Talent or hard work: How to raise a genius. Biography Main sections of the book

Laszlo Polgar was born in 1947 in Budapest, Hungary. It is known that Laszlo studied music in the Hungarian capital, graduating from the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, and, in addition, he was a student of very eminent mentors - the German bass-baritone Hans Hotter and the outstanding Russian bass, soloist Bolshoi Theater by Yevgeny Nesterenko.

Polgár's career on the big opera stage began in the 1970s, when the young bass joined the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest.

By the way, by that time Polgar had already won several vocal competitions. His first professional work was the opera “Rigoletto” by Verdi (Giuseppe Verdi).

Very soon Polgar became a very prominent figure on the Budapest opera stage, and it was he who began to get the leading bass roles - Osmin in Mozart's opera "The Abduction from the Serail" ("Die Entführung aus dem Serail"); Sarastro in Mozart's opera "The Magic Flute"; Don Basilio in "The Barber of Seville" by Rossini (Gioachino Rossini); King Philip II in Verdi's Don Carlos; and others.

Hungarian opera lovers remember him both as Leporello in Don Giovanni and in Richard Wagner's Parsifal, where he performed Gurnemanz. Perhaps one of Polgar’s most remarkable roles was the role of Leporello, which was simply adored by the public and highly praised by critics. They said that Polgar simply had no equal in this role.

Subsequently, the name of Laszlo Polgar became known on the world's leading opera stages - he appeared on the opera stages of Vienna (Vienna State Opera), Milan (Teatro alla Scala a Milano), Hamburg (Hamburg State Opera), Munich (Munich State Opera) and Paris ( Opera de Paris).

By the way, Laszlo sang for the first time on the international stage in 1981, and it was the role of Rodolfo in “La sonnambula”, the action took place on the stage of the Royal Opera House in London.

Polgar is perhaps best known for his performance of the title role in Bela Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle, although his repertoire includes a truly large number of roles in all major operas. productions. Thus, Polgar sang in “Norma” and “I puritani” by Bellini (Vincenzo Bellini); Verdi’s “Luisa Miller”, “Don Carlos” (“Don Carlos") and "Force of Destiny" ("La forza del destino"); "Tristan and Isolde" ("Tristan und Isolde") by Wagner and many other classical operas.

It is known that the public literally idolized him - in addition to his strong and open voice, Laszlo had a beautiful appearance, and his thick curly hair and the flaming gaze of dark eyes under black eyebrows made more than one opera lovers’ hearts beat faster.

In the late 1970s, Polgar became a professor at the Music Academy in Budapest, and he also taught at the Music Academy of the Swiss city of Winterthur (Hochschule für Musik in Winterthur, Switzerland).

From 1991 to 2009, Polgar was a member of the troupe of the Zurich Opera House. Even after his retirement in 2009, Laszlo continued to work as a guest singer.

His recording of the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, made with the legendary black soprano Jessye Norman and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez, is widely known.

Laszlo Polgar's death came as a surprise and a huge blow to opera lovers around the world. He died in Zurich on September 19, 2010. At the time of his death, the great bass was 63 years old and still in excellent vocal shape. The opera world responded to the death of the great performer with numerous obituaries.

On Monday we will receive from the printing house our new book “Outstanding Results. Talent has nothing to do with it!” It talks about the fact that one cannot judge a person’s potential by the “talented/untalented” indicator. In general, popular wisdom says the same thing: patience and work will grind everything down.

The spark of talent will not ignite without constant training. There is probably not a single area where an opponent is unattainable on the sole basis that he “simply has talent.” And a clear proof of this is the story of the Polgar sisters described in the book - an amazing experiment that refutes the myth of the omnipotence of innate chess abilities and puts tireless work on a pedestal.

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“László Polgar, a Hungarian educational psychologist, put forward the theory in the 60s that great people are made, not born. His research convinced him that all great people were forced to focus on their field and work towards achievements from a young age, and he thought he understood this process so well that he could start it himself. He wrote the book “How to Raise a Genius” and publicly announced the search for a woman who would agree to marry him, have children and help him carry out the experiment. Surprisingly, he found such a woman: she was a Hungarian teacher who lived in Ukraine named Klara.
Soon Laszlo and Klara had a daughter, Zsuzsa, and when she was four years old, the experiment began. Why Laszlo decided to make Zsuzsa a chess champion is unclear. Some see the reason because progress in chess is easy to observe and measure from the very beginning. Others believe that this was due to the male predominance of chess and the common view that women were simply incapable of performing at the highest level. Therefore, chess turned out to be an ideal field in which Laszlo could prove his theory in practice.
Laszlo and Klara devoted themselves entirely to teaching Zsuzsa how to play chess, and when two more daughters, Sofia and Judit, were born, they were also involved in the experiment. All three girls were educated at home - their parents left their jobs to devote themselves entirely to teaching their children. The family library contained ten thousand books on chess. The card index, gigantic for the pre-computer era, contained data about previous games and potential opponents. Other subjects were also good for the girls. At the insistence of the Hungarian authorities, they successfully passed the regular exams in school subjects. The girls spoke several languages ​​fluently. But the main thing was chess - long hours of practice every day.
And here is the result: at the age of seventeen, Zsuzsa became the first woman to pass the qualifying rounds of the competition, then called the Men's World Championship, but FIDE did not allow her to compete.

