Don’t let the pursuit of good grades distract you from where your child should be spending his precious time in order to move into the talent zone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Good grades in schoolwork are good for your child right? Yes…or maybe not. Here’s very often why not. To get grades in traditional courses, your child will have to study very diligently and consciously to memorize the details and understand the principles. So far so good, as far as demonstrating that you and your child are not slackers and can take in what others dish out.
But here’s the problem:
In the pursuit of grades, you don’t stop to think about why you are deciding for your child to become that well taught in that very specific narrow course that was handed to you. This is dangerous because he is spending all his time becoming very good at something that is irrelevant for his adult life. Your child’s opportunity to find a talent early enough in life can slip away while you weekly and monthly spend hours becoming very good on all the fine points of English grammar. Yes, your child will never later be stumped on any difficult point of grammar. But then the adult world will stun him later with the message “So what? Just use the PC spell checker. By the way, what can you do to bring value to my company before I hire you?”
There is a place for grades and a place for courses, but you must never let them dictate the time and depth to impose on your child’s education. Instead, map out a talent course for your child, and then find those courses that fit your child’s trajectory. Sometimes you will want your child to aim for a C grade even though your child could aim for an A – because he is too busy becoming great in this other area that is outside of the chartered waters.
Mozart started his training at age 3: Family portrait: Maria Anna (“Nannerl”) Mozart, her brother Wolfgang, their mother Anna Maria (medallion) and father, Leopold Mozart (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Mozart’s father was of course Leopold Mozart, a famous composer and performer in his own right. He was also a domineering parent who started his son on a program of intensive training in composition and performing at age three…Wolfgang’s first four piano concertos, composed when he was eleven, actually contain no original music by him…Mozart’s first work regarded today as a masterpiece, with its status confirmed by the number of recordings available, is his Piano Concerto No. 9, composed when he was twenty-one. That’s certainly an early age, but we must remember that by then Wolfgang had been through eighteen years of extremely hard, expert training. This is worth pausing to consider. Any divine spark that Mozart may have possessed did not enable him to produce world-class work quickly or easily”
In case after case, Geoffrey Colvin goes on to explain that the famous people who are known worldwide for their amazing skills had to work very hard at being that good. Their work regimen contradicts the popular notion that such people are born talented. It is also true that they usually started very young and were strongly guided by their parents hopes and plans. It is their parents oversight that allowed them to focus with such intensity without too many distractions from the normal school routines that other school children would have to follow. This is good news because it implies that parents can deliberately copy the parental pattern of encouraging talent in their own child, starting in their home. That difference in time between starting at age 12 and age 22 can be a good ten years of talent creation. Your child could easily fit his 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by the time other adult children are just beginning to look for a productive output.
Do you have a map for discovering the talent in your children or are you going to randomly check out several thousand beaches? Get your Talent Guide! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Once you understand that you can start deliberately planning for a life long talent in each one of your children, it becomes a very exciting lifestyle for everyone in the family. It is no longer a random process for the parents or the child.
In order to get started working on a talent, the key is to latch onto something tangible for your child.
To get to the top, both average and early “talented” children have to go through the same grueling 10,000 hours of training. There is no break for the precocious. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“By age twelve, the researchers found, the students in the most elite group were practicing an average of two hours a day versus about fifteen minutes a day for the students in the lowest group, an 800 percent difference…nothing it turned out, enabled any group to reach any given grade level [of musical ability] without putting in those hours…To put the results in their starkest terms: Shown five groups of students, one of which won positions at a top-ranked music school and one of which gave up even trying to play an instrument, we would all say that the first group is obviously immensely more talented…but…they were not.”
As it turns out even for children whom people would normally label as precocious in their early childhood ability to carry out a tune, that it would have little to no impact on their future ability to be world-class instrumental players. It seemed that without severe and extensive training, no amount of preciousness or innate ability in a child could allow him to avoid the same amount of effort that an otherwise average child would need to in order to become just as amazingly great. The conclusion therefore is that the super-talented are grown, not born, into their superhuman performance abilities. This principle of talent applies to all other fields of human talent.
