Secret to Avoiding a Cute Hobby

interview traditional cooking

Would you like to eavesdrop on an intelligent conversation on how to create a unique talent opportunity for your young person? Listen here.

Do you want to know what the secret is to making sure that it is not some cute hobby that will do next-to-nothing for your son or daughters’s future prospects? Listen here.

I explain how to develop talent in young people during the entire 60-minute podcast by Wardee Harmon. She is the owner and chief cook at the online school www.TraditionalCooking.com . What caught my attention was the fact that she herself was using her life’s interests exactly along the lines of what my 10ktotalent method suggests: by finding a way to make a core skill bring value to others and not as a stand alone skill by itself.

Listen to the point in the interview she makes about how it was not until she was in her late twenties that she finally started a learning journey of her own that made sense to the vision for her own life. How much better it would have been if she had had a method that could have started her in her teens. Enter “yours truly”, to explain a strategy of how that can be accomplished much sooner rather than much later.

Wardee asks me how I would approach talent in a young person’s life if the interest was already there for traditional cooking or homesteading. Her podcast audience has a shared interest for real food and traditional cooking so it would be natural for the children of her listeners to also have grown up with a passion for growing food, fermenting food, or cooking food in a traditional way. Does such an early interest mean something to son or daughter’s future opportunities? or is it neither here nor there? This was a great how-to-create-talent interview because she wanted me to explain how do you turn such a type of interest and passion into eventually an opportunity that can support a family. And that’s what I take the time to clearly explain.

Your child’s core skill, such the ability to grow a Victory garden, can be used as the first skill around which to wrap many others until it gets transformed into a market valuable talent.

Here are some of the links mentioned in Wardee Harmon’s Podcast:

Connect with the Best in Your Generation
Example of 10,000 Hours in Practice
Does Your Child Have a Tag Line for his Talent?
Same Experience Repeated Over and Over is Not Talent
Redding Drone by Jonathan Harris Jr. (17 years old)
Scarabcoder Learns to Program by Nicholas Harris (13 years old)
Blades of Belaq by Caleb Harris (15 years old)
KYF #009: Nourishing Skin Care with Renee from hardlotion.com

Interview by Radical Personal Finance Joshua Sheats

radical finance

Listen to a podcast interview by Joshua Sheats of Radical Personal Finance on my explanation of how you can go about discovering and developing talent in your child while your son or daughter is still young.

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!

That was Joshua’s commentary during the interview, so if you want to hear more stuff like that, subscribe to his podcasts so you can hear his other interviews.

 

What the first few hours of a talent journey look like

first hours of talent.jpg

Today I snuck a picture of what the beginning first few hours of a 10,000 hours talent journey looks like for a young boy.

What you see is my son Simeon reading from “Hank the Cowdog.” He is eight years old and he is in his first few hours of attempting to get good at voice-acting. Notice that next to him he has an old digital recorder that he borrowed from me. He started  a few weeks ago with reading “Calvin and Hobbes” aloud with lots of enthusiasm. I then encouraged him to record himself so he can play it back and see what parts of his voice acting he does and doesn’t like. Every day now for the last couple of weeks, I have agreed that one of his regular school hours will be dedicated to practicing his voice by reading aloud to the recorder.

He likes his privacy as he is still very self-conscious, but his confidence is growing daily. Last week we had to close his bedroom window so that the neighbors did not misconstrue the noises drifting over the fence for someone who was truly in pain – there was a “pain” passage in the text that he discovered he could really bring out with extra gusto.

So what do I expect from all this daily effort from a little boy? Well, I expect that this one little skill will grow, but it will not stay on a fixed trajectory. I fully expect the skill to morph into something different and unique as we add one other little skill on top of another to make it more challenging, interesting, and meaningful. He also has, per Dad’s insistence, a set time every day that he must practice. I treat it as seriously as his math or handwriting.

