Page 8 – 10k to Talent – Discover and Develop Your Child's First 100 Hours of Talent

Six Common Questions by Homeschoolers

Good morning from #lakecalifornia via 10ktotalent — When your child’s daily hard work really does have an end goal in mind that is just for him, it feels like blue skies ahead.

Studying and learning with a meaning instead of becoming a recipient of data dumping, can make all the difference in child’s life. See if a focus on building real talent your child’s life can be a cure to one of these common questions:

How do I match my homeschool to my child’s learning style?
What kind of daily routines can I copy that make sense in our home?
How do I awaken my child’s entrepreneurial spirit?
What can I do to accelerate my child’s learning so he can finish school sooner?
How do I motivate my son who has no motivation to study or do anything serious?

(Question as heard from teenage homeschool students) How do I finally become really good at something, instead of always studying?

Fivejs Curriculum Plan Includes Talent Development

Jonathan

Sprint006 plan — Do you have your custom plan in place for this year’s talent development in your child? (Photo credit: J’Roo)

My friends at the fivejs.com website are purveyors of helpful and nifty tips and reviewers of resources that support homeschoolers. What they also do is boldly post their curriculum plans for each of their children for the up-coming year. In this year’s plan they are showing by their list of choices for their oldest son that they creatively substituting some standard type courses for very specialized ones that push deeper into expertise one of several sub-skills that their son needs to become very, very good at what he hopes to do. Pop Quiz: Do you think this talent focus will make him more or less attractive to immediate employment and college recruiters? If you were the recruiter, would you rather that young man be with or without his talent identity well under way?

Daily Routine Designer by MOTH

Jonathan

In our early homeschool years, we came across the MOTH manual on how to design daily routines and schedules that restore sanity to your life without foregoing the goals you originally set out to meet. The guide helps you avoid creating daily routines that just fill up your day with no real big-purpose. It’s the grind and it’s bad and it typically afflicts new homeschoolers who are trying to out-do the classroom setting by just piling it deeper and meaner in the home. The other extreme is no daily routine at all that engenders sheer chaos when you have many small children living under the same roof. The MOTH daily routine designer is the ultimate customizing guide – it will even teach you how to schedule yourself to be unscheduled!

Daily Routines that Make Sense for Talented Homeschoolers

Jonathan

Schedule — My son Caleb checking up on our recently updated daily routine that includes some of the standard type courses from the online Ron Paul Curriculum.

Sanity: it’s about creating a daily routine that makes sense because it has a purpose. That’s where I do build in a daily routine for outright pure talent focused activities, independent of whether or not it ties into standard school curriculum. Into the daily routine, I also make room for standard type courses – but I do NOT allow them to dictate the direction of where all this schooling and learning is going to take my sons. For example, if you acquire a superbly designed grammar course and you don’t dominate and dictate its role in your child’s overall plans, you will soon find that the author’s goals will try to crowd out you and your child’s goals. Without you meaning to, the grammar expert speaking through your curriculum starts trying to take direction of your child’s time and priorities. Don’t let that happen. Stay in control as the parent. Instead make that course sit timidly in the corner of the room to come into your child’s schedule only at your beck-and-call.

Math Logbook Includes Notes About Application to His Talent

Jonathan

math log notebook — Your child should log how his traditional course connects and applies to his developing talent.

My son Nicholas, who is 11 years old, has started a new online math course that he is enjoying very much. One of the course goals is for him to keep an personal log of what he is learning in his own words. In this picture you can see him writing in a Moleskin notebook about that day’s lesson and you can also see in the background the whiteboard (propped up on our baby’s high-chair) he uses to teach back to his younger brother what he learned. What you can’t see though is that he is also logging extra notes and thoughts about how the different type of numbers are handled in the coding languages he is learning as part of his on-going coding talent. This is one of the ways he is able to use a traditional content course like the one from Grade 8 Math by Benjamin Richards (available at RonPaulCurriculum.com) to support and develop a stronger control of his core talent.

