2012 – Page 2

Need Talent – Signed Not Afraid to Get My Hands Dirty

A modern painter and decorator. — Worried that your son is entering a job market over-saturated with painters? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your child needs a talent, if you find yourself saying:

“My 16 year old son is a very dependable and hardworking young man. He accompanies his father on many jobs in our family run painting business and is becoming a very good painter in his own right. But lately, husband and I have concerned that he will be entering a market already over-saturated with excellent painters with no room for newcomers to make a full-time living. Is all this expertise he has built up lost time?”

Signed, “Not-Afraid-to-Get-My-Hands-Dirty-Mom”

Need Talent – Signed Frazzled Mom

Jonathan

Your child needs a talent if you find yourself saying:

“My 13 year old son is exhausting our family because he has so many interests. I’m glad he is enthusiastic, but we never seem to stick long enough with one activity to make a difference to his schooling or to his ability to become really good at something.”

Signed, “Frazzled-Mom”

Need Talent – Signed I-Got-My-Eyes-On-You

Jonathan

You need your child to develop a talent if you find yourself saying:

“Help! My sweet 16 year old daughter is starting to attract the attention of older homeschooling boys who don’t have a plan beyond working part-time at the local YMCA. She needs a focused talent to expand her world and make her more attractive to eligible bachelors with high expectations.”

Signed, “I-got-my-eyes-on-you-Dad”

Need Talent – Signed Practical Dad

Jonathan

Your child needs a talent, if you find yourself saying:

“My wife is using a great Christian homeschooling curriculum and she is very happy about its emphasis on character development. I’m happy with it too, but my concern is, will good character alone pay the bills?”

Signed, “Practical Dad”

Establish Deep Understanding of History through Child’s Talent

Jonathan

How can you encourage your daughter’s passion for dance using your homeschool history curriculum? Do this by having her consistently study each time period through the focal of dance. Changes in technology, philosophy, beliefs, and culture will be reflected in human activity and dance will be no exception. But by sticking with the single topic of dance, your daughter will not only establish deep pillars of understanding under her own developing talent, she will also be creating powerful mental pegs into each historical era. She will be able to narrate her way through history at a very deep level that is bound to astound.

Do Not Passively Consume

Jonathan

At the airport — Children developing talents depend on their parents to clear the way

Planning to make room for talent development in your child’s life is not the same as creating good study habits, creating good work ethics, or learning a trade while homeschooling. Talent development in your child’s life is building up a set of skills and insights in a field of human endeavor that is so profound that it will cause your child as an adult to one day be a world leader in that area. This means that your child cannot passively consume what is given to him in a curriculum or nonchalantly take whatever summer job presents itself. He needs your authority as a parent to make it happen. He needs your willingness to prepare the way to find, use, and manipulate the resources and advantages in his environment to a coordinated purpose.

Talent Is Not Average Performance

Jonathan

Surfer Honor — Talent – so amazing they will want to remember the date on which you reset the standards.

Talent is not average performance. Talent is performance that is so great that it forces a field of human endeavor to reset its expectations and standards as to what can be done. This is why developing talent requires 10,000 hours of training and studying. This is why it is important to start young. This is why you should start your child’s first 100 hours ASAP.

Apply Talent Immediately

Jonathan

Find Ways to Apply Talent – this will train your child to look for how it can be of value to others

Finding a way to apply a child’s talent early on in his immediate environment will be of huge advantage. The first advantage is that it will encourage your child to see his talent impacting others. This will create positive feedback for him to continue with his efforts. The second advantage is that attempting to act out his talent in his environment will require him to modify his talent in such a way that it is welcomed and recognized by others to have practical value to them. Yes, some things of excellence, such as character, must be pursued regardless of outward approval. But when it comes to pursuing an earthly skill set, your child should pursue it in such a way that his talent will provide for him rather than drain him financially in his adult life.

Hi-Jack Your Homeschool Curriculum

Jonathan

Be the captain of your homeschool curriculum – make it serve your child’s talent building.

In order to develop and focus on your child’s talent, you do not need to give up your current homeschool curriculum. Stay with the strengths of your homeschooling method, but modify slightly the individual tasks and goals toward supporting an on-going talent. For example, if your child’s talent focus is related to music and your worksheet tells your child to “Discuss the theme of grief in this English literature book”, you can modify it to your purpose. Modify it to say instead “Discuss the theme of grief in the music composed during the era of this English literature book.” Boldly hi-jack your curriculum to make it the servant to your child’s talent.

Difference Between Mediocre, Great, and World-Class Talent

Jonathan

The difference between mediocre and great talent performance is due to the number of practice hours. That observation is not surprising. What is surprising is the reason for the difference between great performance and knock-down world-class performance, according to Geoff Colvin in his book “Talent is Overrated”. The difference is due entirely to participating in more systematic and planned-out type of practice hours. Doubling from 2 to 4 hours of daily practice will make you great, but doubling from 4 to 8 hours will not make you a world-class performer.

