After studying the biographies of hundreds of geniuses, Laszlo had come to a conclusion: geniuses are made, not born. He found a consistent thread across all of these stories: they all started being curious at a very young age and studied intensively. It was an interesting thesis, but how could Laszlo prove that his hypothesis had merit? For that, Laszlo decided that he would utilize his own children.

Lazlo’s wife, Klara, had their first daughter, Susan, in 1969. Susan was hyperactive, always wandering around and getting into trouble. One day, around the age of 4, Susan was rummaging through a cabinet and found a chess set. Susan’s mom had no idea how to play chess, but promised her that Laszlo would teach her the game that evening. When Laszlo’s wife told him about Susan’s interest in the chess pieces and the board, Laszlo became excited. Chess was the perfect activity for their proto-genius: It was an art, a science, and like competitive athletics, yielded objective results that could be measured over time.

Within six months of teaching Susan chess, he took her to a smoke-filled chess club in Budapest. When Laszlo asked if one of the men might be willing to take Susan on in match, they men laughed out loud. Eventually, one agreed. Within a few minutes, this four-year-old girl had crushed her opponent. Sitting with a stunned look on his face, Susan extended her hand to the man to thank him for playing. Her father entered Susan into the city’s girls-under-age-11 tournament. She dominated with a perfect score.

In 1974, they added Sophia to the family and in 1976, Judit came along. Both of the girls became interested in chess when they saw their father teaching their older sister, Susan. Laszlo believed that public education created mediocre minds, so he battled Hungarian authorities for permission to homeschool his children. Laszlo and Klara were very regimented with their daughter’s educations. They structured the day with language, mathematics, fun and, of course, chess.

In terms of languages, they taught all their daughters to be multilingual by making sure they could fluently speak Hungarian, German and English. Today, Susan speaks seven languages fluently. In terms of mathematics, the girls were working on calculus in their early teenage years. In terms of fun, they swam occasionally, played Ping-Pong, and had a 20-minute breather everyday just for telling jokes. But once the school day was done, they flocked to the chessboard.

The brain has three tasks to carry out when playing a game of chess. First, it must comprehend the rules. Each piece moves according to its own powers and restraints. Second, it must analyze potential moves, which involves envisioning different configurations on the board. Finally, the brain must decide which move is most advantageous. This final task requires critical thinking in the visual-spatial realm, a skill common among heavily right-brained individuals.
Neuroscientists have found that testosterone is a major factor in heavily right-brained individuals, which may explain why women have classically struggled to find success in the world of chess. However, Laszlo’s theory that geniuses are made, not born, made him ignore all of this research. To him, it didn’t matter whether you were a girl or a boy, right-brained or left-brained. What mattered was how you nurtured the individual.

Their house was chess factory. All the girls became obsessed with playing the game. Laszlo once found Sophia in the bathroom in the middle of the night, a chessboard balanced across her knees. He scolded her saying, “Sophia, leave the pieces alone!” She replied, “Daddy, they won’t leave me alone!” As Susan found success in tournaments, Sophia and Judit quickly followed in their sister’s footsteps. Eventually, they were not just competing in Hungary, but all over the world.

In 1985, the girls travelled to a tournament in New York. At 16, Susan crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. Sophia, who was 11, swept most of the games in her section. But it was 9-year-old Judit who drew the most gawkers of all. Judit took on five players simultaneously and beat them all…blindfolded.
When a grandmaster plays chess, the areas responsible for long-term memory and higher-level processing are activated. Chess titans have anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 configurations committed to memory. They are able to quickly pull relevant information from this mammoth database. With a mere glance, a grandmaster can then figure out how the configuration on the chessboard is likely to play itself out.

In 1988, when the girls were 19, 14 and 12, the Hungarian Chess Federation allowed the family to go to Greece to compete in the Women’s Olympiad. Playing together as a team, Susan, Sophia and Judit brought home the first win against the Soviet Union in Hungary’s history. It permanently changed their lives. Upon returning home, they were welcomed as national heroes. Sponsorships poured in. Susan compared it to winning the lottery because her family could afford a summer house and a car, which in a communist country was a big deal.

From there, the girls started travelling everywhere. They would compete in tournaments held in 40 countries around the world. Sophia, the most naturally talented of all the girls, had a glorious moment in a 1989 Italian tournament when she finished ahead of five grandmasters in a record-breaking performance that became known as the “Sac of Rome.”
In 1991, when Susan was 21, she became the first woman ever to earn the designation of Grandmaster, the World Chess Federation’s title for top-ranked players. Judit picked up the honor the same year, at age 15. She was a few months younger than Bobby Fischer was when he won the title. When men talk about playing against Susan and Sophia, they describe how their play is often elegant and beautiful, very different from a man who is generally only focused on winning.

Judit, on the other hand, plays like a man. Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, once described chess as “The most violent of all sports. The only goal is to prove your superiority over the other guy.” When Judit was 15, Pal Benko, a former Hungarian chess champion who coached the Polgar sisters, said of the Judit: “She is dangerous. She doesn’t play chess like a woman.”

