How do you get the expert to open his door to your child? Hint: the answer is in blogging (Photo credit: Klearchos Kapoutsis)
At some level of his growth, your child will want to interact more with experts in his field of talent. The problem he can run into is that experts don’t have time to open the door to gawkers and will only tolerate those who are just as seriously committed as they are. How does your child show is he part of the committed ones? He shows it by documenting his performance, over time, through a blog that others can easily check. He also does it by writing in that blog with emotion and inquisitive engagement, and not just facts – that is how he will open up those doors.
Swallow away your child’s time into overcrowded skillsets until his real talent potential disappears. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Reverting to average is a real danger that can happen to children that show beginning signs of real talent growth. What is the cause of this reversion to average? It is caused by putting a child into programs, educational or otherwise, that are already crowded with thousands of other participants, where the programs are designed to produce in them copycat skill sets. This can be done putting your pre-teen budding engineer into an after-school soccer team year after year or by putting your art-serious daughter through the same history classes as all the other top-heavy verbal children. End result after 2 to 3 years will be children who are just average in whatever they do. They will have lost that critical formation time over to human activities that will have no room for them in their future adult lives. Root cause: parental peer-pressure driving us to want so much to look like our neighbors that we can’t see our children being swallowed up into mediocrity.
I don’t wait for my young son to stumble into talent on his own, I work with him to aggressively seize some opportunities while dropping others. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Is it too early for the talent discovery process with a child who is not yet 12? Check out this interview I did with Wardee Harmon from GNOWFGLINS regarding my 9 year old son Gideon and his beginning talent. Notice how young Gideon is not on his own, wandering the hallways of a library or dumped off at group sports in order to stumble into something that he can call his own. No, his talent development depends on me, his parent, and depends on a number of opportunities that we decide to cultivate or not to cultivate. I am not my son’s passive guardian, but an active planner with him.
Talent and passion awakens the lion in your child. Fathers be prepared. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
What happens when your child finds a talent that he can be passionate about? What happens when you as a parent use your years of experience as an advantage to guide a passion toward being relevant to other people or the marketplace? What you have is a lion that will keep growing in all its splendor and at times, in all its passionate fierceness. On the one hand, many teenagers are couch potatoes with a seemingly bottomless pit of self-loathing and indecision. But then, in some children, a lion is finally awakened and the time of nursing and nurturing is over. Enter Dad, the natural lion tamer in the family.
What is a Wedding Rhyme Strategy for developing talent? [Costume play: Princess Amidala (Star Wars) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)]Joy Miller, author of the homeschooling website fivejs.com website, did the crisp graphic design and layout for my ebook workshop “How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s First 100 Hours of Talent.” Because of our conversations on this interesting topic of talent development, she asked me to do a guest post for her personal blog. I happily agreed and here’s what I came up with: “How to Build Talent in Your Child: A Wedding Rhyme Strategy.” Check out the graphics she did for that post too! This is the take-away I wanted parents to get: yes, develop a traditional talent, but make sure your child finds a way to weave with a few other skills to make a real, modern, and valuable talent.
Here in a pretty little 17th century wedding rhyme, I give to you a simple strategy for talent building:
“DropHammer” would be another good nickname for a child with a talent related to modern blade smithing (Photo credit: TheGoldGod)
There is a great opportunity for children on the Internet to create nicknames to reflect their talent focus. This gives them some status and allows others to easily find them online in the context of their talent. Instead of creating a user name like “BigJohn” or “John1235” which sounds like a child who still needs to find a focus, how about creating a user name that helps your child fit into the little online communities of people who have his same talent focus? Try instead “SwordQuencher” for a young knife maker who knows that you have to quench blades to harden them properly. Try for example “ScarabCoder” for a young programmer who learns by re-using small bits of code from other more experienced programmers – just like the scarab insect re-uses discards for his own purpose.
