Excerpt from Blog to Your Talent e-course (lesson 10)

Excerpt from the up-coming e-course “BLOG TO YOUR TALENT” with e-guide and videos.

Lesson 10: Provides Immediate Access to Sources

Blogging has a direct source advantage over normal essay writing. Through a blog you can provide web links to online resources that you recommend. These would be resources that the reader could use to get more details to inform himself further or possibly act on. You are doing your reader a great favor because you are taking the effort to filter for him the best links available. If you take care to provide useful links, your reader will gradually come to respect
you as a well-connected and careful person in your field of talent.

Take Action

Write a post entitled “Resources I like for [name of talent]” and list the current Internet links where you like to visit for your talent. Write a one line description of what each resource is about. Expect to update this post over time with more links as you discover more useful resources.

See this idea in action

Resources I like:
http://jonathansfilmblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/resources-i-like-for-videography.html

 

Daughters Who Have a Skill for Business

girls business startup

A key skill for even the Christian Stay-At-Home-Mom is an ability to trade something of value in the marketplace. Check out this reminder article by VisionaryDaughers.com (the top 10 things girls should study but rarely do) on the art of business worth being developed in daughters who want to be spiritual and who want to know how to efficiently run a household. A great quote from this article is: “In Proverbs 31, even the virtuous woman’s wisdom and kindness are not praised as frequently as her business acumen, industry, and economic profitability, which is why we believe these are some of the most feminine things a Christian woman can study”. This means that a well developed talent in a future homemaker would not be amiss to included some entrepreneurial skills – because a good talent would include not just one household skill, but a combination of several well-chosen skills, with one of them having a value that can be traded in the marketplace.

Benefits to Identifying Sub-Skills of Your Talent

Work
Train your child to clearly identify the specific sub-skills of his talent  so he does not go down educational rabbit trails  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a benefit to training your child to objectively look upon the skills of his talent as separate components that can be individually identified and developed. If for example your child has an interest in bladesmithing, one of the skills that is useful to commercial speed is the ability to weld layers of raw steel for prep work. The mistake would be to sign up your child into your local and traditional 2-year long welding program where ALL the welding skills are taught. That makes it easy to explain to other parents where your child is spending his time, but your child would lose valuable time on his talent plan. Instead, because you have identified the specific sub-skills for the talent, you can pay an expert welder to teach your child on just those few narrow welding techniques in a matter of days.

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Birthday Wishlist Betrays Desire for Talent

Are there signs of interest in your child for a talent of his own to emerge? If you have a personal system in place, ready to channel that youthful energy, you will not have to hope that an appropriate skill-set appears spontaneously. Gideon is now nine years old. See if you can spot some emerging interest in the birthday wishlist of my soon-to-be ten-year old:

wishlist
Gideon’s Wishlist for his 10th Birthday

 

 

 

From Pearl to Diamond Daughters

 

sh15 luxury
Pearls, diamonds, they are all wonderful. But if you could take your daughter to diamond level, would you do it? (Photo credit: Upupa4me)

Many do well by raising their daughters to be pearls of great attraction. A few parents will exceed even that by deciding that they will then take their daughters to the diamond level before they graduate from home. I asked my wife what she thought would be ***practical examples*** of what a diamond level girl could do as compared to a pearl level daughter. Here below are some quick examples of what she came up with. Do you notice how the difference would be due to having a development plan for a homemaking talent in place instead of passively acquiring curriculum knowledge?

 

A daughter who is a “Pearl” is soft, beautiful, and known for her tender luster; she must be careful that the wrong environment does not take advantage of her and crush her.

 

…but a Diamond is a strong, bright, hard; can handle changes well, but is still beautiful to look at; you can easily delegate to her and she doesn’t wilt in a time of crisis.

 

Pearl: can put together a nutritious meal together, on time

 

…but a Diamond could do this: can entertain guests with ease on an hour’s notice using resources on hand

 

Pearl: can initiate thoughtful handwritten thank-you notes

 

…but a Diamond could do this: maintain church and family relationships through encouraging and informative newsletters and blogs

 

Pearl: can make preserves, jams, and jellies for her family from produce picked in her garden

 

…but a Diamond could do this: coordinate, manage and teach food preservation skills for local food exchange club

 

Pearl: can sell handmade jewelry at local craft shows

 

…but a Diamond could do this: carefully research a country-wide market demand for special wool socks and then run an e-bay store targeted to a specific customer group; selling socks whose knitting was outsourced to other homemakers.

 

 

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Adding Up the Talent Hours

adding machine (d)
Keep the vision: your child’s talent hours will add up (d) (Photo credit: Aaron Kyle)

If your child accumulated 300 days a year focused on developing some aspect of his talent for four hours a day, he would easily cross the 10,000 hours of training mark from age 12 to age 22. Consider that a traditional university degree will contribute only 2,400 hours (last two years of college) toward a specific talent, assuming of course he is able to study in a field that supports his talent goals directly. Consider also that the practice level needed to perform in an average middle class paying job probably only requires about 2,000 hours of focused learning vs. your child’s accumulated excellence of 10,000 hours.

Age 12 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 13 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 14 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 15 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 16 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 17 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 18 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 19 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 20 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 21 – 1,200 talent hrs (college year 3)

Age 22 – 1,200 talent hrs (college year 4)

Total: 12,000 talent hours

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Read Like an Action Hero

Cover scan of a Great Comics comic book
Cover scan of a Great Comics comic book (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is your son reading lots of books about his talent, but reading them with only the goal of being able to say he’s read them? This is mistake. If this is so, most of what he reads will be forgotten and unusable in the abundance of details he is acquiring over time. Instead, he must treat books in the spirit of an action hero who has a mission to accomplish (see the Book Blitz Method by Levi Heiple). Your talent driven child must learn to scan his books with an eye to interpreting key information into immediately applicable rules of action within his specific talent focus. The rest of the otherwise good information, he must learn to judiciously gloss over.

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Danger: Hard Work Not the Same as Value

choir-130
Talent caveat: everyone enjoys listening to a choir at least once in a while, but very few will want to pay for what they have already heard many times. Lesson: your talent must be more than just repeat to bring real added value to others (Photo credit: Family Photo Archives)

Teach your hard working and diligent child how not to confuse quantity of hard work to be the same as the amount of value he is bringing to others through his talent. It is the recipients of his talent who will determine how much of a difference it makes to their lives and not the amount of sheer effort that he has to put into it. This explains why often in the arts, it is original content that is rewarded more highly, even if the performers are less technically proficient than more hard working, school-trained artists. It is also true in other fields like business or mystery-book writing. Talent focused children and their parents must not forget that because people have already seen or heard the same type of Country-Western song so many times, fans would rather now pay for a much more different take on that genre, than to simply add another very accomplished repeat to their collection.

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