showcase

How do you get someone to read your messages? ( or how your child can build a following)

I interviewed Jack Reamer, a real world writing consultant for business people. You turn to him if you want to learn how to write emails that others will want to open and read.

Have you noticed how hard it is to get others to read the message in your mail unless you already have a very close relationship?

Most school curriculum and college prep courses will not teach you in a way that others will actually listen to what you have to say.

Traditional courses do teach you some very clever and sophisticated writing techniques, but those will not get you read.

But Jack says the mistake is to write too cleverly and too much in the first messages.

Jack Reamer explains how and why a different approach to writing gets you to your goal of communicating and connecting to your intended audience of readers.

I asked him to unpack it in this recorded interview in a way that a young man or young woman who already has a talent (do you know what your son’s talent is?) could start building a following of readers by email.

Enjoy!

Jonathan Harris

www.the10ktotalentshow.com

P.S. The show notes will link to Jack’s top recommended books that teach you how to write messages that get read. Visit here:

http://the10ktotalentshow.com/jack-reamer-writing-so-others-want-to-actually-read-your-words#Qrc9w7mckb1vJi6E.99

Podcast Episode: Use Instagram for Building Talent Community

Jonathan

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.

Secret to Avoiding a Cute Hobby

Jonathan

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.

I explain how to develop talent in young people during the entire 60-minute podcast by Wardee Harmon. She is the owner and chief cook at the online school www.TraditionalCooking.com . What caught my attention was the fact that she herself was using her life’s interests exactly along the lines of what my 10ktotalent method suggests: by finding a way to make a core skill bring value to others and not as a stand alone skill by itself.

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:

Connect with the Best in Your Generation
Example of 10,000 Hours in Practice
Does Your Child Have a Tag Line for his Talent?
Same Experience Repeated Over and Over is Not Talent
Redding Drone by Jonathan Harris Jr. (17 years old)
Scarabcoder Learns to Program by Nicholas Harris (13 years old)
Blades of Belaq by Caleb Harris (15 years old)
KYF #009: Nourishing Skin Care with Renee from hardlotion.com

Everything is Up for Being Hacked, Even Education

Jonathan

“Hackschooling makes me happy” by Logan LaPlante

Some of my favorite excerpts of this boy’s speech are:

everything is up for being hacked…even education

I take advantage of opportunities in my community and through a network of my friends and family. I take advantage of opportunities to experience what I am learning.

I’m not afraid to look for shortcuts or hacks to get a better or faster result. It’s like a remix or a mash-up of learning: flexible, opportunistic,…

It’s a mindset, not a system.

I didn’t use to like to write because my teachers made me write about butterflies and rainbow and I wanted to write about skiing.

I got to write through my experiences and my interest while connecting with great speakers from around the nation. And that sparked my love for writing.

I realized that once you are motivated to lean something, you can get a lot done in a short amount of time and on your own.

Inspired me to one day have my own business

So I got an internship

Happy healthy creative

This is where I am really happy: Powder days. It’s a good metaphor for my life, my education, my hackschooling. If everyone skied this mountain like most people think of education, everyone would be skiing the same line, probably the safest and most of the powder would go untouched. I look at this and see a thousand possibilities…Skiing to me is freedom and so is my education. It’s about being creative, doing things differently…among my very best friends.

A Swordfish Named Opportunity

Jonathan

Do you remember the update on my oldest son’s entrepreneurial talent journey? Last week he received a phone call in the middle of working on a school lesson. “Could you make it up to Lake Whiskeytown today? We need your drone service.” – said the voice on the other line. With a quick check with me, and with the principle that his schoolwork is his slave and not his master, I gave him the green light to grab that opportunity and catch up on his study work at a later time.

This last minute opportunity turned out to be a rather fun assignment for him as it involved a swordfish, jet-subs, hanging out with inventors, and getting a joy ride as part of being with the crew (can you spot him half way through the promotional video?). In the short Facebook clip below, you can see the work he did as all the aerial parts of it were done by him.

