Driving your child to and from locations is an opportunity to talk on regular basis with your child away from the hubbub of family life at home. This tip is given to me by another homeschooling Dad, Will G., as an additional benefit of engaging in the to-and-fro of mini-talent mentoring relationships with people outside of your household. Your child is going to be relaxed and will enjoy your transportation company as a way to converse with you about all sorts of topics at his own rhythm and pace.
If you start early, at age 12 for example, you will have several solid years of pleasant, edifying, and bonding conversations before he reaches the age of 18. Instead of growing apart, you will be growing closer together in the teenage years.
Personal interests are good to have and they will bring great added-value by incorporating them into your child’s talent. However a young person’s personal interests are not enough to provide him with all the direction he needs to create something amazing.
What he also needs is the strength of character from his parents to support him as he works through his short attention span in his adolescent years. He needs your strength to navigate the highs and lows of short-term failures and successes in the pursuit of real talent. Very often, parents will be frustrated by their offspring’s desire one day to pursue one interest and then another day to completely change their enthusiastic focus to another interest. Today it is collecting coins. Tomorrow it is scuba diving at the local YMCA. You must stay engaged to help him interpret whether it is an opportunity or just a distraction to his real goals.
The fact that there are so many things that grab their attention is not wrong in itself at all. Their curiosity is high and their desire to make friends is high. This is partly what makes it possible for our young people be so fresh and open to the new things that need to get done. But if they keep switching their minds and their focus to many times, they will never gain enough traction to find joy in performing beyond the beginner’s level in any field of human endeavor. That is where you come in as a parent and where they depend on you to not be caving in on every new change of heart. By strength of character, I mean you must sometimes say ‘no’ to the request for participating in a new youth group activity or in starting up a new hobby. Some tears, some pouting, some sullenness, some confused looks might come your way, but so be it. Your son or daughter might resent you at first that you do not agree to their changing emotions, but you must be steadfast on their behalf until they are able to grow into their own complete vision for themselves.
When trying to look at what can be used in a family’s environment, very often a skill asset is completely overlooked that could be one of the pieces of the puzzle to creating a unique and exciting talent for your child. Let us say for example that your daughter has a strong interest in cooking and also a strong interest in sewing. The normal reaction is to look down on one or the other skill because it is not clear how focusing on one or the other will add much value beyond knowing how to do the basics in the household. Remember that with the pursuit of inordinate talent we are also talking about talent that brings great value to others, so the initial reaction, as far as to how to judge it with bringing great value to others, is correct. There is not much value as stand-alone skill between those two. However, once you think of creative ways to dovetail skills already existing in your household, then the possible value starts becoming more apparent.
Back to the example: so does this mean I recommend you try to get her to sew her food? No, of course not. But what I do mean is you could encourage your daughter to sew specifically for clothing ware that fits the professional female chef or that fits the advanced home baker and cook. Having a strong, first-hand experience with the functionality needed to meet a kitchen environment, she can continually create and test better clothing options. She can even start testing and then reviewing on a blog various clothing ware offered on the market and demonstrate by video the pros and the cons as she bakes in the kitchen while modeling the work clothes. See what happened there at the end of this example? I managed to slip in a third skill, a writing skill, when I only wanted to talk about two skills! Now there are three skills working together, each giving strength to the other. Finding a venue to writing with a purpose and developing the voice of confidence comes natural. That’s because she is writing from the first-person point about two interests she both cares and knows about. The more skills that come together to support each other with purpose, the easier it gets to create something glorious for your child to pursue as an adult.
Your mission: find that one skill you are proud to see your child develop and then find a way to create a deeper value proposition by dovetailing it with a completely different interest in your child’s life.
Not all STOP signals are as obvious as a street sign. If you are an alert parent, you will be able to discern when the time is right to stop something. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Say “no” to learning opportunities when the effort can not be counted as deliberate practice hours of some kind. This means the parent stays alert to changing conditions so that his child can gracefully bow out of what previously may have been helpful, but no longer is.
In one situation, for example, my 12 year old son spent time cultivating a relationship with an older gentleman who had a lot of talent in a specialized area that he was eager to pass on to a younger person. As a consequence, I encouraged my son to read up on some topics and buy some protective gear that this same man had recommended so he could let him wield some torch bearing equipment. However, as the months rolled by, this same gentleman started showing a growing lack of confidence in his own abilities due to his increasing old age. I stepped in and helped my son bow out of such teaching sessions.
My experience has been that if there is someone whom you think your son or daughter would benefit from their teaching, but for some inexplicable reason your younger teenage is not wanting to be around that person, it is probably because the adult no longer has the social skills necessary to be helpful. If your child is an otherwise respectful child, then the problem is probably not with your child. We all know that some adults behave very differently around young people than when they interact with you as the adult. But it is not up to your child to have to have to explain the subtle differences to you. It is your job to be on the alert and help your child find a way to gracefully bow out.