My personal (not the author’s) added caveat to parents is to be careful about investing yourself in a skill-set for which you think your child has innate talent when it might have no practical future or use in their adult life. To become outstanding in some fields, your child would still have to put in 10,000 hours of hard dedicated work, but there might be little room to make a living or even to perform that talent for others for free. There might already be too many people that good and adding your child to that crowd is not adding much more to the world. That talent pursuit in an already crowded room of performers is not a “free” opportunity to your child as pursuing it would mean not having time becoming great in a field where others wholeheartedly welcome your child.
So when I recommend developing talent, I mean it should be talent that will bring great ADDED value to others. This is why I recommend you work through the guide “How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s First 100 Hours of Talent” so you avoid the pitfalls of latching on to a flamboyant, but completely irrelevant talent.
“When Tchaikovsky finished writing his Violin Concerto in 1878, he asked the famous Leopold Auer to give the premier performance. Auer studied the score and said no – he thought the work was unplayable. Today every young violinist graduating from Juilliard can play it. The music is the same, the violins are the same, and human beings haven’t changed. But people have learned how to perform much, much better.”
Geoffrey Colvin reports that in most areas of human performance, when people apply themselves with deliberate practice, they easily outperform, even at a young age, the masters of just a couple a generations ago. This is because no one is born a violinist, or a doctor, or an accomplished science-fiction writer, but rather they are taught specific skills and train themselves deliberately over many years with the latest techniques in skill development. This increased achievement is widespread across all human endeavor and reminds us that GREATNESS can indeed be achieved in your child – that is IF you stop letting yourself be misled by the idea that greatness is simply “discovered” wholly-formed in your child. Rather greatness in a talent is developed through hard planning, hard work, and with a lots of support by the parents during the early years.
“We tell our kids that if they just work, they’ll be fine. It turns out that this is exactly right. They’ll be fine , just like all those other people who work at something for most of their lives and get along perfectly acceptably but never become particularly good at it”
Geoffrey Colvin goes on to report that the research he looked at shows that the number of years of hard work spent in a particular field of human activity has NO relationship to the level of excellence by individuals in many, many different fields, including for example medicine and law enforcement. It seems that straight-forward experience is a very poor predictor of outstanding ability. And it seems that any innate talent that one may have at birth has very little predicting power as to how good one will be in adult life.
So what does Geoffrey Colvin say will far outdo any gifting at birth and outdo just years of hard work?
My 15, soon to be, 16 year old son Jonathan jr. has been very excited about the new tool he just acquired from his work savings: a DJI Phantom drone with GoPro3 camera. Why am I sharing this with you? To encourage you with an excellent example of how to be flexible in the development of talent in the life of your older child. Because, remember that if you try to fully identify your child’s talent early on, it is likely too crowded already for your son or daughter to bring significant extra value to others.
One of those skills he uses in the business involves basic photography as we have had to use a good camera for taking product shots and take short videos for my wife to promote our business. From there, we gradually called on him to do more and more of the advanced product shots. By frequently working with the camera, he gradually got comfortable enough to want to do several short fun films on his own, using neighborhood friends as an experiment. It made him quickly realize that though the filming was good experience, it was not easy to get many young people to work consistently together. This prompted him to read up on professional storyboarding and to have a plan for filming each scene instead of leaving too many things to chance. He was also was becoming aware that shooting clever films was not sufficient in itself to bring value to others beyond his immediate circle of friends. His desire for wanting to fulfill some market value for others grew with it.