Weigh Each Course for Talent Building

Jonathan

Scales of Justice Brisbane Courts-1= — Weigh in the balance as to whether that course will help your child’s talent more or less than the other course your child could take (Photo credit: Sheba_Also)

When I look at the 10,000 hour talents I am encouraging my children to develop, I don’t think in terms of the name of a career I am trying to get them into. Rather I think in terms of gradually adding skill after skill onto maybe a traditionally labeled career, yes, but I keep going until the end result is something very unique. So when I am getting my children started on some new courses, as for example from the RonPaulCurriculum website, I don’t just grab whatever is available to fill up my sons daily schedule. I weigh the time commitment of an otherwise well-taught course in the light of whether or not it can help my child build his talent faster or better. This includes supporting skills – so for my son Nicholas, even though he has a plate full of talent building hours right now, I did sign him up for one of the online math classes by Benjamin Richards as I see it as a supporting skill for his programming talent.

How to Make Your Professor Build Your Son’s Talent

Jonathan

We are making Tom Woods’ history expertise serve the needs of my son’s 10,000 hours of talent building. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

This week has been an exciting launch for three of my sons into the online world of RonPaulCurriculum.com

My boys are motivated by the no-nonsense content-rich curriculum with a modern format that suits them well: YouTube style talking head, with a strong male expert or full-time professional in the subject matter, with screen shots of key points, replay-able as often as you want.

Yes, but how I am using these courses to push my sons talents forward? For example, on the Western Civilization history course by Tom Woods, one of the first topics was on the history of the Hebrews. So in counter point, my oldest son did his own simple research on the type of Jewish coins used during that time period because his talent interest includes the study and use of money and coins. As he progress through that history course he will continue to intertwine the historical knowledge of that course with the specific historical knowledge of the skills that build his talent.

Sneak Peek for Videos to Blog to Your Talent

Jonathan

Click on this sneak peek link to see the videos that accompany the e-course “Blog to Your Talent.” Check it out now before it is removed.

List of Videos to Blog to Your Talent

No need to buy the whole e-course if all your child needs is some inspiration to get him going. This is how you can get the talented child in your house to build his portfolio for viewing on the World Wide Web. Enjoy!

Proverbs for Steps to Personal Success

Jonathan

Don't Spill the Beans — Saw this at my local coffee shop. It is similar to the Biblical proverb that says: “He who goes about as a talebearer reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy conceals a matter”

As Dad and Mom, we are currently having great discussions with the teenagers in our house on the topic of proverbs (“up a creek without a paddle”, “he who snoozes looses”, “don’t spill the beans”, etc.) How do you stay practical so that you define success in a way you can recognize it in the workplace and in the exercise of your talent? I recommend you download this free e-book entitled “Wisdom and Dominion” written by Gary North about the book of Proverbs in the Holy Bible. Download here: http://www.garynorth.com/WisdomAndDominion.pdf

Excerpts from the introduction:

“In order to persuade His covenant people to become highly motivated to discover, develop, and implement their individual talents in a program of kingdom extension, God offers a comprehensive program of self-improvement. This program is presented in the Book of Proverbs. This book is God’s handbook for self-improvement. There is none like it in the ancient world.”

“There are numerous sub-themes in those proverbs that are devoted to economics.”

“Each of these themes has several proverbs associated with it. All of these themes are important for devising and implementing a lifelong plan of personal success. Among these are:

The steps to personal success
The standards of personal success
Success indicators
Failure indicators
The function of riches
The basis of riches
The concept of riches
The concept of ownership
The nature of economic causation
The marks of a biblical economy
The purposes of inheritance

Excerpt from Blog to Your Talent e-course (lesson 10)

Jonathan

Excerpt from the up-coming e-course “BLOG TO YOUR TALENT” with e-guide and videos.

Lesson 10: Provides Immediate Access to Sources

Blogging has a direct source advantage over normal essay writing. Through a blog you can provide web links to online resources that you recommend. These would be resources that the reader could use to get more details to inform himself further or possibly act on. You are doing your reader a great favor because you are taking the effort to filter for him the best links available. If you take care to provide useful links, your reader will gradually come to respect
you as a well-connected and careful person in your field of talent.

