breakaway – Page 3

MindMap Helps Uncover Talent Opportunities

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.

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Share How to Move Forward Even in the Face of Unknown

Talk specifically to your child about your personal strategy for developing his talent and explain the whys and hows of your thinking. Taking the time to explain out-loud your reasoning is a great way to model for him thinking patterns on how to plan for the future, even in the face of many unknowns. Sometimes talk with a big picture view of things, other times with just the near future in mind. If he is still very young, he will tend to not ask much, but just light up with excitement knowing that you are that interested in the details of his near and distant future. If he is older, you are going to see his commitment and decision making powers rev up because he knows his own father acts and moves forward even in the face of many unknown variables.

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Old Fashioned Hobby With New Application

bug of the day — Can your child create a brand new talent by combining an old hobby with a modern application of that hobby? The Pinterest founder did. (Photo credit: urtica)

Did you know that Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest, spent his childhood years catching, collecting, and categorizing hundreds of insects, spiders, and beetles? He would pin them on boards and label them. This childhood habit would later become the idea of Pinterest. What does your child spend his time doing now that could turn into a start-up later? Think about how you can combine an old-fashioned hobby with a new cutting edge application, and your child may well be on an exciting path where talent will support him in his adult life.

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How to Have a Job, Career, or Talent

English: In front of the chedule board ... — Are you preparing your child for a career or a talent? The strategy for each is different and the rewards are not the same (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After graduation, do you want your son to have a job, a career, or a talent?

Here’s how to do it:

For a job – don’t plan for anything and hope he figures it all out after he’s 18.

For a career – suppress his uniqueness, load up on student loans, and have him study real hard following a traditional school curriculum or certified training program. Hope he gets hired by the corporate world so he can fit into the top of the predetermined pay band.

For a talent – start him young and have him keep combining skills in a way that is unusually effective, different, and pleasing to other people. Watch his passion carry through him into old age.

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Talent is Something Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue

Nurse's uniform — A skill that communicates and projects your child’s talent is a valuable component of your child’s talent development (Photo credit: east_lothian_museums)

A talent should be made of up of not one, but several different skills: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

An old recognized skill helps your daughter get started, a new skill that did not exist before helps your child break into the next generation of talent, and a skill borrowed from a completely different field will classify your child as someone with breakthrough insight. Add a skill that showcases and communicates your child’s amazing ability, and she will have a beautiful talent in blue.

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Same Experience Repeated Over and Over is Not Talent

English: Kimberley and Babette Nederlands: Kim... — 10,000 hours of talent development is not the same thing as applying the first few hours of instruction thousands of hours over and over (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The same small experience repeated over and over is what keeps an entry level job at the status of an entry level job. After a full year of work standing on her feet at a typical teenage job at McDonalds, there are probably only eight hours of added skill to the child’s life. The same principle applies when guiding your child into accumulating her 10,000 hours of talent development in household management: a daughter who is enthusiastically cooking, teaching, and helping her mom with home organization is not enough to build world-class talent. To be recognized as a future mother and wife who has taken the world of household management by storm, she would have to daily push the boundaries of her abilities with new tools and new ideas of management…until her performance appears magical to others, like that of the fictional Mary Poppins.

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True Talent Jumps Outside Career Labels

Don’t let your 13 your old child say “I want to develop my veterinary skills.” Instead, for example, have your child say “I want to use my microscope to be able to identify all the most common pathogens as found in the cat and dog droppings in our neighborhood and community. I want to recommend to the pet owners the right off-the-shelf pet prescriptions for the specific problems that I find.”

Here’s why you want to avoid traditional career names in discovering your first talent focus:

First, you need to stay flexible about what long term career your child might enter into in the future so he can take advantage of a changing market. Your child’s career is most likely not going to be traditional and true talent will tend to jump outside the boundaries of popular career labels.
Second, your child will most likely be legally or culturally blocked in trying to do anything really resembling the work description of a traditional career. But if you focus on a specific skill to develop, your child can often get around limitations and start developing right away a a skill that can lay the groundwork for the next level of skills.

