Year: 2013

Three Types of People: The Manager

Levi Heiple

 

Captain Stephen Coad
Are you adapting your child’s talent development so it is compatible with his manager’s bent? (Photo credit: Helen Vercoe)

Guest Post by Levi Heiple (continued from Three Types of People-Which One is Your Child?):

Is your child’s dominant trait, the manager’s trait?

Managers are past-oriented. They see people as problems that make big messes that need to be cleaned up.

Managers are typically very good students. The reason for this is not necessarily because they are interested in the material, but because they derive a great satisfaction out of being responsible and doing things correctly.

Managers are needed everywhere. They keep things in order. Like successful entrepreneurs, good managers are also envied. No one likes the star student. Nevertheless, when a position of great responsibility needs to be filled, it is the exceptional student–not the mediocre student–that gets the job (or at least should get the job).

Here are some signs to look for to determine if your child is a manager type.

  • He almost always does exceptionally well in his school work
  • He needs very little “parental incentive” to complete his assignments
  • He is very well-organized (e.g. tidy desk, clean room, well-labeled papers)
  • He is very concerned about whatever grading system is being used, and how he can get the best grade.

Managers thrive on responsibility more than mastering any particular skill. The best thing a teacher can do for a manager-type student is to give him real-world responsibility. School provides a simulation of responsibility, but real-world responsibility will give him much more satisfaction and help him get a head start on his career. For example, instead of just giving him math problems, try giving letting him manage an aspect of the household’s budget.

 

About Levi Heiple

Levi Heiple is a writer/entrepreneur who specializes in electronic training and support systems. He connected with Jonathan Harris after being asked tutor his son, Caleb. You can sign up for Levi’s free weekly tip on “reading for innovation” at BookBlitzMethod.com. You can find his professional website at LeviHeiple.com.  You can find his web design service at WebPromoPackage.com.

Learn More

For more tips on teaching young entrepreneurs:

For more information on the types, click on Jonathan’s affiliate book link:

 

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Three Types of People: The Technician

Levi Heiple
Industrial Designers Society of America Annual...
Is your child’s dominant trait, the technician’s trait? (Photo credit: Kris Krug)

Guest Post by Levi Heiple (continued from Three Types of People-Which One is Your Child?):

Is your child’s dominant trait, the technician’s trait?

The technician lives in the present. He sees people as fretters and fussers that never actually get anything done. The technician loves his work (assuming he has found his talent) and likes to keep his life simple (so he can focus on his work).

The vast majority of people are technicians. They will likely be average students, perhaps excelling at one or two subjects. Some may even be poor students because they are only interested in working on what they are good at. A technician’s success and happiness in life will depend largely upon finding his talent (usually one, perhaps two or three), and developing that talent to the point of mastery.

Because there are so many areas that one can have a talent and achieve mastery in, it is difficult to describe the technician in general terms. The simplest way to determine if your child is a technician is to  first determine that he is NOT either an entrepreneur or a manager. Then figure out what he enjoys doing the most. Give him the resources he needs to master that skill. Show him how what he is learning in his general education will help him to become better at his particular craft. Then show him how to live a simple life.

About Levi Heiple

Levi Heiple is a writer/entrepreneur who specializes in electronic training and support systems. He connected with Jonathan Harris after being asked tutor his son, Caleb. You can sign up for Levi’s free weekly tip on “reading for innovation” at BookBlitzMethod.com. You can find his professional website at LeviHeiple.com.  You can find his web design service at WebPromoPackage.com.

Learn More

For more of Levi’s tips on teaching young entrepreneurs:

For more information on the types, click on Jonathan’s affiliate book link:

 

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Three Types of People–Which One Is Your Child?

Levi Heiple
Start-up office's hall
In his adult life, your child will likely be acting mainly as just ONE of the three types of people that Gerber explains are needed to make work life function. (Photo credit: Aleksandar Ratkovic and Altiona.com)

Guest Post by Levi Heiple:

In 1986, Michael E. Gerber wrote a groundbreaking business book called The E-Myth. This was later revised and published as the more famous E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to do About It. The book is regarded for its insights on how to plan, manage, and grow a small start-up business and turn it into a franchise business. “Work on your business, not in your business” was the key motto.