The next step after recording for his private feedback, might be to set him up with a little audio blog. Maybe he can read his older sister’s blog stories and load those up. Maybe at some point he can start reading some of his regular school materials with some voice interpretations so he can start pegging what he is learning with the skill he is interested in. He’s already concerned that his voice sounds too babyish. This is gradually getting him more emotionally invested in what he is doing.  Maybe this concern will translate into an opportunity for his older brother to help him digitally enhance his recorded voice to sound better. And this could get him introduced in a meaningful way to the technical side of audio recording.

The possibilities are expanding as he digs in a little deeper every week. I expect that we will not choose to exercise all the possibilities that present themselves. This is because we want to grow a talent for him that adapts to the best opportunities available. I do not want to slavishly follow a path to match a career labeled “voice actor” that may or may not exist for him when he is an adult. 

This is how you start lighting the fire of motivation in a young boy’s life. The beginning of a 10,000 hours of talent journey is discreet and modest just like this. You have the power to jump-start this journey early. And I can help you find a realistic focus that makes sense to both your child’s future and to your family’s unique environment.

For a treat, listen to Simeon’s early voice practice.

Full-cover-100-hours-talent-guide

Topics Covered by the 10ktoTalent Website

Headlight lens optics
The 10ktotalent.com website will focus on topics that help parents find a way to develop talent in their child’s life (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The 10ktotalent.com website will cover these topics for parents who want to develop talent in their child’s life:

  • How a child can find a talent to develop
  • How to craft a strategy for 10,000 hours of talent development
  • How a child’s talent can support him financially in his adult life
  • Tips and methods for accelerating talent development
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Five Common Fears Parents Have About Talent Development for their Child

The Twa Corbies (or The Two Ravens)
Is there a primary fear that’s holding you back as a parent in developing talent in your child’s life? ( The Two Ravens Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Five common fears parents have about talent development for their child:

  1. Fear: My child will have an education and degree, but not talent and no income
  2. Fear: My child can’t find a talent on which to focus
  3. Fear: My child can’t derive financial benefit in his adult life from his talent
  4. Fear: I can’t find enough time or resources to develop a true talent for my child
  5. Fear: My child might get caught up with other talented people, but who also live an unsavory lifestyle
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Avalanche of Education Accelerates The Need for Talent Focus

Do you use Khan Academy for your children like I do? The age of the Internet Super-Tutor is descending upon us and is poised to even take university level education by storm. In the near future this will mean for your children amazingly good, incredibly cheap, always-on, always re-playable educational content, delivered by the most personable teachers that the Internet can find. However, this avalanche of world-class education into your home will not help you if you have no method for building long-term talent focus in your child’s life. Instead, this abundance accelerates the need to have a strategy for picking and choosing which of the tens of thousands of learning modules to take.

Eight Principles to Develop Your Child’s Talent

Apply these eight principles to develop world class talent in your child’s life.

Develop your child’s talent with these eight principles:

  1. Start young
  2. Practice daily
  3. Use your environment and assets
  4. Decompose talent into smaller skills
  5. Merge skills from different fields
  6. Enlist family goals and desires
  7. Act out the talent in a way that gives value to others
  8. Make your homeschool curriculum feed your child’s talent

Acquire a Personality While Acquiring a Talent

Speaker's Society Presentations
If you want your child to attract the attention of others with talent, then make sure your child is also developing a talent. Photo from Speaker’s Society Presentations (Photo credit: MDGovpics)

Your child is acquiring an attractive personality while also acquiring a talent if you can report something similar to fictional “I-got-my-eyes-on-you-Dad”:

“It was clear that our daughter was well-rounded educationally, but she had nothing specifically of her own that she could be proud of to show off to friends and relatives. No wonder she was just wanting to hang-out so much at the YMCA. She gave my wife and I lots of extra ideas on parts of the talent discovery workshop and she completely and enthusiastically bought into the idea of developing a talent of her own. Wow, her conversations with us and other people lately are a lot more intense and focused and she blogs to her passion regularly. She is clearly developing herself into that ‘interesting’ girl that no amount of logo-wearing T-shirts and summer camp activities were doing for her. ”

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