Use a MindMap to help your child discover new ways to develop his talent
Use the MindMap technique to help you uncover new skills that could add to your child’s growing talent. Remember that a talent, in order for it to be useful enough to other people, should continue to evolve with an eye to adapting to new learning opportunities and to developing growing market value. The MindMap starts with a large piece of butcher paper, some colored felt pens, and a list of keywords or phrases that describes the current state of your child’s talent. You then connect the keywords to new words representing new ideas and thoughts; enhance with doodles if you like. It is in the process of connecting with old and new that your mind will uncover new talent development possibilities that you had not seen before.
Is there a particular problem blocking your child’s talent development to the next level? Use the fishbone diagramming technique to help you uncover other things your child can do so that the problem is no longer a problem. On a blank piece of paper, diagram with a pencil the schematic of what looks like a fishbone and label the problem or obstacle on the right hand-side. Next pencil-in all the causes that contribute to the problem, with the secondary and tertiary causes listed on the smaller fishbones. One or more of those contributing causes (lack of a resource, no local club, etc) will pop out to your mind’s eye as having a workaround that you could substitute that will then allow you to minimize the size of your child’s obstacle.
The talent in your child should not rebuild what has already been built. It must bring new value so as to not become redundant. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Remain flexible as to which sub-skills you encourage your child to accumulate for his developing talent. This flexibility is to make sure your child is creating a talent that brings enough value to others that they would want to pay him to perform his talent. Your child will most likely need a set of skills that is different than what made a previous generation very successful in that same field of human activity. However as parents we can became fixated on a now defunct past glory and inadvertently encourage them to become uselessly excellent in a field that has since become over-abundant with the same ability. Don’t let the glory of a previous generation blind you to the new and better possibilities for your child.
Will 10,000 hours turn your child into a massive mountain of expertise? Yes, if… (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Will 10,000 hours or 1o years of practice make your child an expert?
No, it will not make him an expert if he practices 10,000 hours of the same skill. You intuitively know this is why 10,000 hours or 10 years of working as a fast order cook would turn him into a worldwide famous master chef.
Yes, it will make him an expert if 10,000 hours of practice is broken down into separate skills that are continually added and chosen to push forward a particular talent. This is why extremely talented people often get started young (for a big time head start) with lots of caring guidance from parents and personal coaches (for careful choice of skills).
Your child should document his talent learning process with a blog for three very good reasons.
Encourage your child to blog to document his learning process on the subject of his talent. Do not have him limit himself to just the final results and success stories of his talent development. Why should you encourage him to journal his learning in a public way?
There are three reasons to blog:
Blogging will train him to speak in his own unique voice.
Blogging will help him be self-aware and take ownership of his own learning path.
Blogging will show potential mentors in his field of talent that he has the kind of motivation and seriousness that is deserving of their expert attention.
Do you want to help your child find blog post ideas related to his talent interest? Grab a pen, sit him down, and ask him for seven questions about his talent that he wish he knew the answer to. Then take each of those questions and turn those into three smaller questions. If he researches and summarizes his finding on each of those questions, he will have content for 21 blog posts. Rinse and repeat for more ideas.
Pray to ask God that He specifically give you wisdom on how to develop a life of talent in your child. If you want to know, He will tell you. As you pray, you can expect that opportunities will appear that did not appear before. You can also expect that in some instances He will give you personal peace about any fears you may have. In other cases, you can also expect that you will start understanding some connections in your child’s life that you did not understand before. Keep asking for specifics so God can either change your mind to a better thinking or to change the circumstances to get your desired outcome.
Talk specifically to your child about your personal strategy for developing his talent and explain the whys and hows of your thinking. Taking the time to explain out-loud your reasoning is a great way to model for him thinking patterns on how to plan for the future, even in the face of many unknowns. Sometimes talk with a big picture view of things, other times with just the near future in mind. If he is still very young, he will tend to not ask much, but just light up with excitement knowing that you are that interested in the details of his near and distant future. If he is older, you are going to see his commitment and decision making powers rev up because he knows his own father acts and moves forward even in the face of many unknown variables.
Do you sort-of-want it? or do you really want it? We are warned in the Bible about approaching God in matters that require wisdom with a half-baked desire to figure it out. We are told that God wants to give us wisdom, but we are also told that He will just as soon withhold it from us if we are timid about this whole affair of getting understanding. In short, He wants us to want wisdom like we really mean it. So if you are looking for wisdom on how to develop talent in your child’s life, are you REALLY wanting it with fire in your belly?