Post by Innespace Seabreacher, the ultimate diving machine.

Post by ReddingDrone.

Can She Sew Her Food?

Jonathan

When trying to look at what can be used in a family’s environment, very often a skill asset is completely overlooked that could be one of the pieces of the puzzle to creating a unique and exciting talent for your child. Let us say for example that your daughter has a strong interest in cooking and also a strong interest in sewing. The normal reaction is to look down on one or the other skill because it is not clear how focusing on one or the other will add much value beyond knowing how to do the basics in the household. Remember that with the pursuit of inordinate talent we are also talking about talent that brings great value to others, so the initial reaction, as far as to how to judge it with bringing great value to others, is correct. There is not much value as stand-alone skill between those two. However, once you think of creative ways to dovetail skills already existing in your household, then the possible value starts becoming more apparent.

Back to the example: so does this mean I recommend you try to get her to sew her food? No, of course not. But what I do mean is you could encourage your daughter to sew specifically for clothing ware that fits the professional female chef or that fits the advanced home baker and cook. Having a strong, first-hand experience with the functionality needed to meet a kitchen environment, she can continually create and test better clothing options. She can even start testing and then reviewing on a blog various clothing ware offered on the market and demonstrate by video the pros and the cons as she bakes in the kitchen while modeling the work clothes. See what happened there at the end of this example? I managed to slip in a third skill, a writing skill, when I only wanted to talk about two skills! Now there are three skills working together, each giving strength to the other. Finding a venue to writing with a purpose and developing the voice of confidence comes natural. That’s because she is writing from the first-person point about two interests she both cares and knows about. The more skills that come together to support each other with purpose, the easier it gets to create something glorious for your child to pursue as an adult.

Your mission: find that one skill you are proud to see your child develop and then find a way to create a deeper value proposition by dovetailing it with a completely different interest in your child’s life.

Interview by Radical Personal Finance Joshua Sheats

Jonathan

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.

How to Use Instagram for Talent Development

Jonathan

Are you still using your cellphone like a bat-phone? No idea how the features on it can start making a great impact on your student’s talent? Enter Instagram.

Instagram is perfect for the son or daughter who has a talent that has a photogenic or interesting visual appeal. Instagram is a great way to connect with other talented individuals in the same field of talent.

And all you need to use Instagram is a smart-phone.

With an Android or iPhone you just download the Instagram app like you would any other application. The application is designed to use your phone’s built-in camera. Before you can use it, you create your Instagram account by creating a profile with your real name and add an easy to remember stage name to help people identify you. For example, my 15 year old’s stage name is “BladesofBelaq” and under that name, you will see his real name displayed as “Caleb Harris.”

(Fun fact: Belaq is his name spelled backward and with the letter “c” replaced by the letter “q”. Blades is included in his Instagram name because his talent focus is around the making of knives and blades.)

You can see what my son’s Instagram profile looks from any computer by clicking on this link:

http://instagram.com/bladesofbelaq

Once your account is created, you are ready to use your cell phone camera to take pictures of what you are doing or seeing. Leave the pictures just as plain as you took them or enhance them with some quick photo filters. When you like what you see, you simply tap on the phone screen and up they go over the Internet onto Instagram’s big computers. This uploading to Instagram makes it possible for anyone in the world with another Instagram account to see your pictures.

If others want to see your pictures on Instagram, they can do it in the following ways.

The first way others can find your pictures is because the Instagram users already know you from reputation. You may have been specifically recommended by other Instagram users or someone may have seen your name recommended in a blog. In such as a case, these users will go straight to Instagram and search for you by your stage name (i.e. BladesofBelaq) or your real name (Caleb Harris). Then they will click the “follow” button that’s available under your name.

By clicking the “follow” button, this tells Instagram to automatically download your photos to your follower’s cell phone for viewing. Don’t worry. Your photos don’t pop onto their cell phone screen willy-nilly. All the pictures coming down are limited in size no matter how big and detailed the original photos were when they were taken. Instagram automatically reduces the pictures to a small footprint on your cell phone screen. This size limitation makes it easy to scroll through hundreds of photos at a time without causing your cell phone to lag. It is a very breezy experience completely different to the one when you try to open picture attachments in emails.