However, one insight that is just as powerful, yet often overlooked, is Gerber’s insight into human personality.

Gerber writes that inside each of us is really three different persons:

  • The entrepreneur – dreams and plans for the future and sees opportunities
  • The manager – craves order and pragmatically solves problems
  • The technician – enjoys work in the present and loves to get things done

The idea of three persons in one should sound familiar to anyone acquainted with biblical theology. The Scripture teaches that God is trinitarian: the Father who plans and wills all things (the entrepreneur), Christ whom was given all things and brings all things under subjection according to the Father’s will (the manager), and the Holy Spirit who carries out the will of God in the present (the technician). Since humans are made in the image of God, it should make perfect sense to biblical thinkers that we find a trinitarian aspect within our own personhood.

Though we each have a three-in-one aspect to our personalities, we will find that people tend to have a dominant “person” that directs their behavior. Identifying which aspect is dominant in your child can be a critical component in structuring his education process.

About Levi Heiple

Levi Heiple is a writer/entrepreneur who specializes in electronic training and support systems. He connected with Jonathan Harris after being asked tutor his son, Caleb. You can sign up for Levi’s free weekly tip on “reading for innovation” at BookBlitzMethod.com. You can find his professional website at LeviHeiple.com.  You can find his web design service at WebPromoPackage.com.

Learn More

For more of Levi’s tips on teaching young entrepreneurs:

For more information on the types, click on Jonathan’s affiliate book link:

 

 

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Fairy Tale Treats For You

Jonathan

Dear Friends of 10ktoTalent,

I have a treat I want to share with you. Here below is a list of 15 of my favorite fairy tales that have beautiful illustrations. They have made me and my younger children smile over the years. I have read and enjoyed hundreds of fairy tales, but these are the top ones that also include gorgeous visuals or whimsical graphics. It is sure to please girls and boys from ages to 4 to 12 years of age.

The first column is the name of the fairy tale, the second column is the author or illustrator, and the third is the ISBN number. Make sure you use the ISBN if you can because they are so many retellings of the stories that without the numbers you might not find the ones I recommend. You can plug the ISBN number into Amazon and many other online books search tools to get the exact version I am referring to.

If you are going on vacation or wanted to treat a friend with a box of sure-fire fairy tale classics, this is the surprise box of books I would send them. Click on my affiliate link to Amazon and use the list below if you want to skip through the inferior ones on the market (forget the ones for example that are re-told by celebrities). Go straight to the good ones.

The Little Red Hen Jerry Pinkney 0803729359
Rumpelstiltskin Paul Zelinsky 0525442650
Rapunzel Paul Zelinsky 0142301930
Puss in Boots (Sunburst Book) Fred Marcellino 0312659458
The Five Chinese Brothers (Paperstar) Claire Huchet Bishop 0698113578
Cinderella K.Y. Kraft 1587170043
The Twelve Dancing Princesses Marianna Mayer 0688080510
The Gingerbread Boy Paul Galdone 0547599404
The Three Billy Goats Gruff Paul Galdone 0395288126
The Three Bears Paul Galdone 089919401X
Snow White Paul Heins 0316354511
Hansel and Gretel Rika Lesser 0698114078
Jack and the Beanstalk Steven Kellogg 0688152813
Little Red Riding Hood Trina Schart Hyman 0823406539
The Sleeping Beauty Trina Schart Hyman 0316387088

 

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Your Child Will Do Better Than You

Jonathan
Father with child
Don’t make your child retrace the same educational path you took if you want him to outperform you in his adult life  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Do you believe that your child will indeed DO BETTER than you in his or her adult life?

If so, then would you also agree that in order to do significantly better than you, your child MUST NOT retrace your same educational path?

Think for a moment the implications of the hope you carry: if your child has the same reading list, and has the same math classes, the same history courses, etc. then it stands to follow that your child will not be able to rise above your own current accomplishments if he starts his adult life with the stock knowledge and experience you had. Your child’s knowledge and experience would not be different enough to change his life that much more than yours. So this means you need to take a hard cold look at somehow making your child’s experience significantly different enough to yours for your hope to become a reality.