Next he met a distant family friend who happened to have a camera drone in his possession. This family friend showed him some of the possibilities of areal photography. This greatly piqued my son’s curiosity to the potential to film interesting video that adults would also find very attractive. He quickly became an even bigger follower on YouTube and Instagram of a new crop of videographers who were using drones for commercial shots. In addition to this, I agreed to a monthly subscription of Adobe Creative. That subscription is giving him full access to all the graphic and video editing software that he could possibly use at this stage of his talent growth. Additionally, as part of his normal homework assignment, he has to create at the end of each of his daily Western Civilization lectures, a graphic capturing the summary and intent of the lecturer’s purpose. This daily and consistent output has built up his confidence that he could handle editing the video footage from a drone. This motivated him to work work extra hard this past fall in order to save up money to buy a drone for himself. Now he has it! And he filmed his first test video for what he could do to showcase real estate that is for sale. Perhaps there is some space in that market into which he can bring value to others and he is going to explore the possibility. Day after day, he has been getting up early or going out in the evening to test the capabilities of his tool.
What I hope others will see in the recount of this example, is that they can also imitate this flexibility in order to start skills now that don’t fall within a the scope of a textbook or store-bought curriculum.
he used an asset that our family already had: a high end digital camera
he practiced simple photography skills by providing value to our home business: through product shots and talking head videos. This gave us, as parents, the emotional desire to keep seeing him spend time getting good in this area, because the home business is important to our specific household.
he combined his video and graphic editing into his normal RonPaulCurriculum.com school time: this reinforced his learning of otherwise dry material and it built up his ability to manipulate software editing tools for graphics and video.
this motivated him to follow closely over the Internet and start chatting directly with professionals using a new technology that is opening up a new, uncrowded market into which a young person has space to potentially make videos that others will pay him handsomely for.
Your Call to Action: If your son or daughter has followed an interesting talent development path of his own, using the changing environment of his assets and your family’s people connections, please email me your story so I can share it with others.
By unraveleing the source of your child’s lack of motivation, you can reel-in the solution to your problem. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Unraveling the problem backwards:
My child has no motivation to study
Because there is no unifying theme to do the study work
Because is there is no clear purpose for the study
Because there is no talent goal to give it purpose
Because there is no time spent planning for a talent
Because there are too many group-activities and side-hobbies that clog the mind and use up the time
Because as a parent I’m worried about what other parents will think if I don’t have my child experience all the same group-activities that everyone else is doing
Reeling it all back in, we find that we have the solution to your child’s lack of motivation:
As a parent, I will deliberately read-up and follow what the best minds have to say about talent development
To give me strength and confidence to know I am putting my child on a much better path
To emotionally allow me to pull back on group-sports and miscellaneous hobbies
To free-up time to truly explore the potential for a viable long-term talent in my child’s life
To give me the fodder needed to come up with a talent development plan for the next few months
To give my child something into which he can really sink his teeth
To give me the framework needed to help me eliminate, re-organize, and re-purpose our existing curriculum to support my child’s talent
To finally give my child that deep motivation I so badly want for him to have in his life.
These four books on the topic of talent development will set you on fire and make you believe that you as a parent can in fact craft a future for your child that is full of hope and possibility. Beyond hard work, there is a strategy and system to developing world-class talent and it is clearly explained in these books. Click on my affiliate links below to get them shipped to your home today.
Do you know how to apply Benjamin Franklin’s method for learning how to write with style? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Imitate Benjamin Franklin’s method for learning how to write really well in the style that you want.
I give you here my interpretation of how you can start applying his method in today’s modern context:
1) Select an article on a subject and written in a style that you already like very much. This will give you that emotional motivation to care enough about what you are writing and to recognize what would be boring to others who are as interested in the same subject as you are. Don’t go looking just for famous articles, instead focus on choosing writing examples that mean something to you and can be used to communicate in your field of talent.
This is how Benjamin Franklin (BF) describes his method:About this time I met with an odd Volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the Writing excellent, & wish’d if possible to imitate it.
2) Break down the article into keywords. Do this by creating one or two keywords for each sentence and list the keywords on a blank piece of paper into one long sequential list.
3) After a couple of days, take your long list of keywords and, without looking at the original article, rewrite the article in your own words using the keywords to guide you.