The second way people find your pictures is because the users are searching Instagram for any pictures containing a keyword. At this point others would not be specifically looking for you. The keyword search is one of the things that makes Instagram such a different tool than Facebook.

A keyword is a word in the caption of the picture to which the the photo-taker appends the sign #. One would do this in the hopes that others would be able to come across that picture if they were to use that word in a search. So for example, someone who is coin collector may want to see all the pictures on Instagram containing the hashtag word “#silvereagle” (do not use spaces). This search will display a set of pictures of American coins known as Silver Eagles. If you had labeled your picture with the hashtag #silvereagle then that particular picture of yours will show up in a large set of pictures from all sorts of Instagram users who also used the hashtag #silvereagle. If viewers see a couple of the pictures they like and those pictures happen to be yours, they might then at that point go to your account and decide to click the “follow” button. Going forward they will automatically see all your photos without having to search for #silvereagle.

If people want to let you know they appreciated your photo, they simple click the “Like” button and you will see a counter go up as the number of enthusiastic views goes up. This gives you feedback as to which ones impacted your viewers without having to leave complicated messages. In that way the like is used similarly to Facebook. They can also leave a short text comment under the caption of your picture to which you can have short back-and-forth comments with your viewers. But the primary focus of Instagram is to gather around pictures that portray a common interest. There are no re-posts of news articles or re-posts of 3rd party memes. This is why the Instagram experience is so clutter-free.

Exercise Talent as a Service to Others

Jonathan

This short compilation of aerial videos was taken by my 16 year old son who is on a journey to apply his skills so that can bring value to other people. This latest updated compilation is to show what he can do for businesses that need a view from above of their properties and commercial activities.

In one of those excerpts in the compilation, you can see the first free one that he did for a local engineering firm. Through a fortuitous meeting at lunch in our local pizzeria, a man connected to a big local earth moving project was intrigued by the possibilities of affordable aerial videography. After showing his drone to the man and what it could do, the rest of the engineering team was enthusiastic about letting him fly over so they could have a dramatic capture of the hard work they were doing. My teenage son’s cheerful and diligent turnaround in the following days with behind-the-scene editing and then providing them with links and video copies was what opened the doors for being approached by another engineering team. That team wanted him to document their project in another city – but this time for pay. I’m happy to report that the filming project has now come and gone and was a great success! Another big one is now lined up based on that last success. And on and on, this 10,000 hour talent journey will keep progressing.

What application does this have for your own son or daughter’s situation? Simply that in order to really grow your child’s talent in such a way that it brings value to other people, it is necessary for your son or daughter to gradually and systematically find ways to showcase and deliver to others with some aspect of value. This value for others means that it is not just the product itself that is important, such as the final video in this example, but also that it is served in the location, manner, and timing that is important to those who will benefit from the talent. As a parent, I take this service part of the talent so seriously, that I will halt my son’s normal school work schedule in favor of him being able to quickly agree to an onsite filming schedule that is convenient to the customer. I make the school schedule bend and flex in favor of my son’s talent development. I will make his normal math or English curriculum schoolwork step aside and allow my son to make it up later in the evening or on another day.

No matter where your child is with regards to his long-term talent development, there is most likely some aspect of it that he can use today to bring value to others besides himself. If he gets your creative parental support to find a way to do it at a young age, he will have a huge advantage of not having to wait till he is in his last year of high-school to find that creative application on his own.

Make your child’s education be the slave to your child, not the master. Make it stand up and sit down on your demand. You and your child are the masters.

How to Handle Social Media

Jonathan

Moms driving into a large city is the same kind of danger and opportunity that faces young people when they bring themselves into the wide world of social media.

