Scrabble World Champion in 3 Languages

Many of us know Scrabble, the popular word game. The goal is to form words with a random set of 7 letters, each assigned a point level. Whoever ends the game with the most points wins. Many people consider themselves pretty good at Scrabble, however compared to New Zealand's Nigel Richards, every player is inferior.

Nigel Richards is a Scrabble professional, and won 5 world championships in English. Already, this is a spectacular feat. However, after a while, he noticed that Scrabble was becoming boring to him. He decided that it must be because he's over English, so he decided to dedicate months to learning thousands of French words, and later won 2 French world championships.

It was possible for him to win without speaking French, as Scrabble is about knowing words, not comprehension. After 2 years of French world championships, Nigel once again grew bored. See, he was tired of French Scrabble too. Because of this, he decided last year to learn Spanish words. He supposedly learnt over 600,000 words, and this past year, he won Spanish Scrabble world champion.

Richards played Scrabble for the first time when he was 28 years old. He never attended college, and still was able to achieve such a feat: winning 8 Scrabble world championships across 3 languages, 2 of which he did not know how to speak.

The takeaway from this impressive story is the following: even those who may not be educated, even those who may not be conventionally intelligent, and anyone whatsoever can reach their dreams if they put their minds to it.