When Zsuzsa was nineteen, Sofia fourteen, and Judit twelve, they competed as a team in the Women's Olympic Games, and thanks to them, Hungary won for the first time against the USSR; the girls became national heroines. At twenty-one, Zsuzsa became the first female grandmaster (the highest achievement in world chess). Soon after, fifteen-year-old Judith became the youngest grandmaster of either sex, breaking Bobby Fischer's record by several months. She was named the number one chess player in the world and remained firmly in the top ten chess players in the world for many years.

Polgar's story clearly illustrates the principles of deliberate practice, showing what the sisters were able to achieve and what they were not. Overall, of course, their incredible success clearly confirms their father's assumptions. There was no reason to believe that Laszlo or Klara passed on an innate talent for chess to their daughters: Laszlo was a mediocre player, and Klara showed no aptitude for the game at all. Their children's success seems to come from years of hard work, which is deliberate practice in its purest form.
At the same time, it should be noted that the girls achieved unequal success, and not one of them reached the highest level - the world champion title. But these facts do not contradict the principles of deliberate practice. The middle sister, Sofia, did not reach the heights of her sisters (although she was ranked sixth in the world among women); everyone agreed that she was the least preoccupied with chess. US chess champion Josh Waitzkin said that Sophia “played with incredible speed and her mind was as sharp as a needle. But she worked less hard than the rest.” Zhuzha called Sofia lazy. Even Sofia herself admitted: “I gave up easier than Judit. I have never worked as hard as she did.” Likewise, everyone agreed that Judith, who rose the highest, trained the most hard. Another reason for her remarkable success is that by the time Judit was growing up, László had perfected his methods of developing a practice.
As for the fact that none of the sisters became world champions... Let's not think about why in the mountainous world of triumphs everything happens this way and not otherwise. I will only say that, having crossed the twenty-year threshold - the age at which future champions usually still fight for a place at the top - the girls decided that life is not only chess. Sofia once remarked on this matter: “Chess is not too much for me; it's too little." They got married, had children, began to devote time to their families and reduced the intensity of the tireless work on chess that previously filled their lives.

Their stories convinced them that their father was right. Zhuzha said: “My father believes that innate talent is nothing, and 99 percent of success comes from hard work. I agree with him."

***
I'll add a little of my own. There was a child prodigy at our school. It seemed to me that with such abilities we would very soon hear about him as a great scientist. Nothing happened. Over time it went out. Everything came too easily to him for the time being, and there was simply no place for perseverance in his character. And without perseverance, at some point it becomes impossible to develop.

Talent in its pure form is rarely viable. If your drafts are not exhausted in search of the only true word, you are unlikely to surpass Pushkin. If you have excellent physical characteristics, but you do not want to train hard twice a day, you will not see the Olympic team. And you will not be either Mozart or Prokofiev if you do not practice music for hours.

But if you simply like something and are ready to tirelessly improve at it, the results will exceed all expectations.

Zhanara Rakhmetova told Steppe about how talent actually appears.

There is an opinion that talent is an innate quality. If a person plays a musical instrument masterfully or breaks records in sports, as a rule, they say that he has a natural gift. Is it really?

In the first episode of his podcast One Percent (1%), Daniyar Abenov dotted all the i's, saying that science and facts tell a different story - in most cases, talented people are not born, but become. Daniyar took as a basis the books “The Talent Code” by Daniel Coyle, as well as the books “Maximum” by Anders Ericsson.

The Mozart phenomenon

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a great Austrian composer of the classical era. From early childhood, Mozart demonstrated a natural gift for music. From the age of 6, he composed music and performed in European royal courts, being already a serious performer on keyboards and violin.

Here is another story about Mozart, based on real historical data. Mozart's father, Leopold, was himself a good, although less famous, composer. Moreover, Leopold was one of the first people to promote the idea of ​​teaching children music from early childhood.

He even wrote a practical guide for teaching children music. Leopold first honed his teaching skills on Wolfgang's older sister. And later he became closely involved in the musical education of little Mozart, who was then only 4 years old.

Based on records from those years, many historians believe that by the age of 6, Mozart had spent about 3,500 hours studying music. Surviving records show that Mozart began writing music at a very early age; his first compositions were not particularly original, but resembled the work of other composers of the time.

