Can you start talent development at a much younger age than age twelve?
In a conversation with my wife I talk about how my experiment in talent development with my nine year old son is coming along. It can be done, but you have to weigh the cost in time of starting at such an early age versus waiting for a what I think is the more normal age of twelve. This is part of the 10,000 hours journey with developing a different talent in each of my children and my documentation of what works and doesn’t work. I think it works if you start younger than age twelve, but it is not a recommended strategy for everyone.
Your call-to-action: see if you can identify in any of your children who are younger than age twelve one ability and one family advantage that you could start putting together to begin developing a talent.
Can a gaming hobby, such as Minecraft, be turned into a real long-term talent? Yes, it can be! But you must re-cast the interest in a way that focuses on bringing value to others. When you switch from doing a skill for just your own enjoyment, to doing a skill so that it brings real value to other people, you transform the low-value hobby into a market valuable talent.
I discuss with my wife Renee about how we have been successfully able to turn one of our children’s talent into a potential for real long term talent.
At the end of this episode, we finish with this call-to-action:
How do you manage your young person’s social media presence on the Internet so that it helps him on his journey to developing amazing talent?
I discuss with Renee how we have been successfully able to handle and encourage the use of social media for own children’s talent development.
At the end of this episode, we finish with this call-to-action:
Find two types of social media or Internet forums that would could be a good fit to the type of interest or talent that your child is wanting to develop.
How do you use an Instagram account so that your talent focused young person can connect with other talented young people? There is an easy straight-forward way to do it and we tell you how to approach Instagram with the right mindset. It’s the smart way to use your smart phone.
My wife and I discuss two recent Instagram examples that helped our two oldest boys to a community of very talented people.
At the end of this episode, we finish with this call-to-action:
Create an Instagram account to search for ideas on how the world of your child’s talent could be showcased so that other talented people will want to connect with your son or daughter.
Would you like to eavesdrop on an intelligent conversation on how to create a unique talent opportunity for your young person? Listen here.
Do you want to know what the secret is to making sure that it is not some cute hobby that will do next-to-nothing for your son or daughters’s future prospects? Listen here.
Listen to the point in the interview she makes about how it was not until she was in her late twenties that she finally started a learning journey of her own that made sense to the vision for her own life. How much better it would have been if she had had a method that could have started her in her teens. Enter “yours truly”, to explain a strategy of how that can be accomplished much sooner rather than much later.
Wardee asks me how I would approach talent in a young person’s life if the interest was already there for traditional cooking or homesteading. Her podcast audience has a shared interest for real food and traditional cooking so it would be natural for the children of her listeners to also have grown up with a passion for growing food, fermenting food, or cooking food in a traditional way. Does such an early interest mean something to son or daughter’s future opportunities? or is it neither here nor there? This was a great how-to-create-talent interview because she wanted me to explain how do you turn such a type of interest and passion into eventually an opportunity that can support a family. And that’s what I take the time to clearly explain.
Your child’s core skill, such the ability to grow a Victory garden, can be used as the first skill around which to wrap many others until it gets transformed into a market valuable talent.
Here are some of the links mentioned in Wardee Harmon’s Podcast:
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!
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.