“Head down, pencil up” will get you into trouble as a parent planning for the future of your child if you don’t periodically look up to reassess how the market and culture is changing. Dan Miller, author of “48 Days to the Work You Love“, in one of his recent podcasts, describes a situation where a high level executive was suddenly let go after 26 years of employment in the same field. What was sad, is that even though the changes in the market place were obvious, he had not taken the time to lift his head up from the day to day of his work to see how changes would affect his career. He had made no plans of his own to deal with the change and now he is really out of time. Don’t do the same to your child – lift up your head today and start implementing those curriculum changes ASAP.
Looking for an amazing 30-day crash course online that happens to be free? Find a money making niche for your child’s talent (Photo credit: gus27 on Wikipedia)
For the last seven years, “the 30 Day Challenge” has been a free yearly online course that walks you through discovering your business niche that allows you to sell from home over the Internet. The lead host, Ed Dale, is an amazing presenter and the materials are presented in such way that high-school aged students can easily follow along. Why do I recommend that you as a parent sign-up? It will open up your eyes to the amazing opportunities that appear when you have a method for uncovering niches for your child’s talent. This information is online, up-to-date, free and cannot be found even in University classes.
Imagine you are a river guide on the California Sacramento River. You are considering choosing between one of two teenagers, George and Nathan, to come along as paid part-time help in exchange for being able to study the river up-close.
Who of the two would you choose?
You don’t owe any favors to their parents, so to make up your mind, you take a quick look at their blog using your Smart Phone. So far, so good. They are both building their portfolio online via a blog so that others like you can get a much better feel for their true accomplishments and their drive to succeed. That’s when you notice that each has a VERY different style of writing about their interest.
One has obviously read up on the river and reported back the many scientific facts as discovered by experts. The other instead writes about specific interactions he has had on the river and what he is doing.
You browse their blogs and find the following two sample posts:
George writes: I read up on river on Wikipedia and here is what I found in my research: “The Sacramento River is an important river of Northern and CentralCalifornia in the United States. The state’s largest river by discharge, it rises in the Klamath Mountains and flows south for over 400 miles (640 km) before reaching Suisun Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, and thence thePacific Ocean. The Sacramento drains an area of about 27,500 square miles (71,000 km2) in the northern half of the state, mostly within a region bounded by the Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada known as the Sacramento Valley. Its extensive watershed also reaches to the volcanic plateaus of Northeastern California. Historically, its watershed has reached farther, as far north as south-central Oregon where the now, primarily, endorheic(closed) Goose Lake rarely experiences southerly outflow into the Pit River, the most northerly tributary of the Sacramento.”
Nathan writes: This is the third morning I went down to the landing at 4AM to watch the river guides take off for the day and to help a few of them load up. I asked permission to take pictures and put them on my public Flickr account. I got the email address of one of the river guides and will email him my best picture because he would like to put it on his business website. I was surprised at how early the guides have to get going in the morning and they told me it’s because they have to get to the best fishing holes before the sun gets up too high and the fish at this time of the year are much further upstream. I took some temperature readings of the river and logged it in my field journal and took a sample of the water so I can study the microbes on the microscope at home. I have a picnic cooler to carry it back home so that the microbes don’t die before I can match them up with this special study guide my dad bought for me on the Internet. I have been able to identify about 10 bugs so far and will post my sketches up with their scientific names.
Which one are you likely to want with you and the customers? Which one do you think is the most interesting boy to have along?
Clearly you want your own child blogging from a first-person point of view like Nathan. And at all costs, you want to avoid him sounding like George, who is stating true expert facts, but revealing nothing of his personal engagement with the river.
A common mistake for parents is to search for talent by looking for an already full-blown motivation in a child’s life. That is a mistake because they will not find one, immediately give up, and falsely conclude their child was born under an “unlucky” star. Instead, the right approach to creating motivation is by introducing him to a simple skill that requires little effort and gives quick satisfaction. At that level, he will easily engage himself with encouragement by his parents. Then keep building his skill levels up until an intrinsic desire of his own starts growing stronger and stronger…and then a full-blown motivation will rage so strongly that all your friend and neighbors will see that your boy is “on fire!”
Can your child create a brand new talent by combining an old hobby with a modern application of that hobby? The Pinterest founder did. (Photo credit: urtica)
Did you know that Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest, spent his childhood years catching, collecting, and categorizing hundreds of insects, spiders, and beetles? He would pin them on boards and label them. This childhood habit would later become the idea of Pinterest. What does your child spend his time doing now that could turn into a start-up later? Think about how you can combine an old-fashioned hobby with a new cutting edge application, and your child may well be on an exciting path where talent will support him in his adult life.
