How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (21 page)

But in the fall of 2009, Justus Williams arrived at IS 318, and the composition of the team began to change. Justus, who lived in the Bronx, was a cool kid, pensive and rugged, tall and dark-skinned and solidly built. He spoke quietly, and he could be shy around strangers, but he moved with a smooth confidence through the halls of IS 318, one of the few middle schools in the country where being a chess champion earned you respect rather than wedgies. Justus had started playing chess in third grade at PS 70 in the South Bronx, through Chess-in-the-Schools, and his teachers had recognized early on that he was a player of great promise, eager to learn and unusually able to focus and concentrate. Chess-in-the-Schools paid for chess tutors to work with him privately, and his mother, who believed that Justus was destined for greatness, did everything she could to help him improve. By the time Justus started sixth grade at IS 318, his rating was above 2000, hundreds of points higher than any previous incoming student Spiegel had taught and quite close, in fact, to Spiegel’s own rating. And while Justus was clearly the best player in sixth grade, there were two other students who arrived with him at IS 318 who also had substantial chess experience: Isaac Barayev, a son of Russian immigrants from Queens who entered sixth grade with a rating of 1500, and James Black Jr., an African American boy from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who had graduated from his local public school with a rating of 1700.

Spiegel had an especially warm relationship with James Black. She had met him when he was still in elementary school, and although his chess ability now rivaled hers, he recognized that she had helped him improve his rating during his time at the school from 1700 to over 2100, a significant leap. James was slight and handsome, with close-shorn hair, a chipped front tooth, and wide, expressive eyes. He was intensely social and loved joking with his classmates. When I visited Spiegel’s class, I often found James at the back of the room playing one game and loudly kibitzing the game next to him, telling the other players what moves they should make and occasionally reaching over and making them himself.

Like Justus, James learned how to play chess in third grade when a Chess-in-the-Schools tutor visited his school. At home, he would practice with his father, who had bought James a chess set from Kmart at the first sign of James’s interest in the game. James Black Sr. was intensely devoted to his son. He once told me that he had made up his mind, even before James was conceived, that his first child, whether a boy or a girl, would be named James Black Jr.

James Sr. grew up in the Bronx and did well in high school, but he dropped out of college after two years. His dream had always been to join the Marines, but when he left school, he landed a well-paying job behind the deli counter at D’Agostino, the New York City supermarket chain, and he never enlisted. Almost twenty-five years later, Black was still at D’Agostino, still a deli clerk. In his mid-thirties, he’d fallen in love with Tonya Coles, a woman with three children, and together with their baby, James, they formed a blended family. James Sr. told me that he had hoped that his stepchildren would provide good examples for James Jr., but it hadn’t worked out that way. One of James’s half brothers was convicted
of selling drugs when James was a boy and spent almost three years in prison; the other is still in prison for murder, serving twenty years to life. Their problems only increased James Sr.’s focus on his son and his determination that he would succeed. “I tell James, ‘I can only say so much to them,’” he told me early in the school year. “‘But I can say a lot to you. My job is to guide you to the future.’”

James was an inconsistent student at IS 318. His grades were mostly good, but on the statewide achievement tests in sixth grade, he scored a 2, on a scale of 1 to 4, in both math and reading, which meant he was below grade level and in the lowest third of students in the city as a whole. At school, he had a reputation as a troublemaker, and in sixth grade he was often sent to the principal’s office for goofing around in class or saying inappropriate things to his female classmates. Despite his occasional problems in school, though, he was an exceptional student of chess, studying as much as six hours a day, one whole wall of his bedroom filled with thick books of strategy.

6. The Marshall

Six months before the Columbus tournament, I spent a day with James, Spiegel, and half a dozen other IS 318 students at the Marshall Chess Club, which occupies two floors of a beautiful old town house on a tree-lined street in Greenwich Village. The club, considered by many chess players to be the most prestigious in the United States, was founded in 1915 by Frank Marshall, a chess champion of the day, and it has counted some of the best American players among its members. It is an imposing place, especially to young chess aspirants: the ceilings are high, the fireplaces grand, the wood tables polished to a lustrous shine, the walls lined with framed black-and-white photos of legendary players bent over chessboards and sepia-toned group shots of black-tie club dinners from the 1930s.

When Spiegel arrived in New York in her late teens, after transferring from Duke to Columbia, the Marshall was where she hung out, playing in weekend tournaments and soaking up the atmosphere. Now the Marshall offers a few free memberships each year to IS 318, and once a month or so, Spiegel brings a small group of students to play. It is a very different kind of chess experience than what they are used to. Regular scholastic weekend tournaments in New York City are pretty chaotic, hundreds of players and parents stuffed into a public school, moms serving up baked ziti for lunch. Games last only an hour, and IS 318 players usually win or at least do quite well. When students go to the Marshall, though, they generally play in games that last four hours against opponents whose ratings vastly exceeds theirs. It is an intimidating situation for the students, but Spiegel reminds them that the best way to improve your chess is to play against the best, even if they take you apart.

On the fall day I watched James play at the Marshall, he was paired with Yuri Lapshun, a Ukrainian-born international master who was (and is) one of the thirty or forty best players in the United States. In 2000 and 2001, Lapshun was the Marshall club champion, and on the grand wooden plaque on the wall that lists every club champion since 1917, his name is embossed on two consecutive brass plates. Chess games, especially at the Marshall, often offer odd-looking pairings—the moody Goth teenage girl against the bearded and bespectacled math nerd; the aging tweed-clad Village lunatic against the diminutive young Chinese boy—but Black versus Lapshun was one of the odder ones. Lapshun, in his late thirties, was not only three times James’s age but also at least a hundred pounds heavier than him. For most of the four-hour game, Lapshun sat scowling at the board, leaning back in his chair and stroking his thick, retro-Soviet mustache, his big, meaty arms folded over his sizable belly. James sat forward, his chin propped in his hands, threatening to disappear inside his big gray hoodie and oversize jeans, occasionally looking around the room and then back at the board, blinking his long, dark eyelashes. James has a hard time sitting still, and during games he frequently gets up and walks around, checking out other boards, much to the consternation of his teachers and coaches. At one point during his match with Lapshun, James wandered all the way up to the second floor, where Spiegel and I were talking. She yelled at him to get back down to the tournament room and told him that if he didn’t stay in his seat for the rest of the game, she’d call his father.

Lapshun was rated 2546 that day, and James was rated 2068. James was, in every way, outmatched—except, somehow, on the board. As early as the sixth move, James surprised Lapshun with some savvy tactics, and by move thirty, it was clear to the various experts and masters observing the game that James was in a dominant position. He had established a suffocating line of defense across the middle of the board, cutting off one move after another for Lapshun, trapping him in an uncomfortable stasis where almost any move he made would lose him a 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.”