About Me

Interview by Radical Personal Finance Joshua Sheats

Listen to a podcast interview by Joshua Sheats of Radical Personal Finance on my explanation of how you can go about discovering and developing talent in your child while your son or daughter is still young.

If you are the kind of person that likes to learn by listening in on a focused conversation between two people, then you are going to enjoy this type of podcast.

Joshua is a financial expert and likes to interview people with unusual insights on how to implement life-hacks that can dramatically change the quality of your lifestyle and that of your finance book. In this case, he was intrigued about how parents can put their children onto an amazing talent development path that will change their lives, without a big up-front investment in money. That’s why “yours truly” came on as a guest for his “radical personal finance” show.

During his interview with me he made the interesting point that if you take the talent approach seriously, then you are passing on the skills for your child to be able to be successful on his own merits. If you are a smart, intelligent kind of parent, you can create the conditions in your child’s environment that will reap enormous rewards in adulthood. The opposite approach would be for an otherwise smart parent to make it big with his own wealth creating abilities, but leave the responsibility of his child’s education to others. Such a scenario will likely have little impact on the behavior of the children according to Joshua, as the patterns of the adult descendants will already have been firmly entrenched by the time they get the inheritance windfall.

What matters most is the time spent now to mold your son or daughter while still in your household. Good news: That time spent does not necessarily depend on your finances as a parent. This means you can act on talent building now without having to wait for a future success date of your own . Chew on that insight for a while on the implications of what it means to pass on success to your children!

That was Joshua’s commentary during the interview, so if you want to hear more stuff like that, subscribe to his podcasts so you can hear his other interviews.

My Wife and I Talking About our Lifestyle

Jonathan

My wife and I were interviewed by Ryan and Stephanie Langford from EntreFamily.com

These are the points we talk about:

Why starting small can be wise
How we decided it was time to become full-time entrepreneurs rather than continue in the corporate world
How to help your kids find their passion and develop a marketable skill early on
How to find learning opportunities that will develop and challenge you as a business owner
Why your own story may be one of the things that helps you most with effective marketing
Why professional development matters and we should always keep learning
How training kids early in responsibilities and independence allows them the freedom they need to make their homeschooling & entrepreneurial family lifestyle work (and with 8 kids, we should know!)

If you are interested in eventually changing your family life so that you are more of an entrepreneurial focused family, I recommend you sign up for the Langford’s podcast to hear how others are doing it.

What Started Me on Talent for My Children

Jonathan

http://gty.im/134249338

This is what I noticed in the lives of many young people post high-school that first got me launched into organizing our homeschool for maximum talent productivity in each of our children:

ill-equipped to take on the marketplace
career frustration
years of delayed marriage
the joy of working snuffed out

But do not worry: you can reverse engineer those problems back to a solution. You do not have to be a deer in the headlight paralyzed for the lack of a plan. And the answer is creating a custom talent that starts in the very early teens. Are you doing that now for your son or daughter?

If the above list of frustrations is not what you have experienced in your own young adult life, then you do not need my help. You are probably going to give the right guidance to your own children. However, if you experienced those problems or you or your spouse are still experiencing those career problems, then please STOP your children going down the same educational path you took for career fulfillment.

If you are following the crowds, then there is high likelihood that you are inadvertently regressing your son or daughter through your curriculum to a composite average of academic skills. If your child is already 18, then yes, there is probably nothing you can do now for him except to beg him to not have as short of a vision and planning mentality as you have had in your youth.

If your young student is still in his or her early teens, then it is not too late. I will help you. I will help you to mine out the gold that is in your unique environment and family situation. That gold can be hammered into a long-term mind-boggling talent.

Read the rest of the article I wrote on this subject for Amy Roberts on her site at RaisingArrows.net

What the Angels Eat

Jonathan

Ever wonder what I look like when you decide to give me a call for coaching you through the talent discovery process? Well, here I am. The beard may or may not stay, depending on how I feel about it in the fall. However let me explain the watermelon prop…

When we moved back to California (about a decade ago now), my wife and I were so excited to be back where there was so much produce and fruit in season. One of the first things we did was to find Al, a local produce guy, who grows exotic and not-so-exotic greens and delivers them to your door on a weekly basis. We could not find enough delicacies like his in the local supermarkets so we signed up, pronto!

Come rain or shine, this guy shows up every week! As a side-benefit, our relationship with Al grew into a friendship where we enjoy his weekly drop-offs as an excuse to talk about latest obsession with this or that new mobile device, how to cook the latest vegetable in season, which local winery is closing or changing, and some occasional philosophizing about children and life. This week was no exception. But this time he also brought me one of his few watermelons, because the watermelon crop was very small due to nights under 100 degrees Fahrenheit this year. So here I am in this pic getting to take possession one of his very few melons as a reward for being one of the original customers…or as I like to think, one of the “preferred” customers Of course, I had to joke about treating and holding this big fruit like one of my babies. That’s when he took a snap-shot of me. (Thanks, Al! If you are reading this post…do know that we have enjoyed your friendship over the years and we keep looking forward to your bounty.)

So that is me. And when I answer that phone I am not going to have any problem understanding your homeschooling situation. I love to roll my sleeves up and help you uncover something unique about your family’s environment that is going to translate into talent for your son or daughter. I get even more excited about talent in children than about Al’s watermelon, so you know these will be good sessions.