had ever felt able to focus on anything. Chess, which requires hours of patient study, seemed an unlikely pursuit for a person with an attention disorder, but Prilleltensky said that the combination was not as odd as it sounded. “A lot of people with attention issues crave intense experiences and serious stimulation,” he explained. “They want to be absorbed in some sort of all-encompassing pursuit.” For Prilleltensky, chess was in fact the perfect antidote to ADHD; when he sat down at a chessboard, his symptoms all but disappeared.

Prilleltensky became a serious player in high school, reaching a rating of 2000 just after his eighteenth birthday. In college, he continued to play and even won a tournament or two, but he didn’t really improve much, and when he graduated, in 2009, his rating was stuck at around 2100. He wanted to get better, but his chess didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Then in January of 2010, he played in a tournament in Palatka, Florida; he was on the verge of winning the whole thing when he blew a crucial game. He felt crushed by the defeat, and when he analyzed the game afterward with his opponent, a high-school student, he realized that the other guy hadn’t played particularly well—Prilleltensky had beaten himself. It was an awful feeling, he told me later. He was tired of being an unexceptional chess player.

On the way home to Miami, Prilleltensky read a collection of interviews with grand masters that included an e-mail conversation with Jonathan Rowson, the Scottish grand master who had written about the importance of emotion and psychology in chess success. Rowson’s comments seemed to speak to Prilleltensky’s plight—and they also echoed Angela Duckworth’s theory on the crucial difference between motivation and volition. “When it comes to ambition,” Rowson wrote, “it is crucial to distinguish between ‘wanting’ something and ‘choosing’ it.” Decide that you want to become world champion, Rowson explained, and you will inevitably fail to put in the necessary hard work. You will not only not become world champion but also have the unpleasant experience of falling short of a desired goal, with all the attendant disappointment and regret. If, however, you choose to become world champion (as Kasparov did at a young age), then you will “reveal your choice through your behavior and your determination. Every action says, ‘This is who I am.’”

Inspired by these words, Prilleltensky, in late January of 2010, made a belated New Year’s resolution: he would break 2200. He devoted almost a full year to the study of chess, eliminating everything else (except his understanding girlfriend) from his life: no parties, no Facebook, no ESPN, no unnecessary socializing. Just hours and hours of chess. (“This is who I am.”) His efforts paid off; on October 10, 2010, his rating hit 2200 for the first time. He was a national master.

I met Prilleltensky soon after he reached his goal, and what surprised me, as I listened to him talk about it, was that he looked back on those monastic months with not just pride in the result but also pleasant memories of the process. What, I asked him, was so fun about a year of complete immersion in chess? “It was mostly the feeling of being intellectually productive,” he replied. “So much of the time I feel like I’m not really challenging myself or pushing myself, just kind of wasting my brain. I never feel like that when I’m studying or playing or teaching chess.”

I was struck by the word that Prilleltensky used: productive. Spiegel chose the same word when she described for me, a little wistfully, what she had lost when she traded all-night online chess obsession for domestic bliss with Jonathan: “I miss how productive I used to be.”

This was a puzzle. I could appreciate the appeal of mastering chess, just as I could appreciate the appeal of mastering any other skill I wasn’t good at—oil painting, playing jazz trumpet, pole-vaulting—but while I could easily be persuaded that chess was a worthy and challenging intellectual undertaking, productive was the last word I would choose to describe it. Chess players, it seemed to me, were quite literally producing nothing. As it happens, this question had come up in the Rowson interview that sparked Prilleltensky’s quest for 2200. The interviewer asked Rowson if he was embarrassed to have expended such prodigious mental energy to become a grand master “rather than something worthwhile like a brain surgeon.” Rowson acknowledged that “the question of chess being an essentially futile activity has a nagging persistence for me… . I occasionally think that the thousands of hours I’ve spent on chess, however much they have developed me personally, could have been better spent.”

But Rowson went on to defend himself and his fellow chess players, and he did so on essentially aesthetic grounds: “Chess is a creative and beautiful pursuit, which allows us to experience a wide range of uniquely human characteristics,” he wrote. The game “is a celebration of existential freedom, in the sense that we are blessed with the opportunity to create ourselves through our actions. In choosing to play chess, we are celebrating freedom above utility.” In Rowson’s eyes, two chess players facing off across a board were making a unique, collaborative work of art, and the better they played, the more beautiful the result.

In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell brought to popular attention Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s theory that it takes ten thousand hours of deliberate practice to truly master any skill, whether it is playing violin or programming computers. Ericsson based his theory in part on a study of chess mastery. There are no natural-born chess champions, he found; you simply cannot become a grand master without dedicating thousands of hours to play and study. The best chess players started as children, Ericsson discovered; in fact, over the course of chess history, the age at which an aspiring chess champion needed to start playing in order to reach the game’s highest levels had steadily fallen. In the nineteenth century, it was possible to start playing chess at seventeen and still become a grand master. Among players born in the twentieth century, though, no one who started playing after the age of fourteen became a grand master. By the end of the twentieth century, Ericsson found, those who went on to become chess masters had started playing chess at an average age of ten and a half, and the typical grand master had started playing at seven.

The most famous, and notorious, study demonstrating the power of early deliberate practice on success in chess was conducted by Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian psychologist who, in the 1960s, published a book titled Bring Up Genius! The book argued that with enough hard work, parents could turn any child into an intellectual prodigy. When he wrote the book, Polgar was single and childless, and thus in no position to test his theory himself, but he set out to change that, winning the heart of a Hungarian-speaking foreign- language teacher named Klara who was living in Ukraine but was persuaded to move to Budapest by Polgar’s letters, which detailed how together they would raise a family of geniuses.