Gauging the Power of Perseverance and Extent of Unrealized Potential in One Intellectual Domain

Abstract

Human potential and its limits are of broad interest. One issue is whether high-level intellectual performance depends mainly on persistence and extensive practice, or whether genes set widely varying maximum performance levels. Another issue is whether, if genes do limit performance level, how much genetic potential still goes undeveloped in a given domain's participants who progress some way and then stop. International chess is a good test domain because it has objective performance measures, little gatekeeper influence, and abundant longitudinal, population-level data. Performance of 27,362 players entering the international chess domain between 1985 and 1999 was investigated in 6 studies. By June 2022, only about 3% had met the high achievement criterion of grandmaster status, taking a median 9.26 years and 472 internationally rated games to gain the title, far more games than the median all-participant career total of 130. About 67% of those playing over 1,500 games became grandmasters, and almost all grandmasters had achieved the title by 1,500 games. Then, for non-grandmaster participants playing at least 100 but less than 1,500 games, a mathematical model, which predicts future grandmaster performance reasonably well, estimated their unrealized potential. The model projected their learning curves out to over 1,500 games and predicted their peak rating if they actually had played over 1,500 games. By model predictions, perhaps only 10–15% might have achieved the title by persisting. These results show that persistence is important but not all-important because genes may limit maximum performance level. Players also may gauge accurately their ultimate performance prospects.