Mothers can drive themselves into the city to go meet up with friends at restaurants, shop for bargains for the family, and take their children to activities without being mugged, run-over, or assaulted. How is that possible? That is because they are going into the city with a purpose, meeting up with safe friends, and avoiding unsavory dangerous parts of town. Rarely does a mother feel the temptation to get out and go for a walk in a gang-infested part of a town and try to strike up a conversation with someone who has underwear hanging out over their pants. (if you are a mother and you do you feel that temptation, chances are you are not reading this blog anyway).

It is the same with young people on social media. If they engage in communities on the Internet around a particular purpose, there is little danger. The more they engage with the right people and communities early on, with some helpful pointers from parents on how to avoid the danger spots of the Internet, the more they will instinctively recognize good, healthy, and productive environments. They will correctly “socialize” themselves into the right environment. This is the same kind of guidance as you give when you are teaching them to drive on their own.

This is how you should approach the Internet when giving guidance to young people. Older teenagers need to start shopping, taking care of errands, and communicating with people in their talent world on the Internet, just as they would in real life. Just as in real life, you can set Internet curfews, off limits parts of the Internet world, and give instructions about not having certain friends not being allowed to just hang out with you. If you start the guidance when they are still young, they will be ready to handle the Internet all on their own when they are eighteen.

Create the Young Entrepreneur Mindset

Jonathan

Afraid that the clock is ticking too fast and that your soon-to-graduate high-schooler might have to retrace a similar path to yours in his young adulthood? You know, those early years of being the kind of person who had to wait for an employer to tell you where and how to work and at what time to wake up?

Do you instead want to find a way to start encouraging the behavior and mindset of a young entrepreneur inside your teenager’s mind?

Enter Ryan Finlay of reCraigsList.com . He has a program for teaching young wannabe entrepreneurs on how to make money buying and selling appliances on CraigsList. Those principles can apply to selling other types of items your son or daughter has a special interest in. To boot, there are no age or employment restrictions just because he is a minor! That’s because your child would NOT be working as an employee for someone else, but for himself when he is buying and selling on CraigsList.

Ryan had a special on his ApplianceSchool.com that ended on Wednesday September 3rd. Subscribe to his newsletter so you don’t miss out on opportunities like this.

His blog post said:

“…It only takes selling a few machines per week to make $800-$1000 extra per month. Average profit is $100-$140 for basic washers and dryers. To do this, a person would need to pick up a washer/dryer set once per week. Then in their spare time, test, repair and post the machines back up for sale. Deliveries can be scheduled when convenient, or all they can be done on the weekend. The broken machines are hauled back, repaired and then resold, which makes for a very efficient use of time.

There are many readers that buy and sell bicycles part time. They pick up bikes that need a little work for a good price. Bring them back to their apartment or home and fix them up, test them and then post them back up at market rate. Profit for each bike can range from $50 to several hundred dollars…Why you should focus on one type of item…”

How Publishing a NON-FICTION Book Gets Done by Tom Woods

Jonathan

Sneak peek by “celebrity” Tom Woods on how publishing a NON-FICTION book gets done today. Economics and political analysis and teaching is part of that person’s talent and he has something to write about that others want to read. If you have a young person that hopes to one day write about his talent for book publishing, in order to support himself financially, listen to this very clear podcast.

Tom Woods reveals that the numbers are NEVER in the millions of copies, even when you make it to the best seller’s list. Set your money expectations accordingly. He explains the role of books opening doors for you in your overall strategy of providing your talent value to the world. It is part of a broad approach to your talent market, not a single strategy for supporting yourself (he even talks about a blog as part of his strategy!) He has had eleven books published so far. He knows what he is talking about as a successful author.

He covers these topics in this episode:

How do I submit a manuscript to a big publisher?

Do I need an agent?

How do I find one?

What are the benefits of traditional publishing?

What are the benefits of self-publishing?

How much does an author earn from the sale of a book?

How many books do nonfiction authors typically sell?

What’s the indispensable ingredient for getting media exposure for my book?

Which Social Media To Use?

Jonathan

In the case of so many options for social media outlets, where should your young person spend his time to have the greatest impact? How do you link his talent interest to the right community?

