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Sure enough, evidence shows that although kids and novices learn chess faster if they're smarter, intelligence becomes nearly irrelevant in predicting the performance of adults and advanced players. In chess—like in kindergarten—the early advantages of cognitive skills dissipate over time. On average it takes over 20,000 hours of practice to become a chess master and over 30,000 to reach grandmaster. To keep improving, you need the proactivity, discipline, and determination to study old games and new strategies.

Character skills do more than help you perform at your peak—they propel you to higher peaks. As the Nobel laureate economist James Heckman concluded in a review of the research, character skills "predict and produce success in life." But they don't grow in a vacuum. You need the opportunity and motivation to nurture them.

IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL CLIMB

When people talk about nurture, they're typically referring to the ongoing investment that parents and teachers make in developing and supporting children and students. But helping them reach their full potential requires something different. It's a more focused, more transient form of support that prepares them to direct their own learning and growth. Psychologists call it scaffolding.

In construction, scaffolding is a temporary structure that enables work crews to scale heights beyond their reach. Once the construction is complete, the support is removed. From that point forward, the building stands on its own.

In learning, scaffolding serves a similar purpose. A teacher or coach offers initial instruction and then removes the support. The goal is to shift the responsibility to you so you can develop your own independent approach to learning. That's what Maurice Ashley did for the Raging Rooks. He set up temporary structures to give them the opportunity and motivation to learn.

When he started teaching chess, Maurice saw other instructors line up all the pieces to teach the standard opening moves: king's pawn forward two spaces, followed by knight up one and diagonal one. But he knew learning the rules could be boring, and he didn't want kids to lose interest. So when he first showed up to introduce the game to a group of sixth graders, he did it backward. He put a handful of pieces on the board and began at the endgame. He taught his students different ways to checkmate their opponents. That structure was their first bit of scaffolding.

It's often said that where there's a will, there's a way. What we overlook is that when people can't see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination. To ignite their will, we need to show them the way. That's what scaffolding can do.

By teaching the game in reverse, Maurice lit a fire of determination. Once students knew how to corner a king, they had a route to victory. Once they had a way to win, they had a will to learn. "You don't tell kids, 'Well, you're going to learn patience and determination and fortitude,' 'cause they'll fall asleep right away." He laughs. "You say this: 'This game is fun. Let's go—I'm gonna beat you'....stir their spirit, their competitive fire. They sit down, they start learning the game, and as they become hooked, and they lose a game, they want to win." It wasn't long before Kasaun Henry would lie in bed at night, imagine 64 squares on his ceiling, and play out entire matches in his mind.

Maurice also introduced scaffolding for the players to support one another's development. He taught them creative ways to share techniques: they drew cartoons about chess moves, wrote science fiction stories about chess matches, and recorded rap songs about commanding the center of the board. They were learning to treat a solitary game as a prosocial exercise in teamwork. When a player cried at nationals, it wasn't because he lost; he was devastated that he had let his teammates down.

As they gelled into a team, the players started taking the motivation and opportunity to learn into their own hands. They held one another accountable for recording every move of their games on score sheets so the whole group could learn from individual mistakes. They weren't worried about being the smartest player in the room—they were aiming to make the room smarter.

The previous year, at their first nationals, the Raging Rooks had finished in the top 10 percent despite being short on players due to budget constraints. When Maurice set a goal for them to win the following year, it was the players who took the initiative to plan. Now that they had the skill, they had the will. They created their own makeshift chess camp, spending the summer practicing and reading books. They cajoled Maurice into dedicating his summer off to their training. They had moved into the driver's seat.

In an ideal world, students wouldn't have to rely on one coach for these opportunities. The scaffolding Maurice created was a substitute for a broken system. One parent told him that when she saw her son play chess, she realized she hadn't believed in him. Maurice wasn't just helping his players reach their potential—he was helping their parents and teachers recognize it too.

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Few of us are lucky enough to have a coach like Maurice Ashley. We don't always have access to the ideal mentors, and our parents and teachers aren't always equipped to provide the right scaffolding. My aim is for this book to be that scaffolding.