BF’s method: With that View, I took some of the Papers, & making short Hints of the Sentiment in each Sentence, laid them by a few Days, and then without looking at the Book, try’d to complete the Papers again, by expressing each hinted Sentiment at length & as fully as it had been express’d before, in any suitable Words, that should come to hand.
4) Compare your article written in your own words to the original article. Grade yourself on how well you did in matching the author’s intent and style.
5) Change the sentences in your article where you don’t think you did very well to the original intent. Improve by giving them the same intention of thought (though not necessarily into the exact words) as the original.
BF’s method: Then I compar’d my Spectator with the Original, discover’d some of my Faults & corrected them.
6) Take the regular narration or prose from your article and turn it into verse or into catchy memorable phrases of your own.
7) Then after a few days, turn your poetic version of that article back into normal writing, without looking at the original article. After you are done, grade yourself as to how well you expressed the thoughts of the original article.
BF’s method: But I found I wanted a Stock of Words or a Readiness in recollecting & using them, which I thought I should have acquir’d before that time, if I had gone on making Verses, since the continual Occasion for Words of the same Import but of different Length, to suit the Measure, or of different Sound for the Rhyme, would have laid me under a constant Necessity of searching for Variety, and also have tended to fixthat Variety in my Mind, & make me Master of it.
BF’s method: Therefore I took some of the Tales & turn’d them into Verse: And after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the Prose, turn’d them back again.
8) For extra practice: Take your original keywords you had earlier assigned to each sentence and then jumble them out of order. From the jumbled list of keywords, rewrite the article in your own words and try to match the same order of presentation as you can remember. After you are done, grade yourself as to how well your order of the thoughts matches up to the original order of the article.
BF’s method: I also sometimes jumbled my Collections of Hints into Confusion, and after some Weeks, endeavor’d to reduce them into the best Order, before I began to form the full Sentences & complete the Paper. This was to teach me Method in the Arrangement of Thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovere’d many faults and amended them;
9) To discover your own unique writing voice: keep rewriting the article to improve on both the expression of the original thoughts and on the order of of the presentation of those thoughts. Grade yourself as to how much better your re-written version is to the original article.
BF’s method: but I sometimes had the Pleasure of Fancying that in certain Particulars of small Import, I had been lucky enough to improve the Method or the Language and this encourag’d me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English Writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.
RE-READ that last paragraph by Benjamin Franklin. Did you catch what he said? He said he got BETTER than the original writers by this method!
Emily Brontë’s obsessive childhood practice and parental allowance for the time for her to practice were key to creating the talent that wrote “Wuthering Heights” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Do you have a daughter who might actually become a very good writer, good enough for other people to really want to read her works? How can she become that talented if she is not born with that level of talent? There are two things you and your child can do to foster that level of talent growth. One depends on your child’s effort and the other depends on you as the parent.
Consider Emily Jane Brontë who wrote the famous literary work “Wuthering Heights.” She spent her teenage years with her sisters re-writing and imitating the popular magazines stories of the time that came through her household. According to Juliet Barker, a curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Hawort, their childhood novella plots were overwrought and their spelling and punctuation was atrocious. There was no sign of genius. But as they continually worked through their stories, with the children collaborating together in their attempts at storytelling, they got better and better by sheer persistence, practice, and self-correction. What was also important was that their father was instrumental in their literary success by giving them the massive amount of time necessary in their younger years to fully explore their writing skills. Clearly the Brontë girls were not born with the the full talent for writing, but were born in a household committed to the practice of writing. They put in their 10,000 hours of talent practice.
For more interpretation on how talent was really acquired by the Brontë sisters, read:
I recommend the One Year Adventure Novel forum for homeschooled students who are serious about developing story writing skills as part of a long-term talent. The forum will do wonders for the son or daughter who no longer wants to feel alone in the serious pursuit of talent. You will not find a similar local writing club in your area composed of dedicated teenagers.