Four Practice Principles: Deliberate, Intelligent, Distributed, Over-the-Top

Jonathan

1. Deliberate Practice: practice like you mean it! Push yourself to do it better than the last time around

2. Intelligent Practice: study how each individual part of your talent can be improved and make an actionable plan to improve each part

3. Distibuted Practice: borrow and copy pieces of excellence from fields of talent other than yours and recombine into your own performance

4. Over-the-Top Practice: practice 4 hours each workday of every week for 10 years and you will cross over the 10,000 hours

Use History Study Time for Building Talent

Jonathan

Waterloo Poem — Historical Poem Example for History Study of Napoleonic era if Poetry is the chosen talent to develop

Make your standard history study time serve hours of building up your child’s chosen talent focus:

If music is talent focus, then study composers of the Napoleonic era
If chemistry is talent focus, then study scientific theories of the Napoleonic era
If poetry is talent focus, then study children songs and poems of the Napoleonic era

Do NOT just go through the motions memorizing the standard historical timeline without connecting it to the historical roots of your child’s talent.

Education Consumes But Talent Creates

Jonathan

Guitar Lesson — Find a Talent to Develop

Education consumes, but talent creates.

If you can find a talent to develop, then your education will have a worthy master to serve. If the pursuit of education is your only goal, then all hope of talent will be lost. Start today by building your first 100 hours of deliberate talent practice. There will be 9,900 hours more to master.

Talent Statement Grows Over Time

Jonathan

Babysitting Jobs Can be Leveraged to Bigger Things

Possible scenario of a Talent Statement that changes and grows over time because the opportunities grew as the child developed her talent:

(age 13 – First 100 hours of talent building) I will photograph children that I babysit. I will share those pictures in a digital scrapbook for the parents with notes and comments about their children. I will use my blogging and basic HTML skills to do it.

(age 15 – at 1,000 hours) I will photograph landscapes and the children that I babysit while traveling with their families on short weekend getaways. I will blog about nannying children on short getaways. I will give tips on the blog about how to use digital photography and how to be a traveling nanny.

(age 16 – at 3,000 hours) I will vlog about how to travel with children while accompanying families as a nanny on extended vacations or business trips in foreign countries. I will create and sell e-guides for educational games that tutor children of wealthy traveling parents.

Use Your Environment to Start Talent Building

Jonathan

Checking the Details in a Local Craftsman's Workshop — Use Local Resources to Increase Talent

Start building a talent focus for your child by using the environment you are in. This means use the tools, assets, personal connections, and geography that you have on hand rather than waiting for tools or time you can’t afford today. Create a Talent Statement that will focus your child to act on his first 100 hours of talent building. At the end of the 100 hours, modify the Talent Statement to reflect your child’s increasing skill set and newly discovered opportunities. Keep modifying and refocusing the talent as you uncover your child’s growing potential.

Humble Talent Start is Good for Discovery

Jonathan

Taking to Discover Talent Thread — Take Time to Discover Talent Thread

When you help your child start a journey of 10,000 hours of talent building, it can feel in the beginning like you are riding a bicycle on the backroads, when you would rather be driving on a highway with a big, fast SUV. It feels like that because the beginning is in fact humble and slow. But humble and slow in the beginning stages of building talent gives you time to discover which part of the talent thread you want your child to pursue with bigger, more expensive tools. Don’t over-invest in the big, wrong tool that can get you fast to where you want to go. Stock-pile your energy and money to make bolder investments once your confidence has grown that you are on the right talent track.

Three Classic Failures To Guard Against

Jonathan

These are the three classic failures that parents need to guard against for their child’s success in adulthood:

Failure to prepare for a Christian marriage (typical consequences are: marrying an unbelieving spouse, not wanting children, problems with child rearing)
Failure to prepare for productive work (typical consequences are: work skills that have low $ value or low charity help to others, struggling with basic household skills, discouraging & grinding daily work)
Failure to prepare for higher education with a purpose (typical consequences are: high college debt, corrupted by immorality on campus, useless degree)

The 10ktoTalent.com website is about protecting you from failure #2.

Copy Best Learning Examples

Jonathan

Cherry Pick from The Best Learning Examples

“Cherry pick” the best of other people’s learning styles and adapt them to fit your custom 10,000 hours of talent building for your child. Because you homeschool, you can afford to pick and choose only the best and thereby avoid mediocrity right from the beginning. To do this you have to accept that it is rare to find in one individual all the learning patterns and examples you need to copy, so be prepared to get aggressive about acquiring tips and tricks from many different sources. One family may excel at extracting learning opportunities when out in nature while another may excel at mathematical learning techniques. Copy those friends ONLY in those areas of learning where they excel.

Online Doodling and Sketching Course

Jonathan

Unless your goal is to turn your 10,000 hours of talent into an art focus, then all the sketching ability your child will need can be easily satisfied by an online art doodling course. Our homeschooling family has been following the Mark Kistler drawing program and I’m happy to report you can now get free online lessons at Mark Kistler Online Video Art Academy. You can also order the hardcopy sketching and doodling program entitled Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad and Drawing in 3D with Mark Kistler . This will give your child the confidence he needs to sketch out his ideas and visually document the concepts he is assimilating.

Collect Images of Your Talent Online

Jonathan

Got a Talent Card Collection of your own? 1952 Bowman Baseball Cards (Photo credit: Baseball Collection)

Baseball Card image collections for your child’s talent would be a great way to build visual and emotional excitement for your son or daughter. How can you do that when your focus is actually NOT about building 10,000 hours of talent toward a baseball career? There’s a simple answer: use one of the many new Social Media tools available on the Internet. Two very popular tools for creating and sharing image collections are www.flickr.com and www.pinterest.com

Create an account under your name for your child if he is not old enough to open one under his own authority.