Take Action

Write a post entitled “Resources I like for [name of talent]” and list the current Internet links where you like to visit for your talent. Write a one line description of what each resource is about. Expect to update this post over time with more links as you discover more useful resources.

See this idea in action

Resources I like:
http://jonathansfilmblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/resources-i-like-for-videography.html

Daughters Who Have a Skill for Business

Jonathan

A key skill for even the Christian Stay-At-Home-Mom is an ability to trade something of value in the marketplace. Check out this reminder article by VisionaryDaughers.com (the top 10 things girls should study but rarely do) on the art of business worth being developed in daughters who want to be spiritual and who want to know how to efficiently run a household. A great quote from this article is: “In Proverbs 31, even the virtuous woman’s wisdom and kindness are not praised as frequently as her business acumen, industry, and economic profitability, which is why we believe these are some of the most feminine things a Christian woman can study”. This means that a well developed talent in a future homemaker would not be amiss to included some entrepreneurial skills – because a good talent would include not just one household skill, but a combination of several well-chosen skills, with one of them having a value that can be traded in the marketplace.

Benefits to Identifying Sub-Skills of Your Talent

Jonathan

There is a benefit to training your child to objectively look upon the skills of his talent as separate components that can be individually identified and developed. If for example your child has an interest in bladesmithing, one of the skills that is useful to commercial speed is the ability to weld layers of raw steel for prep work. The mistake would be to sign up your child into your local and traditional 2-year long welding program where ALL the welding skills are taught. That makes it easy to explain to other parents where your child is spending his time, but your child would lose valuable time on his talent plan. Instead, because you have identified the specific sub-skills for the talent, you can pay an expert welder to teach your child on just those few narrow welding techniques in a matter of days.

Birthday Wishlist Betrays Desire for Talent

Jonathan

Are there signs of interest in your child for a talent of his own to emerge? If you have a personal system in place, ready to channel that youthful energy, you will not have to hope that an appropriate skill-set appears spontaneously. Gideon is now nine years old. See if you can spot some emerging interest in the birthday wishlist of my soon-to-be ten-year old:

wishlist — Gideon’s Wishlist for his 10th Birthday

From Pearl to Diamond Daughters

Jonathan

sh15 luxury — Pearls, diamonds, they are all wonderful. But if you could take your daughter to diamond level, would you do it? (Photo credit: Upupa4me)

Many do well by raising their daughters to be pearls of great attraction. A few parents will exceed even that by deciding that they will then take their daughters to the diamond level before they graduate from home. I asked my wife what she thought would be ***practical examples*** of what a diamond level girl could do as compared to a pearl level daughter. Here below are some quick examples of what she came up with. Do you notice how the difference would be due to having a development plan for a homemaking talent in place instead of passively acquiring curriculum knowledge?

A daughter who is a “Pearl” is soft, beautiful, and known for her tender luster; she must be careful that the wrong environment does not take advantage of her and crush her.

…but a Diamond is a strong, bright, hard; can handle changes well, but is still beautiful to look at; you can easily delegate to her and she doesn’t wilt in a time of crisis.

Pearl: can put together a nutritious meal together, on time

…but a Diamond could do this: can entertain guests with ease on an hour’s notice using resources on hand

Pearl: can initiate thoughtful handwritten thank-you notes

…but a Diamond could do this: maintain church and family relationships through encouraging and informative newsletters and blogs

Pearl: can make preserves, jams, and jellies for her family from produce picked in her garden

…but a Diamond could do this: coordinate, manage and teach food preservation skills for local food exchange club

Pearl: can sell handmade jewelry at local craft shows

…but a Diamond could do this: carefully research a country-wide market demand for special wool socks and then run an e-bay store targeted to a specific customer group; selling socks whose knitting was outsourced to other homemakers.

Adding Up the Talent Hours

Jonathan

adding machine (d) — Keep the vision: your child’s talent hours will add up (d) (Photo credit: Aaron Kyle)

If your child accumulated 300 days a year focused on developing some aspect of his talent for four hours a day, he would easily cross the 10,000 hours of training mark from age 12 to age 22. Consider that a traditional university degree will contribute only 2,400 hours (last two years of college) toward a specific talent, assuming of course he is able to study in a field that supports his talent goals directly. Consider also that the practice level needed to perform in an average middle class paying job probably only requires about 2,000 hours of focused learning vs. your child’s accumulated excellence of 10,000 hours.