This forum is designed to young people who are writing their first novel and want a community of equally motivated peers to provide moral support and share writing techniques and tips. But in order to participate in this adult moderated forum for teenagers, you must sign-up and pay for the One Year Adventure Novel curriculum. The curriculum is designed to get your child to produce a real novel that takes advantage of their first-hand knowledge while following a strategic approach to writing, but the forum itself is more along the coffeehouse format of passionate young writers all sharing ideas with with each other.
To appreciate the magnitude of the support available for your child on this forum of almost 3,000 registered members, here are some the forum topics and statistics:
Have your son or daughter join an online forum related to his talent. This is how he can listen in on the experts at a young age. (Photo credit: Boston Public Library)
Have your son or daughter join an online Internet forum that discusses your child’s talent. Look for one that is actively enforcing a code of conduct by making sure that newcomers are sticking to the topic at hand and willing to ban those who won’t participate respectfully. The best forums are probably those run by adults and professionals in their trade. It is not a bad idea for your child to already have his talent blog under way as it makes easier to get approved to participate. My son Caleb is a member of one such forum for bladesmiths and is learning daily from the interaction of older and more expert.
There are over 7,000 members on this forum from around the world dedicated to bladesmithing and to sharing and learning from one another. There is no local club that he could join as a substitute. Your child will find camaraderie and motivation and free advice by joining such a forum.
So you can appreciate the breadth and depth of a dedicated online forum, here are some of the statistics on the number of topics covered in my son’s forum:
It is really worth reading if you have children in the household from newborn to pre-teen as it will make an enormous difference to your parenting experience. Not only does it have the explanations down correctly, it is backed up by many, many examples, of how to do it. And this book passes my “man” test. There are many Christian books on the market about parenting, but most of the ones I’ve seen fall short. Most books are either too theoretical to be make a practical difference or they are overly sentimental and over- nurturing, so that no self-respecting man could operate in the way it is suggested. However, the “Raising Godly Tomatoes” book is so good, that my wife and I have purchased a stack of these books so that we give them away to friends who are looking for ways to do it much better than the way they were raised. You can also read the entire book online for free!
To help your child learn specialized tables of information that will help him in his talent quest, he can use the game “Battleship.” Instead of using the letters and numbers on the side of the grid to target the squares you want to sink, you would instead call out a sub-set of properties. Whichever squares of information had those properties, those would be the properties that were fired upon.
For example if your child needed to learn the chemical table of elements, he could do it this way:
To find different styles of table of elements to print out for use in this game, go to ScienceGeek.net and download the sheet you need.
Candles for you and your wife while the children listen in their beds to wonderful audio books (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Do you and your spouse want to have some private evenings of relaxation without having to leave home or hire a babysitter?
Audio books to the rescue!
Your children can listen to captivating unabridged voice-acted stories in their bedrooms while drawing quietly, playing Legos, or just lying dreamily on their beds. Here are some 50 hours of suggested audio to stock up with in your arsenal of date-night tricks. This should give you room to relax at home for about 25 date nights worth while your children get deliciously transported into other worlds:
My list of fun fictional books in English for boys 9 to 12 who might be living in Paris and missing a bit of our crazy Americana! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Recently an expatriate friend living near Paris, France, was wondering what kind of fun and interesting fictional books their twin 12 year old boys could read in English to keep them in touch with American culture.
In response, I put together a list of books here below that I thought boys from ages 9 to 12 might enjoy trying to read. Girls might like them too, but I chose this compilation especially for boys who want something to kick start them into reading. There are many other books I could recommend, but if you are looking to get them jump-started on something easily accessible and fun, these below I would recommend first. Note that all the links go to my Amazon affiliate program.