Start at age 12 to begin a talent focus. Don’t over-worry about missing opportunities before then as each season has its glory.
The age of twelve is a good age to start focusing on building a passion and talent. It’s at this age when the emotional desire and drive to be and do something great in their future begins. I find that if I do not help my boys feed and fuel themselves on a daily basis with the basic building blocks of a growing passion, that they become restless. The young eagles are yearning to fly up powerfully and I am happy as their father to be part of that guided and encouraging environment. And what about the younger children? They still enjoy living in the moment and so I let them run free after their basic school work and chores are complete.
In every field of human endeavor there are real dangers, physical, emotional, and moral. It is better to learn about those specific dangers early on to avoid experiencing the painful consequences of wrong decisions. Cautionary Tales are a good way for your child to hear and assimilate the consequences of such dangers.
An excellent source for Cautionary Tales can be found in the biographies of famous talented people that are in your child’s field of interest. Another excellent source is from older and very experienced talented individuals who can scare you with stories of colleagues who lost an arm to a saw after failing to get enough sleep or of a friend who lost a lifetime of savings because they signed a contract without first getting advice. It can also be hearing about social boundaries that were not respected, such as about the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who even though was immensely successful in his talent, had completely failed morally with his wife and children. His friends testified to his tragic failings, even while acknowledging his immense architectural talent.
Another place for your son or daughter to hear about cautionary tales is in the online forums or meetups where people of a similar talent congregate. Recently, my son who has an interest in bladesmithing, heard of a tragic ending to someone who disregarded the direction of the wheel turning during the final phase of buffing a blade. The knife then got accidentally caught in the high-velocity upward motion of the wheel and fatally impaled the worker. Result of taking shortcuts: immediate death. Having heard that, my son is now always making sure the wheel is working in the right direction. The cautionary tale served its purpose.
In the book “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell, he has a chapter entitled “The Problem With Geniuses, Part II.” In that chapter, he discusses what seems to be quite a big missing social skill in children who are otherwise academically well taught, but can’t seem to socially climb the talent ladder within their talent field. He boils it down to one basic reason: those children do not know how to engage and question authority figures in a way that helps them make progress. And this lack of social intelligence hurts them later in their adult life. They tend to just sit passively and let authority figures drone on and on without ever knowing how to interrupt to redirect the conversation in a way that is more helpful to the child.
A typical example of that type of behavior is that when the child, with that lacking social skill, goes to the doctor’s office, he just sits there quietly with very little verbal feedback to the doctor, who in turn just gives instructions. But here is the most interesting part: this type of child is actually mirroring his parent’s behavior. It has been observed that when the parents of that same child visit the doctor for their own needs, they also sit very quietly with eyes lowered as the doctor engages in a monologue.
Compare now the very different behavior of the child who respectfully, but assertively, interrupts the doctor to provide him more accurate information about his personal medical condition. In response to the child’s questions, the doctor modifies or clarifies his original information for the benefit of the young person’s understanding. Where does that social intelligence from the child come from? This intelligent social behavior seems to be learned from the parents and not from an innate personality trait. In this medical example, the child has usually been prepped by his mother beforehand as to what kind of questions might be asked of him by the doctor. He’s also instructed by his mother to make sure to ask that authority figure to provide better information if he doesn’t fully understand to his satisfaction.
That is the key: parents, whether mother or father, are key to teaching their children by patterning and by explicit verbal instruction on how to vigorously engage themselves with experts. This is important. Because with that ability to question, they can make progress in their understanding that is applicable to their situation. Children do NOT naturally learn that skill on their own. Parents who believe that it can be learned and passed on, act on this belief and take time to instruct on how to address authority figures and on how to extract information from them.
This is why I frequently run through a little informal prep session with my own sons. I check with them to hear if they are ready to answer questions with an expert they are about to meet for the first time. I check to see if they are also ready with their own list of questions to ask. I also prep them with how to respectfully, but assertively, redirect adults off of inappropriate topics when the adults have social difficulty staying to the topic of their expertise. Sometimes we will also run through possible scenarios where we discuss how to handle an adult who is extremely introverted. We also talk about scenarios of the other extreme: how to handle an adult who is so enjoying the rapt attention of my respectful child that he forgets to actually “teach” to the situation at hand. All this respectful and balanced social engagement, instead of turning off adult experts, actually draws them in more into wanting to help a young person.
This teaching our children on how to respectfully engage authorities is one of the building blocks to talent success. This parental input makes a significant difference in the lives of our offspring. I encourage you to harness this social skill to teach your sons and daughters how to use in the context of the their talent growth. If you have an interesting story on how your child was able to use that social skill to win over an expert to helping them out, I would love for you to share it with me.