This is quite understandable, because he was still learning. Mozart composed his first serious compositions when he was already 15-16 years old, that is, by that time more than ten years had passed since the beginning of his studies. It turns out that in fact Mozart was by no means born a brilliant musician. He became one thanks to his father.

Laszlo Polgar's experiment

In the 1960s, Hungarian psychologist Laszlo Polgar studied hundreds of people who were considered geniuses in various fields. Based on his research, Polgar came to the conclusion that any child is capable of becoming a genius in any field with the right amount of support and training. Laszlo decided to prove this with his own children.

Through a marriage advertisement in a newspaper, Laszlo found the mother of his future children who agreed to his bold experiment. The Polgar couple had three daughters. For their experiment, the parents chose chess. All Polgar girls' education took place at home.

What were the results of this experiment?

Already at the age of 4, the eldest daughter, Zsuzsa, won her first chess tournament - the Budapest Championship for girls under 11 years old. At the age of 15, Zhuzha became the first in the world ranking of female chess players. Zsuzsa also became the first woman to achieve the men's International Master Grandmaster standard. With all this, Zhuzha was not the most titled chess player in the family.

The middle daughter, Sofia, at the age of 14, won the men's international chess tournament in Rome, demonstrating a phenomenal result - 8.5 points out of 9 possible. Sofia managed to reach 6th place in the ranking of the strongest female chess players in the world. But despite all these achievements, Sofia was considered a slacker in the Polgar family.

The youngest daughter, Judith, became the most successful among the sisters. And this is not surprising - after all, by the time of her birth, Polgar’s parents had already accumulated experience in raising 2 chess champions. Among Judit's many achievements is the title of International Grandmaster at the age of 15. At that time, Judit was the youngest player, both among women and among men, who was able to achieve this title. Judit remained the strongest female chess player in the world rankings for 25 years, namely until she retired from the sport.

The results of the Polgar family's experiment clearly demonstrated that with enough training, any child can turn into a child prodigy. Since this experiment, other studies have been conducted showing that genes do not predict talent. In particular, not a single combination of genes has been discovered that would be responsible for a person’s success in a particular area.

At the same time, a large number of experiments and studies have been conducted that clearly demonstrate that anyone can become a first-class master in any field, given enough effort and time. So how does this process work? How does talent develop?

With the development of new technologies, scientists have the opportunity to look under the cortex of the brain and understand what happens in our heads as we develop skills and gain knowledge. Since 2005, many studies have shown that there is a directly proportional relationship between training and skill development, as well as the density and structure of white matter in the human brain.

For example, a connection has been proven between the amount of time pianists spent practicing and the density of white matter in their heads. In other words, the more practice, the denser the white matter in the pianists' brains.

White matter provides pathways that are covered with myelin, a white fatty tissue. Myelin's job is to allow the electrical signal to travel through the neuron without allowing the signal to lose its strength.

It is myelin that is responsible for the development of neural networks in the brain. It is he who helps us acquire and improve skills by improving the functioning of neural networks.

The longer you develop a skill, the denser the myelin coating becomes. And the denser the myelin coating around the pathways, the stronger the skill. Be it sports, dancing, singing, playing a musical instrument or any intellectual skill such as speed reading. All this can be learned by “winding” enough myelin.

However, not every activity or training can lead to talent. To develop talent, you need deliberate and focused practice, multiplied by several thousand hours.

What is “deliberate and deliberate practice”? Experts agree on several elements of this practice. Of these, 5 main ones can be distinguished:

First- It is very important to work with an experienced teacher, instructor or trainer. It is advisable that your mentor already has success in your chosen activity. It is also important that your mentor has experience teaching others - ideally someone of a similar age and level to you.

Second element- this is complete concentration on the process. You need to be constantly turned on during classes, that is, the learning process should be conscious and not automatic. Maintaining a high level of attention continuously is quite difficult. Therefore, experts advise starting with shorter sessions and increasing their duration gradually.

Third element deliberate practice aims to break down the skill being studied into its component parts and work on these components one at a time. Experts also advise training such components at different speeds, slower or faster.

Fourth element- this is repetition. It is necessary to exercise as often as possible, especially as you age. If you do not train often, at some point this will cause the layer of white fatty tissue (myelin) to become thinner and a high level of skill will be lost.

And finally fifth Element- this is motivation. Conscious, goal-oriented activities are very labor-intensive. Therefore, it is important to stay motivated in order to maintain such an intense regimen. To do this, it is useful to remember your goal all the time, try to enjoy the process, and rejoice in small victories.

The fact that talent is not given by nature, but that you can create it yourself, is very encouraging. In fact, anyone, regardless of age, can develop any skill with enough effort and patience.