Pop Quiz:

Is your child’s educational content different enough to be better than the content you learned as a child?

Are your child’s learning methods and techniques better than the ones you used as a child?

Is your child apportioning his time between different subjects in a much more judicious way than the way you did it as a child?

Is the strategy for choosing one set of classes over another set different enough from the one your parents used in determining what you should study?

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Parable of the Pottery Makers by Ted Orland

Jonathan

 

Parable of the Pottery Makers
The Parable of the Pottery Makers is found in the book “Art and Fear” co-authored by David Bayles and Ted Orland

Recently one of my sons was going through a discouraging patch of inspiration in regards to the building up of his talent. In addition to my fatherly soft-and-tough pep talk about persevering and not giving up, I also repeated back a parable I had heard which also made complete sense to him – and brought a smile back to his face. That story was the Parable of the Pottery Makers as it originally was told in the book “Art and Fear” and relayed in the book “The First 20 Hours.”

This particular son, who is the most perfectionist of all my children, will tend to research and analyze the details of a new skill to the point that he becomes paralyzed by feelings of inadequacy and as a result never gets started actually practicing what he has learned. This is is why I recommend that in the beginning, as a parent, you shield your child from too much outside scrutiny so that he isn’t frozen into inaction. Encourage your child to get his hands dirty as soon as possible and to stumble (safely) through as quickly as possible in order to break beyond the first baby-step problems that a newbie has to go through.
Click my Amazon affiliate link below to get your copy of “Art and Fear”:

Art & Fear

Turn Socrates into Talent Time

Jonathan
IMG_2911
You can turn every standard hour of history learning into an opportunity to push his talent forward.

How do you turn a standard history lesson on Socrates into an opportunity to build talent?

I will share with you how my 15 year old son is using history curriculum to push his talent forward. At the end of each hour of study for his Western Civ class, he allots 10 to 15 minutes to producing a single visual graphic that conveys one specific message of that lesson. This daily exercise forces him to focus on speed and efficiency in the use of his Adobe photo editing tools and forces him to wrestle abstract concepts into modern images that are attractive and yet still clearly convey a message that others can understand. Those two skills are being daily trained because the history gives him the necessary fodder to train himself to convey value and meaning, instead of just playing with visual effects that have no purpose. The side benefit to being talent driven first is that history is much easier to assimilate (a.k.a. “pegged” to his talent) because he has to interpret its message in a relevant manner each and every time.

Struggle Rewires the Brain for Talent

Jonathan
EEG with 32 elektrodes
Your child’s brain rewires itself to be faster and better the more he decides to struggle and work through a specific skill. It is the struggle itself that creates the improvement for his talent.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Teach your child to believe that it is in fact the struggle and the wrestling that is growing his brain to match the talent he wants to have. Teach him to disbelieve the popular, but completely FALSE notion that as soon as something is not easy, it therefore must mean he should not pursue that talent.

Unfortunately, as parents if we buy into that popular false notion then we will automatically assume that what is first easy thing to do (hey, look honey, we can sign up Billy into soccer camp!) and irrelevant (wow, I can have Susie learn to play the Ukelele because old Mrs. Winston is providing cheap lessons on Thursdays) is what their long term talent will be.

This is the truth about the stages of learning and talent:
1) learning the basics of a talent is a struggle
2) your brain changes in response to your effort and practice and rewards you by gradually and literally rewiring your brain for those particular tasks
4) eventually what was difficult becomes so effortless that it frees you to no have to think about the lower skill levels of your talent
5) friends and relatives then think your child was born with that gift without giving you or your child credit for all the hard work and planning you put in

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Break Down the Vision into Objectives for Today

Jonathan
Vision translated into objectives today
Our child waits on us to think about his future for him until such time as he is fully able to take charge. This means acting on opportunities for him today.

 

Break down the talent vision for your child, your parental vision, as big and blurry a cloud as it may be today, down into smaller objectives that are nearer to earth and that can be concretely reached at an earlier age.