Judit is considered the greatest female chess player of all time. She’s the only woman to have been a serious candidate for the World Chess Championship, in which she participated in 2005. She reached a peak world ranking of No. 8 in 2004 and is the only woman to be ranked in the top ten of all chess players. She was the No. 1 rated woman in the world from January 1989 until her retirement in 2014. Even more impressive, Judit has defeated eleven current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess.

So I pose the question to you: Was Laszlo Polgar correct? Are genius made, not born? I mean, think about it. He studied 400 great intellectuals from Socrates to Einstein and he has this watershed moment where he believes with the right nurture and environment, anyone has the potential to become a genius. He sets out to create a genius and each of his daughters becomes incredible chess players. Indeed, his youngest daughter becomes the greatest woman chess player of all time.

What Laszlo realized is that human beings are not static creatures. All humans harbor this amazing potential inside of themselves. We simply need the right nurture and environment to unleash that potential. In this way, I think Laszlo’ theory doesn’t just apply to children. This is true of people at any age. But let’s be honest, change for an adult can be much harder than change for a child. Children simply accept the world that is handed to them. For Judit Polgar, the third daughter, the world she was born into was one where everyone played competitive chess, so she accepted that as her reality.

When it comes to adults, accessing our full potential feels a lot harder to pull off because we have so many life-experiences under our belts that can limit the way we see ourselves. For instance, you might have the potential within yourself to be super creative and write an amazing novel. However, if you’ve been told your whole life by the people around you that your ideas are silly and you have no business being an author, you might not believe yourself capable of such a feat. Your potential is limited by your negative experiences.

So the question we have to consider today is how can we access that potential that is buried deep inside of us, even when it feels inaccessible. In the Old Testament scripture that we read today, God sends Jeremiah to a potter’s workshop to observe the potter as he creates his ceramics. As Jeremiah watches, the vessel the potter is making of clay falls apart in his hands and is reworked it into another vessel.

Then God says to Jeremiah: “Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?” What this verse is telling us is that God can mold and reform our hearts into something different and better than we were before. In other words, with God, change is possible. Like the potter who takes the clay and sees the potential of it to become a beautiful vessel, God has that same ability to reform us into something beautiful. The question is: How does God do this?

Well, the key to this transformation can be found in our second scripture where Jesus calls Matthew the tax collector. Here is a Jew who was collecting money for the Roman Empire. He was seen as a traitor to his own people. He was despised because he was working for the enemy. Clearly, whatever has happened in his life has led him to make some pretty poor choices.

But then, Jesus takes him and brings him into his crew and makes him one of the disciples. He sees a potential in Matthew that no one else can see. Indeed, he sees a potential that Matthew doesn’t see in himself. Jesus understands that with a lot of work and investment, this guy can do a lot of good in the world. So Matthew begins walking around with Jesus. He starts listening and learning from Jesus, and, slowly, over time, he starts to blossom into one of Jesus’ most important disciples as his recollections are recorded in the gospel we read this morning.
But what happens to allow this to occur? Jesus changes Matthew’s environment. He takes Matthew out of the tax booth and introduces him to an entirely new way of seeing the world. This is what unleashes his potential. And this is exactly what Laszlo Polgar predicted with his children. What makes the difference between a child who reaches their potential and the child who falls short of their potential is their environment.

Therefore, the same is true for adults. If an adult is struggling, usually that’s because of the environment in which they find themselves. I think one of the best examples of this comes from the Vietnam War. A Time magazine report estimated that some 20 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam had become addicted to heroin while fighting the war. The drug was accessible and being traumatized in a war zone, many of the soldiers chose to numb themselves out.
There was a huge fear that when these men returned to the States that they would begin looting and stealing to pay for their habit. But that didn’t happen. In fact, 95 percent of the addicted soldiers simply stopped using heroin when they came home. All they needed to do was to change their environment. After they shifted from a terrifying war to being at home, surrounded by family and friends who loved them, they no longer needed the heroin to cope.
Sometimes to reach our potential, we need to shift our environments in small ways. Other times it takes big shifts. The most important thing for you to understand is that if you’re struggling, if you’re not doing well and finding it hard to cope, if you’re not reaching your potential, you need to examine your environment and ask yourself, “What’s holding me back? What are the factors that are causing me to struggle and what can I change to make sure that I move my life in a positive direction?”

Part of the reason why you come to a place like the church is because we try to create an environment where we help you see your potential as a human being. Like the potter in Jeremiah, you can change. God can help you to become remolded into something completely new. The question is are you open to that change?
When Jesus asked Matthew to come follow him, he could have remained where he was. He could have been too scared to get up out of his chair, but he took a chance and that choice changed his life completely. That’s what I want from you today. I want you to take a chance. Even if change seems scary, trust me, it’s worth the risk because all that potential inside of you is waiting to be unleased. Don’t allow all that potential to go to waste because you’re too scared to act. If you allow your heart to become the clay in God’s hands, I think you will be amazed at the person you can become. Amen.