Make your standard history study time serve hours of building up your child’s chosen talent focus:
Do NOT just go through the motions memorizing the standard historical timeline without connecting it to the historical roots of your child’s talent.
Education consumes, but talent creates.
If you can find a talent to develop, then your education will have a worthy master to serve. If the pursuit of education is your only goal, then all hope of talent will be lost. Start today by building your first 100 hours of deliberate talent practice. There will be 9,900 hours more to master.
Possible scenario of a Talent Statement that changes and grows over time because the opportunities grew as the child developed her talent:
(age 13 – First 100 hours of talent building) I will photograph children that I babysit. I will share those pictures in a digital scrapbook for the parents with notes and comments about their children. I will use my blogging and basic HTML skills to do it.
(age 15 – at 1,000 hours) I will photograph landscapes and the children that I babysit while traveling with their families on short weekend getaways. I will blog about nannying children on short getaways. I will give tips on the blog about how to use digital photography and how to be a traveling nanny.
(age 16 – at 3,000 hours) I will vlog about how to travel with children while accompanying families as a nanny on extended vacations or business trips in foreign countries. I will create and sell e-guides for educational games that tutor children of wealthy traveling parents.
Start building a talent focus for your child by using the environment you are in. This means use the tools, assets, personal connections, and geography that you have on hand rather than waiting for tools or time you can’t afford today. Create a Talent Statement that will focus your child to act on his first 100 hours of talent building. At the end of the 100 hours, modify the Talent Statement to reflect your child’s increasing skill set and newly discovered opportunities. Keep modifying and refocusing the talent as you uncover your child’s growing potential.
When you help your child start a journey of 10,000 hours of talent building, it can feel in the beginning like you are riding a bicycle on the backroads, when you would rather be driving on a highway with a big, fast SUV. It feels like that because the beginning is in fact humble and slow. But humble and slow in the beginning stages of building talent gives you time to discover which part of the talent thread you want your child to pursue with bigger, more expensive tools. Don’t over-invest in the big, wrong tool that can get you fast to where you want to go. Stock-pile your energy and money to make bolder investments once your confidence has grown that you are on the right talent track.
These are the three classic failures that parents need to guard against for their child’s success in adulthood:
The 10ktoTalent.com website is about protecting you from failure #2.
“Cherry pick” the best of other people’s learning styles and adapt them to fit your custom 10,000 hours of talent building for your child. Because you homeschool, you can afford to pick and choose only the best and thereby avoid mediocrity right from the beginning. To do this you have to accept that it is rare to find in one individual all the learning patterns and examples you need to copy, so be prepared to get aggressive about acquiring tips and tricks from many different sources. One family may excel at extracting learning opportunities when out in nature while another may excel at mathematical learning techniques. Copy those friends ONLY in those areas of learning where they excel.
Unless your goal is to turn your 10,000 hours of talent into an art focus, then all the sketching ability your child will need can be easily satisfied by an online art doodling course. Our homeschooling family has been following the Mark Kistler drawing program and I’m happy to report you can now get free online lessons at Mark Kistler Online Video Art Academy. You can also order the hardcopy sketching and doodling program entitled Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad and Drawing in 3D with Mark Kistler . This will give your child the confidence he needs to sketch out his ideas and visually document the concepts he is assimilating.
Baseball Card image collections for your child’s talent would be a great way to build visual and emotional excitement for your son or daughter. How can you do that when your focus is actually NOT about building 10,000 hours of talent toward a baseball career? There’s a simple answer: use one of the many new Social Media tools available on the Internet. Two very popular tools for creating and sharing image collections are www.flickr.com and www.pinterest.com
Create an account under your name for your child if he is not old enough to open one under his own authority.
Don’t have your child try to excel at everything he does in pursuit of building 10,000 hours of talent.
Why?
There are some building block activities that contribute toward your child’s talent, but not every activity should be pursued to a level of world-class performance. For example, one of my children is interested in minerals and would profit from learning how to use a microscope to study his material at a deeper level. However he would not gain by becoming an expert in microscopes. Added expertise, beyond proficiency, would only detract him from focusing and building up his core interest.
Your talent mentor will get these benefits from helping your child:
Tip from homeschooling Dad, Will Goulding, about selecting mentoring opportunities for your son or daughter: “It’s not just about skill building and it is not so important as losing some notches in the character belt.” Some adults that you come across will excel in their skill set and would love to work with your child in helping them build their talent, but you will ultimately decide whether or not the mentor’s character is too much of a negative influence on your child. This is why you are still important as a father to your child’s success. He still depends on your life experience to ferret out the bad from the good.