If you sense that your child’s long term talent after the age 0f 18 will have an engineering bent related to it, then you will want to start coming up with intermediate objectives that you can reach by the age of 16 (perhaps finishing Calculus). And in order to reach those objectives by age 16, you will want to set even still smaller goals now for him to reach by age 14 (perhaps participating in local math clubs). When you have reached the age 14 objectives, perhaps new and even better opportunities will emerge by that time that will allow you and your child to come up with more specific long-term talent goals than just vague engineering. Perhaps by age 14, a fascination for how telescopes and microscopes work will have grown to such a point where you both agree that he would do well to now focus more narrowly on the science of optics instead of engineering science in general.

Six Common Questions by Homeschoolers

Jonathan
Good morning from #lakecalifornia via 10ktotalent
When your child’s daily hard work really does have an end goal in mind that is just for him, it feels like blue skies ahead.

Studying and learning with a meaning instead of becoming a recipient of data dumping, can make all the difference in child’s life. See if a focus on building real talent your child’s life can be a cure to one of these common questions:

  • How do I match my homeschool to my child’s learning style?
  • What kind of daily routines can I copy that make sense in our home?
  • How do I awaken my child’s entrepreneurial spirit?
  • What can I do to accelerate my child’s learning so he can finish school sooner?
  • How do I motivate my son who has no motivation to study or do anything serious?
  • (Question as heard from teenage homeschool students) How do I finally become really good at something, instead of always studying?
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Fivejs Curriculum Plan Includes Talent Development

Jonathan
Sprint006 plan
Do you have your custom plan in place for this year’s talent development in your child? (Photo credit: J’Roo)

My friends at the fivejs.com website are purveyors of helpful and nifty tips and reviewers of resources that support homeschoolers. What they also do is boldly post their curriculum plans for each of their children for the up-coming year. In this year’s plan they are showing by their list of choices for their oldest son that they creatively substituting some standard type courses for very specialized ones that push deeper into expertise one of several sub-skills that their son needs to become very, very good at what he hopes to do. Pop Quiz: Do you think this talent focus will make him more or less attractive to immediate employment and college recruiters? If you were the recruiter, would you rather that young man be with or without his talent identity well under way?

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Daily Routine Designer by MOTH

Jonathan
Moth
MOTH – the ultimate guide to desiging your own custom homeschool schedule(Photo credit: Fastin8)

In our early homeschool years, we came across the MOTH manual on how to design daily routines and schedules that restore sanity to your life without foregoing the goals you originally set out to meet. The guide helps you avoid creating daily routines that just fill up your day with no real big-purpose. It’s the grind and it’s bad and it typically afflicts new homeschoolers who are trying to out-do the classroom setting by just piling it deeper and meaner in the home. The other extreme is no daily routine at all that engenders sheer chaos when you have many small children living under the same roof. The MOTH daily routine designer is the ultimate customizing guide – it will even teach you how to schedule yourself to be unscheduled!

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Daily Routines that Make Sense for Talented Homeschoolers

Jonathan
Schedule
My son Caleb checking up on our recently updated daily routine that includes some of the standard type courses from the online Ron Paul Curriculum.

Sanity: it’s about creating a daily routine that makes sense because it has a purpose. That’s where I do build in a daily routine for outright pure talent focused activities, independent of whether or not it ties into standard school curriculum. Into the daily routine, I also make room for standard type courses – but I do NOT allow them to dictate the direction of where all this schooling and learning is going to take my sons. For example, if you acquire a superbly designed grammar course and you don’t dominate and dictate its role in your child’s overall plans, you will soon find that the author’s goals will try to crowd out you and your child’s goals. Without you meaning to, the grammar expert speaking through your curriculum starts trying to take direction of your child’s time and priorities. Don’t let that happen. Stay in control as the parent. Instead make that course sit timidly in the corner of the room to come into your child’s schedule only at your beck-and-call.

Math Logbook Includes Notes About Application to His Talent

Jonathan
math log notebook
Your child should log how his traditional course connects and applies to his developing talent.