My answer: the key to using social media effectively is to understand that social media is NOT a generic medium for broadcasting to the world, but rather each type of social media is best suited for particular types of communications and communities.

This means that if your son or daughter’s talent is primarily visual in nature, then you need a social media that is best suited for visual communication. Twitter in that case is very ill-suited to showing and sharing your knitting projects because the visual part is not its strength. Facebook is also ill-suited for knitting because it is very poor in helping you to connect with other expert knitters. But Flickr or Instagram for knitting is very good because it is very visual AND you connect to other people on the basis of shared interests, not on the basis of a shared past like Facebook.

On the other hand, if your young person is into a talent that is very time-sensitive and event oriented, such as running marathons or participating in kayak races, then Twitter is the ideal medium for communicating quickly within those expert communities with bare facts of statistics that can be read with mobile phones while on the go.

In almost all cases (I can’t think of any exception), a blog is an important component to creating a living portfolio of your child’s talent progress. Strictly speaking, a blog is not really a “social media” medium, but it feeds into that idea of communicating with your talent community. The main point of using social media and a blog is that your talent has something of value to communicate to particular communities.

Connect with the Best in Your Generation

Jonathan

I encourage you to activate the social media power in your child’s life. It is not for the sake of “hanging out” willy-nilly in a very wide world wide community, but it is for the sake of learning from great people in your child’s field of talent and for the sake of being encouraged by experts.

The benefit to using social media presumes that the purpose of your student’s talent is to gradually bring value to other people in their lives. If you cannot think of why your son or daughter could benefit from connecting online to other peers or mentors in their field of interest, then there is a good possibility that your young person has too much “hobby-ness” going on in their talent. Find a way to re-calibrate the hobby so that it becomes a valuable talent.

Where can you find individuals with whom your young person would want to stay in contact with via social media? An excellent to find them in the beginning, is by joining dedicated online communities around an aspect of the talent being developed. For example, if your daughter’s intention is to become one of the best household managers possible, then she should easily be able to outpace you in performance in her adult life if she taps into the various online communities where child rearing (for example RaisingGodlyTomatoes.com) and time management (for example GettingThingsDone.com) are discussed in great detail in closed forums. Other motivated individuals will easily be found in those forums and the conversations around the shared talent can naturally continue over time through the use of social media.

If your daughter has nothing worthy enough to share and compares notes with in conversation with peers or far-flung mentors online, then she is probably not pushing herself enough to find the latest tools and methods available to her generation. Healthy cooking alone has made strides in the last few years, in great part because of people like Wardee Harmon of GNOWFGLINS.com who have made advanced healthy cooking instruction so easily available online. And yes, you can connect with her directly online. She will not move to your street, nor you will find someone as good as her abilities living in your town that knows how to cook for families…but you can now peer into her kitchen thanks to the Internet.

Social media allows young serious and talented individuals to connect directly with other talented individuals around a focused interest. Do not let that opportunity for connecting with the best people in the country on that same narrow topic pass them up.

The Process for Discovering Talent in Your Child

Jonathan

How do you find a focus around which your young person can start building a valuable talent? It seems like such a distant thing to hope for in the midst of textbooks, dozens of equally good curriculums, and too few hours left in the day to pursue anything else. It seems like it is just meant to happen to a lucky few to fall into a talent. But I am here to show you how that “luck” can be applied to each and every child in your household.

Here’s why every one of your children can develop a real talent while still under your roof:

You can start them young because you create a talent from the current uniqueness in your child’s life. You are not waiting for some mysterious future thing out there, that has no connection to your present life. Your environment of people and places, your family’s particular quirks and strengths, your child’s personal interests can all be merged together in a unique way that has passion and focus . You then give that focus a purpose by finding a way to bring value to others through that talent. This creates a feedback loop of encouragement, motivation, and productivity. This is a systematic process for discovering a viable talent that leaves plenty of room for passion.

