A 2,000 fold Advantage

A powder snow avalanche
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?

Enhanced by Zemanta

Fight the Darkness

English: Solomon and the Plan for the Temple, ...
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).

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Age 12 – The Educational Game Gets Serious

 

100-hours-3d
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

excellence in writing waste of time.jpg

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.

Learn How to Write by Writing About What You Care

Students of St. Francis School in Richmond lin...
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.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Bonding and Blades

Talent with a skill of blade sharpening brings value
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.

Practice the Art of Stealth in Your Child’s Talent Development

Rapunzel's tower guarded by acres of blackberr...
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.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Twaddle Me Some Useless Facts

what is homeschool twaddle

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.

Talent Progress Creates Family Buzz at the Dinner Table

Dinner Table Buzz

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.

Walk in Order to Think

around the bend

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.

Children Bond Through Exercising Talents

brothers reading

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.

MindMap Helps Uncover Talent Opportunities

 

Use a MindMap to help your child discover new ways to develop his talent
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.

Fishbone Uncovers Workaround to Problem

 

English: Ishikawa fishbone-type cause-and-effe...
English: Ishikawa fishbone-type cause-and-effect diagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

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.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Build a New Glory with Your Child’s Talent

Courtyard of the Museum of Louvre, and its pyr...
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.

How to Write a Blog When Beginning Talent

filedesc http://www.epa.gov/win/winnews/images...
Tips for blogging about his talent when child is still a beginner in his field of interest (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How to write when your child is just beginning to blog about his talent development and is not yet an expert:

  • Summarize what he read, saw, or heard
  • Focus on just ONE main point per blog post
  • Insert a personal observation about the main point that has triggered an intellectual curiosity in him or triggered an emotional response
  • Keep it short
  • Aim for a particular weekly post frequency
Enhanced by Zemanta

Will 10,000 Hours Make Your Child an Expert?

Mount Shasta
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).

Enhanced by Zemanta

Why Your Child Should Blog About His Skill or Talent

English: Staircase in Kutaisi
Your child blogging about his talent or skill is like building a staircase up to the top of his field of interest (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Why your child should blog about his skill or talent:

  • Others more advanced in the same skill can find him
  • Documents he is able to learn that skill
  • To learn to write about something that matters to him
  • To develop a unique voice in a particular field of expertise
  • To connect with other peers with same commitments
  • To create a portfolio to open doors to next level of expertise
Enhanced by Zemanta

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
Enhanced by Zemanta