Caleb (13) blogging his 191st post related to his talent #unstoppable #10ktotalent #homeschool via Instagram 10ktotalent
Do you have a goal for how often you want your child to practice writing about his talent? It’s not good if your child is currently writing ten little essays or articles on any number of random topics for every one article on his chosen long-term talent. Instead of writing about such things as his latest vacation or a description of his team’s last winning baseball game, what if every one of those essays were replaced by an article describing an activity or principle of his talent? You can continue having your child practice all sorts of writing methods to satisfy outside requirements, but you can apply those methods in the context of your child’s talent. If you re-orient his writing focus, now how many essays do you think he could write up on his talent in one year’s time?
Starting a talent at a young age is like the power of a snow avalanche – your child will accumulate so much knowledge and practice before age 20 that he will sweep away all competitors in his wake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Part of the power of putting in 10,000 hours of deliberate focus on a talent is that it makes it very hard for those who adopt a talent late in life (such as right after college) to come anywhere close to out-performing those who develop their talent early in their childhood. Consider for example that if a child writes about some aspect of his talent, say WWII history, three times a week from age 10 to age 20, that he would have put in over 2,000 writings well before the average college student has even started on a major that has a similar historical focus. If your child majors in history with a WWII focus, he has already out-thought all the others on that same subject by a 2,000 fold factor! Where others don’t even know they could eventually have a unique voice, your child would come across as amazingly confident, dripping with conceptual and tactical details, and supremely at ease in his already well-developed voice. At that point in time, of all the student portfolios, who do you think a college professor or a prospective employer would rather have a second interview with?
Solomon knew the different philosophies and the despair they can engender in thoughtful people. But, he says, their logic forgets a key point, that brings hope and meaning (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Ecclesiastes hits head on the philosophy of despair and the dark brooding that comes from believing that your plans and actions make no difference in the long-run. Solomon, after spinning that dark philosophy every which way, says that, no, when you do make plans, make plans for action, and then rest confidently without guilt in those pleasures that God allows for you today. Full future details are hidden from you, Solomon says, but what you do for good does matter and it is an inheritance to your children. So make homeschooling plans that don’t expect for a lowest acceptable outcome, but make plans based on a belief that God promises to prosper righteous efforts – because He wants to and has rigged the universe for that purpose. For a great “pump-me up” to fight against any feeling of encroaching darkness, read Gary North’s excellent commentary and explanation of the book of Ecclesiastes (it’s actually part of a larger series on the books of the Bible from a uniquely Economic/Business angle).
Download my e-course: “How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s First 100 Hours of Talent”
Around the age of twelve (12) is when you will often see boys get really antsy about the purpose and meaning of the schoolwork they are doing. At that age their ability to think and plan seems to increase significantly and that is when as a parent you are pushed to also make new educational plans. Keep coasting by picking standard curriculum from a general educational menu and you will meet resistance and sullenness. Start picking specific courses and learning modules that encourage a talent focus and watch your child’s mind roar forward with intellectual energy. No talent yet? Try the 7-day-workshop for discovering and developing your child’s first 100 hours of talent.
What to do with already bought curriculum? Make it serve the talent your child is building in his life (or better yet, start a blog). Here’s an example of what this means in the context of a popular homeschooling resource published by Excellence in Writing. When you look at the table of contents, it lists the essays and articles it uses in order to demonstrate the course’s writing techniques and asks your student to use the same content for practice – it does not care what the content is about, only that you have something to demonstrate its method. If your child has a music focused talent, only one in all that entire list of articles pertains to music, with a largely useless one from the perspective of a talented musician, about Thomas Jefferson playing the violin to relax. This course represents about 300 hours of solid work with only 20 hours related to music. Instead of losing 300 hours, your child can gain an extra 300 hours of talent building by substituting each article in that curriculum with a serious one related to music.
Is your child writing essays that sound anonymous? Have him write about his talent instead (Photo credit: BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives)
Are you worried that your child does not care about what he is writing? You should be, because not caring means he is not learning how to develop a specific voice that others will want to listen to and it means he is not learning to write something useful even in the face of incomplete knowledge. Typical ‘non-caring’ writing will produce high-school research papers that no one but the teacher will read: papers that are lifeless, mechanical, and based on topics that were chosen because they were easy to find in the school library for citation proof. Though there is a place for the mechanics of writing, you should not allow it to be more important than writing for a purpose. As parent of a child developing his talent, you do have a ready solution to the caring problem: insist that your child always connects his essays to an aspect of his talent.