Age 12 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 13 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 14 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 15 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 16 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 17 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 18 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 19 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 20 – 1,200 talent hrs

Age 21 – 1,200 talent hrs (college year 3)

Age 22 – 1,200 talent hrs (college year 4)

Total: 12,000 talent hours

Read Like an Action Hero

Jonathan

Is your son reading lots of books about his talent, but reading them with only the goal of being able to say he’s read them? This is mistake. If this is so, most of what he reads will be forgotten and unusable in the abundance of details he is acquiring over time. Instead, he must treat books in the spirit of an action hero who has a mission to accomplish (see the Book Blitz Method by Levi Heiple). Your talent driven child must learn to scan his books with an eye to interpreting key information into immediately applicable rules of action within his specific talent focus. The rest of the otherwise good information, he must learn to judiciously gloss over.

What Blogging to Your Talent Can Do for Your Child

Jonathan

Example of what blogging to your talent can do for your child: interview of my son 11 year old son Nicholas by his mother. Enjoy!

Danger: Hard Work Not the Same as Value

Jonathan

choir-130 — Talent caveat: everyone enjoys listening to a choir at least once in a while, but very few will want to pay for what they have already heard many times. Lesson: your talent must be more than just repeat to bring real added value to others (Photo credit: Family Photo Archives)

Teach your hard working and diligent child how not to confuse quantity of hard work to be the same as the amount of value he is bringing to others through his talent. It is the recipients of his talent who will determine how much of a difference it makes to their lives and not the amount of sheer effort that he has to put into it. This explains why often in the arts, it is original content that is rewarded more highly, even if the performers are less technically proficient than more hard working, school-trained artists. It is also true in other fields like business or mystery-book writing. Talent focused children and their parents must not forget that because people have already seen or heard the same type of Country-Western song so many times, fans would rather now pay for a much more different take on that genre, than to simply add another very accomplished repeat to their collection.

Wrap a Very Different Skill Around Core Art Skill

Jonathan

Stop starving artists: wrap another very different skill around your daughter’s core art skill (Photo credit: mayhem)

Great example of the 10,000 hour principle where this mother calculates her daughter has already accumulated thousands of those hours and become a really good illustrator. By the evidence, her 16 year old daughter has mastered an old, standby-core skill, and has additionally wrapped it in a modern digital medium. Here’s my 10ktotalent tip: if she hasn’t already, I would then recommend that her daughter leverage one of her family’s goals, one of her environmental assets, and then gradually find a market focus, by adding another very different skill from a completely different field. Ideally she wants to keep wrapping other sub-skills around her art in such a way that others will be willing to pay her for her talent and hesitate to call her just an illustrator, because the term would be too limiting. Her immediate danger is that she will be recruited too soon by an art school who will try to socialize her into something that is not useful to others (turning her art only into a private hobby) or training her to be good at a specific art production that is already over-crowded with other already great artists (becoming the proverbial starving artist).

Reasons for Hobbies that Do Not Matter

Jonathan

Couch Potato — Without a talent focus, the only answer is group sports and cute hobbies – but it then creates problems later in early adulthood (Photo credit: Furryscaly)

Here are the common reasons parents sign-up their child for cute hobbies and group sports that are NOT talent related:

child is restless and needs something to keep him from boredom
don’t have anything in common to do or talk about in the evenings so it’s easier to drop child off at soccer or basketball
worried about child not being physically active enough after sitting in a classroom all day
worried child won’t make friends unless he’s involved in the same activity as everyone else

Those are some good reasons to address, but you don’t need to address them by sacrificing your child’s ability to have enough time to develop a real talent. With a serious talent focus, he can gain all of the above (motivation, friends, reasons for moving his body, and an interesting personality that even you will want to be around), AND, in addition, gain a meaningful productive life in early adulthood. The exception might be if your child’s talent does not involve anything physical, in which case, you may still need to get him out the door.