Books that have a special Americana bent to them: Hank the Cowdog series (down-on-the-ranch humor)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid series (school kid humor that will open the doors to understanding modern American boy humor)
Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (classic American outdoor adventure; the outdoor part is the story might as well describe the outdoors of where we currently live in California)
The series of books “Freddy the Pig” by Walter Brooks (anthropomorphic animal stories, with some gentle humor, that does a good job explaining through elaborate plots the different aspects of how American life, culture, and politics work – they were a big hit with my twelve and under crowd)
The animal stories by Thornton Burgess (nature stories that my daughter Noelle absolutely loves; shock full of real facts about nature in the context of fictional animal stories)
The Wizard of Oz series of books (the boys liked this as the books are far more interesting and gritty than the movies)
“Lawn Boy” and “Lawn Boy Returns” by Gary Paulson (humor about a boy running a successful business – this one really gets the American obsession about being successful in business life from a kid’s point of view; it had Gideon (age 10) laughing all the way through the books)
I’m listing a few Non-Americana books here below, but I include them because they are very popular in the United States and easy to read with good story lines:
ALL the books in Chronicles of Narnia series (I think that even though this was written by CS Lewis, a British writer, it is probably more popular in the United States than in Great Britain. An absolute MUST read.)
For 11 and 12 year olds, I recommend ALL the Artemis Fowl series of books by Eoin Colfer (it is the kind of science-fiction humor that made me smile and laugh as an adult; big people get the humor too and it is not inappropriate humor; a lot of advanced vocabulary, but accessible because the writing is so good, that in context, you understand it)
Thanks to Daniel, a reader of this 10ktotalent blog site, I am adding to this list the Redwall series of books by Brian Jacques. Several other friends over the years have highly recommended these adventure books of a mouse-warrior in a medieval setting.
For a child who is visually oriented, try having her sketch her storyboard first, and then write it out in words. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Here is a storyboard format that has really worked well with our twelve (12) year old daughter.
We have settled down over time to this short list of questions that has really worked for her. Other types of writing prompts simply did not work. She loves to draw, loves animal stories, and is far more visually oriented than her brothers. But this list of questions she uses has really gotten her to daily and consistently write her own short stories.
So if you have a child who is not the verbal chatty type, but with more arts-oriented skills, you might find this format very refreshing. Please feel free to share and print this list with others:
What type of animal is your character?
What is your character’s name? Explain and draw a picture of him.
What does the character want to have happen? Explain and draw a picture.
What’s a difficult thing that happened before the character got what he or she wanted? Explain and draw a picture.
How did the character overcome the problem? Explain and draw a picture.
How does the story end differently, but in a better way than what the character wanted to first happen? Explain and draw a picture.
Julia Child’s autobiography “My Life in France” is a perfect example of the 10,000 hours principle. You can read in detail her personal adventure and quest at becoming the “Grand Dame” of American cooking. Although I’m not in sympathy with her personal political views she ascribes to in her book, she did do a great job serving our culture in an area that was very inadequate in the United States. Read especially the part about how she practiced making so many batches of mayonnaise, she had to dump them down the toilet! Read also how her expensive education did not prepare her for her life’s calling – she too had to put in her tedious 10,000 hours!
Because she had amazing talent, she was hard to put in a box with a specific career label, such as describing her as a “chef.” This is how you want your son or daughter to view talent development – as a journey to become so good and unique that a career label no longer fits your child.
You can read her biography by purchasing it from my Amazon affiliate link here:
Perfect Free Pronunciation Guide from a Native French Speaker Reading the Text of a French Bible – Always Available and NEVER Tires
Looking for a way to get a real French voice to teach your child how to pronounce French correctly for hours on end, without ever tiring, without ever betraying an American accent? How about if that was available to you as free for your child’s learning of a foreign language? And you could do it without having to drive your child to a tutor after-hours? Well, it is available here:
http://www.wordproject.org/bibles/fr/index.htm
The audio can be treated as the perfect free pronunciation guide from a native French speaker reading the text of a French bible.
If you go to the WordProject.org you will find many bibles in many different languages WITH a native reader reading the text in the foreign language of your choice. You can also follow the written text as the person reads. And of course you can repeat it as often as you like or download it to your smartphone to listen to it in the car during commute hours and errands. In the past, to find a teacher who both had a correct accent and is willing to do it for hours on end with your child would have broken your pocketbook. Now when repetition and precision is everything, the audio bible comes to the rescue.
Here are the other Bible audios they currently offer online:
Author: 