And perhaps you don’t want to become a grandmaster or virtuoso of violin playing, devoting thousands of hours to this, but just, for example, want to “pull up” an existing skill or learn something new, for example, to sing good karaoke or play the piano. guitar.

Once you try these 5 key elements, you will see how effectively they will lead you to your goal. Not everything will work out at first, but with each conscious and focused practice, the results will surprise you.

Once upon a time there lived in Hungary a young scientist, psychologist Laszlo Polgar.

Polgar was convinced that talent is not an innate feature and that it is instilled by upbringing. This belief system was influenced by the works of the American psychologist John Brodes Watson. Polgar studied the biographies of famous geniuses such as Mozart and Gauss, and concluded that children from an early age can show extraordinary results if they study systematically and intensively.

Laszlo Polgar with his daughters / polgarjudit.hu

Laszlo Polgar studies giftedness and writes articles and books on the topic. He is confident that any child can be turned into a genius. With his works, he attracts the attention of a young girl, Clara Altberger, and after a long correspondence, he marries her.

I went to Hungary to visit my uncle and there, of course, I met Laszlo. He, like me, was studying to be a teacher and already on our first date he began to tell me how brilliant our children would be. He said that geniuses should begin their careers from early childhood, like Mozart. We corresponded for another year and a half, and then I finally agreed to become the mother of brilliant children.

Clara Polgar

How did you meet your soulmate?

Chess

Which field should you choose for your future geniuses? Laszlo initially settled on mathematics, but later changed his mind. And I chose chess.

Why chess? Laszlo himself says that in chess you can evaluate a child’s success from the very first days, because children constantly compete with each other.

Chess players also like to say that chess is a fusion of science, sports and art.

• The science: Chess players develop hundreds of opening variations in the silence of their offices in order to surprise their opponent. Now, with the advent of supercomputers, many batches are completed at the level of home preparations.
• Sport: often opponents sit for 10 or more hours at the board.
• Art: when a chess player sacrifices almost all of his pieces and wins with the help of a subtle combinational motive. It’s not for nothing that chess problems are called studies.

It only remains to add that Laszlo himself was not a strong player.

Sofia

The “weakest” child of the Polgar family. Therefore, about her achievements briefly:

• international master among men;
• No. 6 in the ranking of female chess players;
• world champion among girls under 14 years old;
• vice-world champion among boys under 14 years old;
• two-time Olympic champion.

In the video she beats the famous Viktor Korchnoi:

Susan (Zhuzha)

• Women's world champion 1996–1999;
• international grandmaster among men;
• No. 1 in the women's ranking (first took this position at the age of 15);
• five-time Olympic champion;
• World champion among girls under 16 years old (at the age of 12 years).

Susan interviews young world champion Magnus Carlsen:

Judit

Another person in Laszlo’s place would have calmed down: he had already raised a world champion. Here he is, a ready-made genius. But Father Polgar was not like that. He makes all the necessary settings, “fixes bugs” and releases a new version. He wants to make his daughter the world champion among men!

Meet the youngest, most gifted sister - Judit Polgar.

Judith is the greatest chess player of all time. There was not and does not exist a woman who could come close to her achievements at the chessboard. See for yourself:

• chess player No. 8 in the men's ranking (2005);
• the youngest male grandmaster (15 years old, 1991, surpassing the achievement of Robert Fischer);
• victories over nine world champions (Karpov, Kasparov, Spassky, Smyslov, Topalov, Anand and others);
• Olympic champion.

There could have been much more achievements, but Judit practically did not play with women. She fundamentally competes only with men. Only with the best of men!

Judit defeats Garry Kasparov in the historic Russia vs. the Rest of the World match:

“Fuck normality”

It was under this slogan that Laszlo lived. Well, it seems so to me, at least.

• He got married as part of a scientific experiment.
• He wrote a bunch of books that were criticized, and then went ahead and raised three geniuses according to his system.
• He fought against the system of socialist Hungary, where home schooling of children was prohibited. He pushed it with all his might, communicating with social security services and other “ghouls.”
• He won the right for Judit to play among men, while officials insisted that she churn out easy victories among women.

Is he normal?

I feel sorry for the children

Someone in the comments will probably write that yes, of course, they are geniuses, but at what cost? Coaching (often by force) from an early age, narrow specialization, home schooling (none of the sisters went to school).

But the sisters have grown up and haven’t turned into clumsy monsters who can only move their figures. They all got married successfully and are raising children. The Polgar sisters make careers, travel around the world, meet other outstanding people, and are national heroines of their country.

Was their childhood taken away from them? The sisters themselves say no. They are sincerely grateful to their “abnormal” parents.

What do you think? How do you feel about early education of children, training a child in a narrow specialty? What are your thoughts on homeschooling? Share in the comments.