Wouldn’t you like a taste of that kind of purpose in teenage son’s life? or how about your daughter finding great confidence in her unique productivity that she could carry with her all the way into her married life?

That is what the 10ktotalent process for discovering and developing talent can do for the young person in your home.

I give you here the basic process for discovering that kind of talent focus:

Step 1: Identify and list these items in your young person’s life into these four categories:

Personal Interests, Family Goals, Environmental Advantages, Academic Goals

Step 2: Merge together several items, one from each of the previous categories to create a poetically compelling fusion of strengths in your child’s life. On paper, try your hand at several of these fusions to see how interesting your options can be be. What emerges as the best is usually far superior than what you thought was possible before you started this discovery process.

Step 3: Take your favorite, most compelling fusion, and turn it into a believable and d0-able action statement for your child’s first 100 hours of talent focus. That is the beginning of your child’s talent. As your young person acts on it, his beginning talent will grow in complexity and branch out into previously unthought of opportunities.

Do you want help to make sure your son or daughter is on to the best talent possible? Then you may want to get my coaching help in this e-course “How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s First 100 Hours of Talent.”

Audio Interviews with Big Name Marketers

Jonathan

I recommend that every serious talent building endeavor have a component that is related to promotion and marketing, in order to get the word out that your young person does in fact have a valuable service to provide others. Remember that if a talent doesn’t learn to bring significant value to others then it really just is a big private hobby.

For that reason, I recommend that your older teenager loads up his MP3 player with Michael Senoff’s audio interviews with big name marketers. Your son or daughter will hear the inside story on how things really worked behind the scenes from very successful marketers drawn from different fields of service.

What I personally find really insightful is to hear these famous people explain how they used their uniqueness to create a name for themselves in their field and how it often involved partnering with a few key people in life. I don’t remember hearing about this kind of stuff in college. Michael Senoff boasts that if you get yourself on his newsletter alerts that he will plug you into “Free mp3 Downloads To 157 Hours Of Audio Interviews From The Best Experts in Marketing and Business”…and boy, does he deliver value. The audio-only format is excellent for listening while driving or anything else where you like to keep your mind stimulated. He also sells additional focused audio packages where he gets successful people in small niche markets to reveal step-by-step how they do their current marketing, so you can copy them. You can see Michael Senoff’s long list of audio interview titles here.

Of course, marketing skills only make sense in the context of being able to bring something of value to others. So if your son or daughter would like to build a long term talent to help create for himself an unusual lifestyle in his adult life, I recommend you go through my own e-course “How to Discover and Develop Your Child’s First 100 Hours of Talent.” In there I show you how to find something that makes sense for both your child and you as a parent, to be able to get underway, right away. If you already have a great talent going, then get cracking ASAP on your young person’s marketing skills so that he is not forgotten in that very wide-world.

Fandom Helps the Artist in Your Family

Jonathan

Do you know that “fandom” can be used by your artistically bent daughter to start showcasing her abilities?

Google+ is one of the hottest places today to find a fandom community around which your child can find a pre-disposed and hungry group of enthusiasts who cannot get enough of new artistic material. This is a far cry from trying to get immediate friends and relatives to share your daughter’s same excitement for both her art and her subject material. By interpreting something the fans will love to talk about and admire, your young talented person will have an opportunity to get much needed feedback as to how the current market is wanting to consume art. Your teenager will start developing a good sensitivity to the needs of others. At the same time it is a great way to gradually document an online portfolio that is exciting and interesting for future employers, art schools, and future clients. Imagine if your child could gradually build her portfolio in a manner similar to Karen Kavett , who started college at 16 and finished at 20 with a track record of excellence and focus around delivering on her art?

In her FAQ section about herself, Karen says that her interests started in her young teen years and that she is now in her early twenties. She describes herself as having multiple skills that make it hard for her to have a traditional label as just a “graphic designer.” It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have a focus, it means that she is getting so good in her service area that she is transcending the standard artist descriptions. Her website and her blog IS her living resume that screams availability and competence. Your son or daughter also needs a blog so that he can blog to his talent right from the beginning.