My son Nicholas, who is 11 years old, has started a new online math course that he is enjoying very much. One of the course goals is for him to keep an personal log of what he is learning in his own words. In this picture you can see him writing in a Moleskin notebook about that day’s lesson and you can also see in the background the whiteboard (propped up on our baby’s high-chair) he uses to teach back to his younger brother what he learned. What you can’t see though is that he is also logging extra notes and thoughts about how the different type of numbers are handled in the coding languages he is learning as part of his on-going coding talent. This is one of the ways he is able to use a traditional content course like the one from Grade 8 Math by Benjamin Richards (available at RonPaulCurriculum.com) to support and develop a stronger control of his core talent.

Weigh Each Course for Talent Building

Jonathan
Scales of Justice Brisbane Courts-1=
Weigh in the balance as to whether that course will help your child’s talent more or less than the other course your child could take (Photo credit: Sheba_Also)

When I look at the 10,000 hour talents I am encouraging my children to develop, I don’t think in terms of the name of a career I am trying to get them into. Rather I think in terms of gradually adding skill after skill onto maybe a traditionally labeled career, yes, but I keep going until the end result is something very unique. So when I am getting my children started on some new courses, as for example from the RonPaulCurriculum website, I don’t just grab whatever is available to fill up my sons daily schedule. I weigh the time commitment of an otherwise well-taught course in the light of whether or not it can help my child build his talent faster or better. This includes supporting skills – so for my son Nicholas, even though he has a plate full of talent building hours right now, I did sign him up for one of the online math classes by Benjamin Richards as I see it as a supporting skill for his programming talent.

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How to Make Your Professor Build Your Son’s Talent

Jonathan
Tom Woods
We are making Tom Woods’ history expertise serve the needs of my son’s 10,000 hours of talent building. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

This week has been an exciting launch for three of my sons into the online world of RonPaulCurriculum.com

My boys are motivated by the no-nonsense content-rich curriculum with a modern format that suits them well: YouTube style talking head, with a strong male expert or full-time professional in the subject matter, with screen shots of key points, replay-able as often as you want.

Yes, but how I am using these courses to push my sons talents forward? For example, on the Western Civilization history course by Tom Woods, one of the first topics was on the history of the Hebrews. So in counter point, my oldest son did his own simple research on the type of Jewish coins used during that time period because his talent interest includes the study and use of money and coins. As he progress through that history course he will continue to intertwine the historical knowledge of that course with the specific historical knowledge of the skills that build his talent.

 

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Sneak Peek for Videos to Blog to Your Talent

Jonathan
Peeping Afgan girls
Free videos for you from the e-course “Blog to Your Talent” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Click on this sneak peek link to see the videos that accompany the e-course “Blog to Your Talent.” Check it out now before it is removed.

List of Videos to Blog to Your Talent

No need to buy the whole e-course if all your child needs is some inspiration to get him going. This is how you can get the talented child in your house to build his portfolio for viewing on the World Wide Web. Enjoy!

 

 

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Proverbs for Steps to Personal Success

Jonathan
Don't Spill the Beans
Saw this at my local coffee shop. It is similar to the Biblical proverb that says: “He who goes about as a talebearer reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy conceals a matter”

As Dad and Mom, we are currently having great discussions with the teenagers in our house on the topic of proverbs (“up a creek without a paddle”, “he who snoozes looses”, “don’t spill the beans”, etc.) How do you stay practical so that you define success in a way you can recognize it in the workplace and in the exercise of your talent? I recommend you download this free e-book entitled “Wisdom and Dominion” written by Gary North about the book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible. Download here: http://www.garynorth.com/WisdomAndDominion.pdf

Excerpts from the introduction:

“In order to persuade His covenant people to become highly motivated to discover, develop, and implement their individual talents in a program of kingdom extension, God offers a comprehensive program of self-improvement. This program is presented in the Book of Proverbs. This book is God’s handbook for self-improvement. There is none like it in the ancient world.”

“There are numerous sub-themes in those proverbs that are devoted to economics.”

“Each of these themes has several proverbs associated with it. All of these themes are important for devising and implementing a lifelong plan of personal success. Among these are:

  • The steps to personal success
  • The standards of personal success
  • Success indicators
  • Failure indicators
  • The function of riches
  • The basis of riches
  • The concept of riches
  • The concept of ownership
  • The nature of economic causation
  • The marks of a biblical economy
  • The purposes of inheritance

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

Jonathan

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

Jonathan

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.