Having high IQ in the classroom predicts little about how talented your child will be in adult life. Something else predicts his success. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The toll it was taking on him was large. “All right, all right, all right,” he muttered after Ericsson read him the list. “All right! All right. Oh . . . geez!” He clapped his hands loudly three times, then grew quiet and seemed to focus further. “Okay. Okay. . . . Four-thirteen-point-one!” he yelled. He was breathing heavily. “Seventy-seven eighty-four!” He was nearly screaming. “Oh six oh three!” Now he was screaming. “Four-nine-four, eight-seven-oh!” Pause. “Nine-forty-six!” Screeching now. Only one digit left. But it isn’t there. “Nine-forty-six-point . . . Oh, nine-forty-six-point . . .” He was screaming and sounding desperate. Finally, hoarse and strangled: “TWO!”
Above is an excerpt from a humorous section of the book on talent. Geoffrey Colvin relays the true story of a young man of average intelligence who was the first to break the human barrier of being able to memorize more than 7 given random digits. What was astonishing about this story is that within a short time of crossing the previous limit of about 7 data points (maybe 9 points at the outer limits), this young college student quickly increased his ability to such a point that he could memorize hundreds of digits at a time, randomly read to him. It was thought impossible for humans to do that. Not only that, once they had understood how he was memorizing differently, the researchers were then able to transfer this new ability to other college students who were just as average as the one first who creatively found a different way of memorizing. The point is this: ground breaking advancements in human abilities does not depend on high-IQ. This example of getting humans to go to the next level with regards to memory also showed that having or not-having a high IQ had little to do with finding the way to the next level of performance.
Emphasized in Geoffrey Colvin’s narration in this chapter is that this student was of average IQ level. This new ability to memorize did not come about because the individual had a high IQ. He explained that previous studies had confirmed that a high IQ only predicted that an individual would be able to do very well in classroom assigned work…but it ONLY predicted he would do well in the context of a classroom. It did not predict any special outcome in abilities or performance outside of the strict limits of the classroom. In short, high IQ’s had NO predictive power to single out who was actually going to be able to do well in a particular field of human talent.
There was one small acknowledged advantage outside of the classroom for those with high IQ: if you had a high IQ it did seem to predict that you would perform better than others at the beginning stages of a newly introduced skill. But that early stage advantage disappeared quickly if the average IQ individuals stayed focused on learning the new skills beyond the early stages of learning. After the initial stages, other factors that contribute to success completely take over and drown out any differences in IQ levels (note: that is, as long as the person wasn’t significantly below average intelligence or had a clear impediment).
So why is there is no correlation between amazing talent and high IQ? Because IQ measures only a certain type of intelligence, a type of classroom cleverness if-you-will, but outside of the classroom, any specific real-life talent only uses a very small proportion of that type of intelligence in order for it to be effective in the real world. It turns out that other skills and types of intelligences merging together in the right combination and proportions is much more important than having just a high-IQ. This would mean that unless you intend for your child to become a professional test taker, you should not rely on your child’s IQ levels to carry him to the high levels of success to be found outside of his formal schooling days.
Conclusion: a high IQ can help you on the classroom portions of formal learning, but you can not depend on it for success outside of the classroom. Both high and average IQ individuals had the same advantage as regards to extraordinary potential for talent achievement.
If you are the kind of person that likes to learn by listening in on a focused conversation between two people, then you are going to enjoy this type of podcast.
Joshua is a financial expert and likes to interview people with unusual insights on how to implement life-hacks that can dramatically change the quality of your lifestyle and that of your finance book. In this case, he was intrigued about how parents can put their children onto an amazing talent development path that will change their lives, without a big up-front investment in money. That’s why “yours truly” came on as a guest for his “radical personal finance” show.
During his interview with me he made the interesting point that if you take the talent approach seriously, then you are passing on the skills for your child to be able to be successful on his own merits. If you are a smart, intelligent kind of parent, you can create the conditions in your child’s environment that will reap enormous rewards in adulthood. The opposite approach would be for an otherwise smart parent to make it big with his own wealth creating abilities, but leave the responsibility of his child’s education to others. Such a scenario will likely have little impact on the behavior of the children according to Joshua, as the patterns of the adult descendants will already have been firmly entrenched by the time they get the inheritance windfall.
What matters most is the time spent now to mold your son or daughter while still in your household. Good news: That time spent does not necessarily depend on your finances as a parent. This means you can act on talent building now without having to wait for a future success date of your own . Chew on that insight for a while on the implications of what it means to pass on success to your children!
