Page 15 – 10k to Talent – Discover and Develop Your Child's First 100 Hours of Talent

Start Your Child Blogging Today with These Five Questions

Child 1 — Gradually Flex Writing (Photo credit: Tony Trần)

Dovetail your child’s standard historical study with a blog post related to his developing talent as it was during that time period.

Start your child writing blog posts today with these five questions:

Does the blog post focus on answering one basic question?
Does it relate to his on-going focus in some way?
Does it relate to the historical time-period he is studying?
Is there a personal observation or interpretation?
Is there something you can compare to that will help your reader understand what you are saying?

I gently ask those questions of my children every time they write and they gradually flex their writing accordingly. At this early stage, it is more important that they start writing something in their own words about their topic of interest then it is to delay because they don’t have an excellent writing style.

Why I called my website 10ktoTalent.com

Jonathan

Cover of "Talent Is Overrated: What Reall... — Cover via Amazon

I chose to name this website 10ktotalent.com (short for “10,000 hours of talent”) after being inspired by the book “Talent Is Overrated” by Geoff Colvin. In summary, the author makes the case that individuals who have been known for amazing levels of performance in their respective fields of interest were able to perform to such breathtaking levels because of tens of thousands of hours of practice.

The various studies appear to show that despite the presence of talent at an early age in some children, it wasn’t natural-born talent that predicted future outstanding performance. Mature, world-class performance was instead predicted by deliberately practicing with focused intention for approximately 10,000 hours. Deliberate practice was defined as not necessarily practicing on the end-skill directly (such as playing football), but planning, practicing and training on all the individual components (such as specific strength or speed training exercises for a football player) that will eventually come together to produce what appears to others as magical, effortless talent.

History Builds Understanding of How Talent Changed

Jonathan

Your child can leverage his study of history toward building those 10,000 hours of world class talent. History can help your child build a deep understanding as to how human knowledge and skill changed in order to get to where it is today. For example, my twelve year old son Caleb has had an abiding interest in all things mineral and metal. I am encouraging that interest by insisting that he writes on mining or the use of metals as it is in done in the time period that we are cycling through. Just recently we were working through some history of the Middle-Ages and this allowed him to write this post about mining iron on the island of Elba.