She is Drawing, Not Talking Her Way Through History

What if your arts talented daughter could draw through most of her history curriculum, instead of talking and writing her way through it? Wouldn’t that accelerate her talent development?

What do you do with an arts oriented daughter who is having difficulty following a standard history curriculum? Instead of keeping her at a disadvantage, put her talent back in service by having her sketch or trace scenes from that time in history using the many available art history books. Because artists will have specifically focused on important points from that era, it will be easy for your daughter to draw her way through history, rather than primarily talk and write her way through it. Instead of losing time building her talent while she is doing traditional schooling, she is actually gaining ground and learning how paid artists apply their trade to bring value to others.

Wouldn’t it Be Better to Be the Leader?

Miner Spreads His Lunch Out on a Bench in the ... — You can choose to build talent now in your child’s life or you can let society force him to work for others at low wages (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)

Working for someone else and being micro-managed by another person can and will pay the basic bills, but wouldn’t it be better to be the leader in a particular field of talent? Get your son or daughter started today on building a unique talent. They can be the ones who rule in a particular sphere of life instead of being forced to work for others at low wages.

Proverbs 12:24

“The hand of the diligent will rule,
But the slack hand will be put to forced labor”

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Fall Back Plan for Too Much Hobby Time

Is your child 17 years old and has spent too much of her teenage years developing a hobby, such as softball or horse-riding, that has no apparent market value to others? Consider a last minute fall-back plan: use the experience in her hobby as a core strand around which you can wrap some other very different skills. If it’s softball, could she use her understanding of the needs of fans and players to come up with an app or service that she knows would be wanted? If it’s horse-riding, are there some short tutorial videos your daughter could put together for YouTube and a website reviewing horse-saddles with an e-book for beginners? Build on what your 17 year old child already has or, if not, starting from scratch will set your daughter back another decade.

If Your Talent Already Has a Name, It Will Have Been Claimed

Yesterday’s Talent

+ New Skills

= New Talent

Don’t fixate on a traditional career label, such as “writer” or “accountant” as the goal of your child’s talent development. If the name of your child’s talent already has a clearly defined and popular name now, it will have already been claimed by too many others and there will little additional reward for your child to be a “me-too.” During the 10,000 hours of talent development, you will want many other skills to wrap around a core talent such as writing or accounting until it is so different that a traditional label will no longer fit. It is the growing uniqueness and usefulness of your child’s talent that will secure him a place in the sun – cherish true talent.

Small Interest to Big Talent

Don’t wander around looking for the sign of your child’s BIG TALENT. Instead, like the fathers of Mozart and Tiger Woods, start your child young, under your protective and nurturing wings, and follow this pattern of 10,000 hours of talent development; get the free e-guide “How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s First 100 Hours of Talent” to jump-start the first small interest phase:

Small Interest

Small Skill

Small Productive Output

Small Feeling-of-Satisfaction

Which leads to…

Bigger Interest

Bigger Skill

Bigger Productive Output

Bigger Feeling-of-Satisfaction

Which leads to…

Very Big Interest

Very Big Skill

Very Big Productive Output

Very Big Feeling-of-Satisfaction

which equals to…VERY BIG TALENT!

Think Outside Standard Career Labels for Child’s Talent

Three-strand twisted natural fibre rope — Combine different skills into developing a unique talent (Photo credit: Wikipedia; Author= HiveHarbingerCOM)

You are beginning to think outside of standard career labels for developing your child’s talent if you can report something similar to fictional ‘Not-Afraid-to-Get-My-Hands-Dirty-Mom‘:

Five months after taking a talent discovery workshop and discussing our concerns with our son about being in a market with too many painters, we have dramatically re-apportioned the type of time he is spending in the family business.We now have our son spending half his work time with a local tool rental company that needs detailing and small repair help on new cutting-edge sand blasting equipment that gets returned. He connects well with the customers and his employer is recognizing his value as a budding salesman in the painting industry. Combining another new skill with his already extensive painting skills is really getting all of us excited about what other skills could be merged so he can be amazingly productive and desirable in the marketplace.