Do you have a son who does not take as much action as you would like? Here are one of three possible things that you can try as a parent to get him to start moving on his talent:
Option 1: Tie a minimum expectation of daily action he has to accomplish first every day for his talent before he can access his favorite privileges
Option 2: Change the focus of the talent to something more granular and accessible to his current skills so that he experiences easy wins in the beginning
Option 3: Do more hand-holding or be more of a physical presence so that he senses more of your immediate approval and encouragement
Of the above, I have had to exercise one or the other of those options to help keep them focused and motivated. Depending on age or personality, some need more negative encouragement (no computer time until…) and others need more supportive encouragement (I will sit next to you with my laptop and catch up on my emails, while you get started on…). I am not afraid in the beginning of the whole process to remove privileges if they are not at least trying to act on their talent on a consistent basis.
For example, if the expectation is that there is at least one blog post by every Tuesday on the documentation of their talent progress, then he can say goodbye to Minecraft or any other fun activities until that blog post is done. This is assuming of course that the underlying reason for delaying his blog post is that he is enjoying too many of the good things in life without first putting in the effort to be productive. Basically, it’s a variation of not letting your child eat his dessert until has eaten his vegetables first.
I was listening to an interview recently of very wealthy and successful businessman who was reminiscing that part of the secret of his success was due to the upbringing his parents gave him. He said he grew up in a very well-to-do family and enjoyed the comforts of such an environment…but that his father was very strict about not allowing him to enjoy those daily privileges without also demanding that he be daily productive in learning and practicing the tools of his father’s trade (in this case as a sales person). His father enforced that rule consistently in such a way that he grew very comfortable at a young age associating hard work as a condition to enjoying the fruits of it.
You can be the father or mother that gets the credit later in your child’s adult life for having laid the foundation of their good habits.
Most parents do not expect their children to be able to do better than they themselves did in life. They almost say it out loud and they certainly reinforce it with their attitude.
This expectation drives parents to try and lower their progeny’s youthful enthusiasm. This is when you hear such statements as “high school is the best time of your life so make it last as long as you can.” But all parents are not like that. A smaller group of parents is more hopeful that the best is yet to come and so they make plans for their children to enter into adulthood more prepared than they were. It is my guess that 80% of parents fall into the low expectations category and the other 20% of parents have serious hopes and plans that their children will do better. (By the way, I’m not bothering here to define what “better” is as that is a subject whose details I leave to you.)
Likely you are falling into that 20% of parents who have hopes about improving the lives of your descendants. Otherwise you would not be bothered to follow a blog, such as this one, on how to develop massive, life-changing talent starting early in life. But have you thought about rising into that even smaller, super-hopeful category of parents? Are you in that category?
I’m not speaking of that category of people who believe that they can get their children just achieve a little more success than they did. I’m speaking of those parents who believe they can DRAMATICALLY improve the adult outcome of their children’s lives. The size of that category of parents who believe and act on that belief of dramatic improvement is probably in the order of 2 out of 100 parents (that would represent 20% of the already 20% hopeful people). That sounds about right, doesn’t it? Imagine you are at a social mix of about 100 parents in one room. You would expect that most are just expecting their kids to do “okay” after high-school, or maybe they are not really thinking about their future at all and relieved they made it through the teenage years. You would expect that about two of ten people mingling in a corner will seem pretty upbeat talking about future possibilities for their son or daughter. Those are part of the hopeful twenty percenters and that is good. But in the entire group of 100 people, there would also be about two parents who have unusually high expectations for their children. Those two people would seem to truly believe they can pull off the kind of upbringing for their children that would have such dramatic ramifications.
If you are ready to roll up your sleeves with your spouse to generate some great ideas for your child’s future, I recommend you listen to a recent podcast by Joshua Sheats on how to set goals. Find a way to get yourself into that 20% of 20% parents who have concrete hope and very high expectations. You can print out his list of great prompts for you to use in your goal setting session and substitute your son’s name, instead of yours, in the suggested exercises.
Intrigued by a unique way of math learning for children?
Thanks to Dr. Melanie Wilson of the UltimateRadioShow, you can listen to a recent 2014 interview with the author of the quirky math series of books called the “Life of Fred.” Stan Schmidt explains how he got started with creating the books. You can listen to the impact he has had on children based on the fan mail he receives from both children and parents.
They are designed to be self-paced books where the children follow the quirky life of young Fred (who faces surreal situations where, for example, he gets accidentally recruited into the army at the age of 5!) and in the process the readers learn how help Fred solve his problems by using math.
Review excerpt: “My oldest, an advanced learner, loved it! I often found him chuckling while doing math. I found him motivated to get at least 9 of 10 problems correct so he could pass the “bridge” and not have to do a different set of ten problems. As a psychologist, I thought this approach was genius. Why should a homeschooled student want to complete a page of problems when he would just be faced with another?”