Have your child use his beginning talent to help his brother move forward with his talent. Get creative on how to find the intersection of value.
Another example of using talent development in your children to also promote friendship and bonding between your children, happened this past week between two of my sons. One son who has been developing an on-going focus on stones and metals has been following an online recorded course from 17th generation Yoshimoto bladesmith Murray Carter (long live the power of the Internet!) on the topic of how to properly sharpen knives. The other, younger son, has been developing his baking and kitchen prepping skills on a consistent basis and therefore uses knives regularly. Voila: the talents have intersected! After practicing on cheaper blades, we finally got our big expensive kitchen knives properly sharpened by our son Caleb (13) who was proud to have my son Gideon (9) be able to now use them without the previous dangerous slipping that came from dull knives. The respect they have for each other’s abilities keeps growing because the impact of what they are doing is useful and real on even a young person’s level.
Stealth: practice this art of social prudence when getting your child started on his talent.
There is also room for practicing the art of stealth, or social prudence, in your child’s talent development. By stealth, I mean avoid putting on display your child’s awkward and early attempts at mastering his talent and do not invite the admiration of friends and relatives. Many well-meaning friends and relatives have the popular, but false view, that any talent worth pursuing must spring full-blown out of your child’s first training of his art or science and, if it doesn’t, you should not pursue it all. This negativity could potentially discourage your child (and you) at too early a stage when you are still mapping out the big talent plan for your child’s life. So word to the wise: until the time is ripe, practice the art of stealth.
Agree for your children to learn useless facts, but only those that have strategic value that will help keep the social peace within your immediate environment. Do you really need to memorize all the county seat names of your State or country? Probably not, but maybe your old great-grandpa Herman who lives with you is insistent that your children will grow up to be barbarians without a chance to make it in life unless they do. He’s not on the Internet, but he still remembers WWII and that back then they had to memorize that list in boot camp and that proves that it was that kind of toughness that saved civilization. You can waste time on that list, but only because it has strategic value to keep a critical peace – the rest of the stuff is SPAM and you must ruthlessly spend time cutting out the twaddle if your children are going to become great in their talent.
At the dinner table I will sometimes recap to my wife out loud what I am excited about in my child’s talent development. I will then ask my child to speak up and add some clarifying details as to how this milestone came about. I remember one particular week where my 11 year old got several personal notes from professional programmers who commended him on his progress as they could see through his blog and online forum participation. This feedback created a real buzz of excitement as the very next day there was a renewed sense of purpose among the rest of the older children to wake up early to research and blog for their next post on their respective talent development.
I was reminded today by The Art of Manliness how beneficial walking has been for my wife and me. Come to think of it, walking for thinking or inspiration is now also becoming a habit of my two oldest boys who are now 15 and 13 years of age. They are mimicking their parents who, they notice, go on walks in order to get away from the computer, to get a dose of wonderful light, and to get the blood flowing and come back cheerful. After walking, many a previously difficult situation seems to have been resolved with a solution that comes to mind that was invisible before. We just ask that they come back home by a specific time and to let us know their general whereabouts in case of an emergency.
Your child will find joy with his family by using his beginning skill and talent in a way that brings value, even a small value, to one of his siblings. Do you remember how much bonding and admiration power there was, for example, when your oldest child used to read to his younger brother in order to soothe him? You can repeat that same strategy between teenage children as they use their serious talents to learn how to serve the needs of their brothers and sisters who are respectively growing in their own talents. An older sibling who has a core baking skill of a couple thousand of hours behind him, for example as part of a larger developing talent, can also use it to boost the silversmithing club activities of the status his brother through amazing food and hospitality. Another sibling who has developing computer skills can work on upgrading his sister’s online art portfolio and said sister can in turn work on digital logos and ad graphics for all the other sibling blog postings.
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.
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