In Another Life, You Might Have Been a Genius

What comes to your mind when you hear the word talent? Probably the image of your favourite sports personality, musician, artist… someone who performs so well in their field that everyone else just assumes they were born that way… gifted by the gods.

If I were to put it in a sentence to describe how 90% of people think of talent, I’d say talent is a natural affinity to a skill that cannot be taught.

To most people, talent is genius and genius is talent.

But that’s most people. There was one man who thought that all that was BS, that talent was a fugazy… fugayzy. That genius could be engineered, maybe even mass-produced.

That man was László Polgár.

In the late twentieth century, Hungarian educational psychologist László Polgár had a single hypothesis that he was willing to die for… outstanding performance, or “genius,” is not a biological accident but a consciously manufactured outcome.

He believed that any healthy infant possesses the baseline physiological capacity to be …