Talent Can Be Developed

Our destiny fixed by birth, or can the external environment and people around us change it completely?

In 1965, a Hungarian man named Laszlo Polgar wrote a series of strange letters to a woman named Klara.

Laszlo was a firm believer in hard work. In fact, it was all he believed in: he completely rejected the idea of innate talent. He claimed that a child could become a genius in any field with deliberate practice and the development of good habits. His mantra was, "A genius is not born, but is made through hard work and tireless practice."

Laszlo believed in this idea so strongly that he wanted to test it with his own children - and he was writing to Klara because he "needed a wife willing to jump on board." Klara was a teacher and, although she may not have been as adamant as Laszlo, she also believed that with proper instruction and practice, anyone could advance their skills.?

Laszlo decided chess would be a suitable field for the experiment, and he laid out a plan to raise his children to become chess prodigies. The kids would be home-schooled, a rarity in Hungary at the time. The house would be filled with chess books and pictures of famous chess players. The children would play against each other constantly and compete in the best tournaments they could find. The family would keep a meticulous file system of the tournament history of every competition the children faced. Their lives would be dedicated to chess.

Both Laszlo and Klara accepted each other as life partners. And within a few days, both of them were tied in the sacred marriage bond. Within a few years of marriage, the Polgars were parents to three young girls: Susan, Sofia, and Judit.

Susan, the oldest, began playing chess when she was four years old. Within six months, she?had mastered chess and was defeating adults.

Sofia, the middle child, did even better. By fourteen, she was a world champion, and a few years later, she became a grandmaster.

Judit, the youngest, was the best of all. By age five, she could beat her father. At twelve, she was the youngest player ever listed among the top one hundred chess players in the world. At fifteen years and four months old, she became the youngest grandmaster of all time- younger than Bobby Fischer, the previous record holder. For twenty-seven years, she remained the number-one-ranked female chess player in the world.

Looking at the childhood of the Polgar sisters, it seemed that their childhood was very unusual. But when anyone asked them about their childhood, they always used to say that their childhood was full of enthusiasm and they enjoyed every single moment of their childhood.

Those three sisters loved to play chess. Once, Laszlo reportedly found Sofia playing chess in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Encouraging her to go back to sleep, he said, "Sofia, leave the pieces alone!" To which she replied, "Daddy, they won't leave me alone!"

Our close friends, culture and community, and our parents help us to create a new identity. Our behavior and our habits depend on how the environment around us.

"Recent findings of epigenetics give us an insight, epigenetics shows that the environment around us including our thoughts, behaviors, and feelings, everyone in the surrounding environment including the thoughts of parents, affects our genetic structure."

Talent development goes deeper than straightforward training initiatives about regulations. We Develop Talent by Building Skills. The outcome of all of this is the idea that talent is something that can be developed.