Would you like your talented teenager to be able to jump-start to that type of focused blogging? Check out my e-course “Blog to Your Talent: Learn How to Showcase Your Talent in 42 lessons“

Talent Principles for Homeschoolers

Jonathan

Homeschoolers have some advantages over traditional students that can be used to make talent growth much easier. Do you know what those are?

All children can develop talent of course, whether homeschooled or not. So before I tell you what the homeschool advantages are, let me first restate the principles for reaching amazing levels of performance that will apply to all young people in their quest for focus and excellence.

they start young (a few started late, but then they might not have had other normal family obligations such as in the case of Julia Child, who was childless – pardon the family name pun)
they practice daily (no exceptions here)
they actively decompose their talent into smaller skills (they were smart about what their talent was, not just hard-workers)
they merge skills and borrowed ideas from different fields (they wanted to break new-ground, not just preserve the past)

A great read for understanding the above principles can be found in these books that analyze how amazing talent was built in the lives of the top performers in the world.

Now, I am going to tell you what homeschool parents can easily do over other parents that will make the talent acquisition process significantly easier.

Homeschool parents can:

Use their environment and assets (so you don’t wait for a pie-in-the-sky opportunity that may never come)
Enlist their family goals and desires (so you don’t have dad rolling his eyes on another Saturday talent excursion that doesn’t make sense to him)
Have their child act out the talent in a way that gives value to others (so you don’t paint your child into a corner of being very, very, very good at something totally irrelevant to the marketplace)
Make the school curriculum feed their child’s talent (so your child has enough experience to actually have a chance at achieving lift-off by the time he is eighteen)

The more you can dovetail those assets into your child’s life, the more talent progress and focus can be achieved in a shorter period of time.

Is He “Cursed” with a Talent of Video Game Playing?

Jonathan

Listen to an interview of me by Dr. Melanie Wilson on the subject of how to find and discover talent in your children. (By the way, if you are big podcast listener, you may like loading up your iPhone or Android with all her other homeschool interviews on her UltimateRadioShow)

I think the most important point I wanted to get across in that interview is that talent is NOT found by uncovering some already existing, full-blown hidden gem of a talent in your son or daughter. Rather it is understanding that there are many gifts, assets, and environmental advantages your child was born into and was given and that from pool of good things in his life, you can grow one of a number of possible talents. The operative word is “grow”, not “accidentally fall into talent” or “discovered as he was working the pizza bar.” As parents, you can judiciously and intelligently decide to encourage the development of some skills and experiences over and above other ones.

You heard me right: your 13 year old son is in fact not “cursed” with a talent of video game playing, nor is your 15 year old daughter doomed to be a “talented” weekend soccer player. Yet, we can easily slip into that belief mode and resign ourselves into feeding even more those “talents” in our children’s lives that we instinctively know are worthless to making a difference in their adult lives. You feel guilty that since he is not “gifted” to be born a doctor or an entrepreneur then the logic says that is doomed to be an average worker in his adult-life. I suspect that the guilty, over-nurturing parental response is to increase the subsidy of a an otherwise ephemeral talent for a few more years of care-free joy. You tell yourself that at least he will have good memories of his early years before being hit by the dreariness of grown-up responsibilities. It becomes a classic self-fulfilling prophecy.

However if you make a clear list of all those unique things you have going for you as a family, you will surprise yourself at how many great things can be combined together to start developing a real long-term talent that can carry your young person into adulthood. It will make sense to both your teenager and to you the parents. Real talent SHOULD make sense for the long run, it should have a purpose outside of being something for personal pleasure or private challenge. Real talent starts small, has a humble beginning, but does eventually grow into something spectacular.

Need help finding that small thing to get a talent started in your young person’s life? I have your e-course here on how to do it and I can coach you through step-by-step through the process.

(Shhh! don’t tell everyone, but I give you a strategy in the e-course on how you could actually rescue and re-purpose game playing and hobby skills into something becomes a real talent)