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Change the Name of Child’s Talent Over Time

Yoyo whiz Sterling Quinn (14 years old at the ... — Yoyo whiz Sterling Quinn (14 years old at the time of this photo) shows off his stuff at Bumbershoot (Photo credit: Wikipedia; Attribution: Joe Mabel)

Give a name to your twelve year old’s beginning talent. But don’t give a name yet to your child’s final talent destination, the one that will launch him into the world several years from now. Don’t give it a name yet, because you don’t and cannot know how his talent will evolve from its first 100 hours all the way through to its full 10,000 hours of development. Maybe his first talent name is “YoYo Entertainer” because he is able to delight his friends and relatives at gatherings and birthday parties with his YoYo tricks. But as he acquires other skills, his final talent destination may take him to a place where his talent title becomes “Physics Entertainer – teaching science online through the power of toys”.

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Five Talent Tips for Your Child

Nicholas at Microscope — Develop the components that make up your talent, not just the visible, public side of your talent in action

Practice and study a lot, but don’t do it for more than four hours of intense focus per day as your body and mind won’t gain beyond that.
Break down the components of your talent and improve on those so you don’t give all your time to just the public, visible part of your talent.
Borrow tricks and methods from other fields of activity and use them to boost your developing talent in new and unusual ways.
Combine skills from different areas of life so that you create a new and unique talent that has not yet been standardized into a common job title.
Constantly look for ways to apply your talent in a way helpful to others so you are not inadvertently becoming very good at something no one will want from you.

The Case of “Bull’s Eye Jane”

Archery competition — The beauty of Archery can be combined with market valued skills to create a unique talent (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Problem: your daughter has spent a good portion of her teenage years enjoying sports in general and archery specifically, but there is no possibility this could help support her in motherhood or pay the bills for college. She is known in her small archery club as “Bull’s Eye Jane.”

Solution: your daughter combines her beautiful-to-watch archery skills with market valued skills that others will gladly pay for.

Daughter takes physics textbooks and creates free YouTube videos of herself shooting arrows from her pink power bow with close-ups, slow-motions, and sub-texts that demonstrate specific principles found in the textbooks. She sells accompanying science guides containing clever Mnemonics that use archery and sports moves to lock in the memory in preparation of science exams. Homeschool mothers everywhere love her and she becomes known as “The Flying Arrow Girl of Science.”

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The Case of “The Piano Player in Placerville”

Cell Phone Ring Tone — Creating unique piano ring tones is useful for this generation and requires a new combination of piano playing and other skills to make it happen

Problem: your child has developed a skill that allows him to play the piano very well in small local gatherings, events, and weddings, but he has little chance of making a living because technology has replaced him in most events by pre-recorded, low-cost musical alternatives. He is starting to be known as “The Piano Player in Placerville.”

Solution: your child combines his piano playing ability with other skills so he transforms the old talent into a new and very valued talent to the current generation.

Child plays piano well and edits his recordings to turn them into unique ring tones that current generation purchases and downloads to help manage their mobile devices. Child also creates free YouTube videos and sells guides to other piano players so they can do the same. He is now known on the Internet as “The Ring Tone Piano Guy.”

Need Talent – Signed Mother of an Artist

my brother. with his electric guitar. LÂG Roxa... — Worried your son is musically proficient, but will wind up struggling financially after he leaves home? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your child needs a talent, if you find yourself saying:

“My 14 year old son is deeply immersed in playing his guitar faithfully every day for hours on end. I admire his dedication, but I’m worried he will graduate from High-School with no job prospects and the harsh reality of making a living will disillusion him. I see potential, but I’m not sure what the future holds for him in this area.”

Signed, “Mother of an Artist.”

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Need Talent – Signed Love My Alma Mater But Not That Much

Alma Mater statue (Taft, 1929) in front of Alt... — Worried that your family’s tradition of earning higher degrees is not always connected to making a better living for your child? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Your child needs a talent, if you find yourself saying:

“Both my wife and I have bachelor and master degrees and my children’s grandparents keep checking to see if we are making active college plans for our own children. My concern is that with so much emphasis on college, my children will wind up with nice sounding degrees, but still have no marketable skills. I want their degrees to have a plan attached to it.”

Signed, “Love-My-Alma-Mater-But-Not-That-Much-Dad”

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