My friend Will G. is an experienced homeschooling Dad who has helped his teenage son line up several talent mentor relationships over the years. Fathers will do really well at this kind of task list, so I recommend you pass this on to the dad to push the opportunities to the next level. Note that step number 6 is what keeps the mentors coming back to the table to help your 14 year old son on his quest to becoming the best.
This is how you get started finding experts for your son’s field of interest by using these tips from Will:
To also help convince potential mentors, you want a blog portfolio of what your young person has already done in that same field of interest. Don’t have a blog yet? No problem, your son can jumpstart to a full blown blog within a month’s time by following the “Blog to Your Talent” e-course.
Updated: May 2014
I was struck with a passing comment that a friend made about the reasons why a mentor agrees to give of his time and talent. We were talking about what the older, adult mentors get out of the relationship with their mentee and he mentioned he had bolstered his son’s confidence by saying “There’s a uniqueness that you have…there is something that you can give back to your mentors in a way that is unique to you.” This observation triggered some deep thoughts within me.
It is true that in any specific relationship there is a uniqueness to it because the individuals themselves are unique. And when you add to that relationship, the large gap in age between the older mentor and the very young person being mentored, there is a dynamic that can be cultivated into a type of gift back to the mentor. The mentor wants to be blessed by being able to give of himself to someone else. The mentor can find that blessing if he is able to find a receiver who is willing to understand what he has to pass on.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“I am looking for friends. What does that mean — tame?”
“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”
“To establish ties?”
“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”
When studying a particular time period in the course of your standard homeschooling curriculum, have your son or daughter choose to read a biography of an individual who excelled in some particular area of focus related to his long-term term interest. This is not only a great way to build a deep understanding into the 10,000 hours of talent building, it is also a great way to peg general historical facts into a living context. History becomes very detailed and real because as he accumulates his reading of specialized biographies, he increases his ability to understand the general limitations and opportunities of a specific time period. For example, knowing the amount of timber, effort, and cost that smelting ore for 130+ warships in 1588, before the advent of Bessemer process, it really brought home to my 12 year old son the scale of the Spanish Armada preparing for war with the English. He was already familiar with some of the dramatic advances that new smelting techniques had brought to the world in the 1800s, so when he reads of vast quantities of copper and iron being smelted before those technological advances, he could correctly assess the deadly seriousness of the Spanish Armada in the 16th century.
Find a club that supports an aspect of your child’s long-term learning goal of building 10,000 hours of world class talent. This is a great way to socialize your child into the culture of a specialized interest and get to hear first-hand about other learning opportunities that would never be broadcasted elsewhere. The best clubs will often be the ones geared for adult practitioners as your child will invariably get great feedback and advice. My metals and minerals focused son goes weekly to a gem and mineral club that has been meeting since the 1930s. I accompany him as his adult supervisor so he gets a chance to play and use tens-of-thousands of dollars of expensive equipment and hundreds of years of combined experience in one room.
We embrace both low-tech and high-tech for learning in our homeschool. The advantage that high-tech learning tools can bring, such as the iPad, is that they are perfect for drills and memorization of lists. Technology can help you overcome the drudgery of some of that necessary repetitious work and dare-I-say, even make it fun by using reflexes, sounds, and strategy in addition to brute memory. Search around the iTunes app store and see if there is an app related to your child’s long term focus and read the reviews to find a good one. My metals-focused son will often grab the iPhone for himself in the back seat of the car and quiz himself on his memorization of the table of elements.
I encourage my homeschooled children to sketch and doodle (see example of doodling during sermons) about their interest to engage themselves more fully with their material. Doodling is a great way to learn how to abstract out the basics of what they have learned when words can only slow you down. They use it mainly for personal exploration of the subject on hand and is not meant for sharing with the world. Recently, for example, my metals-focused son enjoyed sketching several versions of the Bowie knife to highlight the various functional elements of the blade. My other son, who is focused on the history of coins of money, sketched out several pages of the development of early banking with goldsmiths in England.
If you are creating something of great additional value that others can recognize and desire, then it is a fair and wonderful human activity to be able trade your talent for someone else’s goods and talent. This enriches you and the other person by enabling you both to achieve greater physical prosperity and greater professional satisfaction. Exercising one’s potential talent to the maximum is everyone’s dream, but it often requires one to be able to start early, in childhood. It is a beautiful serendipity of words that the English Bible term for money is “talent” in the Parable-of-the-Talents and that the modern meaning of talent is one’s ability or skill developed to a high point of proficiency. A child’s talent could be developed to such a point that it can also provide for him in his adult life and not be just merely something to be exercised as a hobby on the weekends.
