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.
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.
Doing worksheets and grinding through homeschool essays without connecting his work to developing a talent is like caging your son into a kennel.
Is your teenage son bored, bouncy, and restless? Here is what is happening in your homeschool day: all the work of writing essays and doing math worksheets and other .edu check-off lists are not being connected enough to developing a real, permanent, and long-lasting talent of his own. Yes, he’s doing the work as an obedient son, but the work has no meaning and he is starting to gnaw on his own bones like a dog that has been caged too long. You can set him free by helping him discover and develop his own talent. You will then see that joy and peace come flooding back.
What is your child actually doing with the small beginning talent he was given? Is he multiplying it yet?
A talent parable.
A father noticed his son’s natural doodling abilities and his appreciation of comic art, so, based on a homeschool blog site recommendation, he purchased a set of 25 silky water color pencils and a heavy pack of some of the best textured art paper on the market. He gave it to his son Matthew along with a beginner’s tutorial book as a gift for him to expand his talent.
After being gone for a couple of weeks on a business trip, the father caught up with the accomplishments of his children and it came time for Matthew to report on all the wonderful things he had been learning to do. That’s when Matthew brought to the kitchen table and put in front of his father, the entire pastel set and paper stack still in their pristine shrink-wrap state.
“Dad, see: I kept everything nice and clean. I even locked it away so that little Billy didn’t play with the good stuff. I know you don’t like it when I don’t do my best and I’m not a very good drawer yet. And you get mad if I break expensive tools like these pencils, so I made sure they stayed beautiful and unbroken just like you got them from the store.”
“Matthew,” said the father, “what were you actually doing in your room every day during your art hour for the entire time I was gone?”
“Oh, I was reading my comic books.”
Parents, what do you think should be the right and fair response of the father in this story? For a similar situation, read what the master said to his servant in Matthew chapter 25 in the parable of the talents.
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:
Do you use Khan Academy for your children like I do? The age of the Internet Super-Tutor is descending upon us and is poised to even take university level education by storm. In the near future this will mean for your children amazingly good, incredibly cheap, always-on, always re-playable educational content, delivered by the most personable teachers that the Internet can find. However, this avalanche of world-class education into your home will not help you if you have no method for building long-term talent focus in your child’s life. Instead, this abundance accelerates the need to have a strategy for picking and choosing which of the tens of thousands of learning modules to take.
Four tips from theatre and public speaker expert Carl Miller on how your child can bullet-proof a presentation of his talent:
Prepare ahead of time a list of public speaking problems or list of potentially difficult questions and have ready scenarios or answers to fall back to
Practice the presentation while watching for pre-arranged signs and cues from your practice audience that you are not doing well
Practice first several times in front of immediate family members and close friends
Practice maintaining composure under all public speaking circumstances by having your practice audience deliberately create realistic problems while making the presentation
Use Physical Item to Help Walk Through Presentation
Is your child trying to pitch himself to the next level of expertise in a club or asking a group for an opportunity to exercise for them an aspect of his talent? I asked for advice from my friend Carl Miller, an expert on staging yourself in theater and an accomplished public speaker. Here are some tips I came away with:
Have child create a portfolio of his accomplishments, whether of the physical items themselves, or of the photos of the work, or the paperwork.
Give a presentation that sounds natural by simply talking and walking through the order of your portfolio.
Pass around in the audience a physical item that represents your abilities and helps the audience follow the details you want to emphasize in your presentation.
Finish the presentation with a direct appeal to what your child wants and with an attitude that, because of the portfolio of accomplishments, the request is a reasonable one to make of the audience.
To make headway with your child’s architecture talent don’t just study Julius Caesar – study instead his power as expressed through architecture. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
You are doing great if you can turn your character-based Christian curriculum into a curriculum that can also build up your child’s talent like this fictional report from “Practical-Dad”:
It was awkward at first to red-pen words out of my son’s character-based curriculum questions and insert instead an aspect of his architecture talent that he wants to develop, but I am growing confident. For example, he had a short writing assignment that asked him to talk about the kind of power that Julius Caesar exercised over Rome. I re-worded the question so that it asked him to talk about how the public buildings were used at that time to exercise the power of Julius Caesar. Amazing! He is now excited about writing his essays and we have had to tell him several times in the last few days to stop and come to the lunch table.
If you want your child to attract the attention of others with talent, then make sure your child is also developing a talent. Photo from Speaker’s Society Presentations (Photo credit: MDGovpics)
Your child is acquiring an attractive personality while also acquiring a talent if you can report something similar to fictional “I-got-my-eyes-on-you-Dad”:
“It was clear that our daughter was well-rounded educationally, but she had nothing specifically of her own that she could be proud of to show off to friends and relatives. No wonder she was just wanting to hang-out so much at the YMCA. She gave my wife and I lots of extra ideas on parts of the talent discovery workshop and she completely and enthusiastically bought into the idea of developing a talent of her own. Wow, her conversations with us and other people lately are a lot more intense and focused and she blogs to her passion regularly. She is clearly developing herself into that ‘interesting’ girl that no amount of logo-wearing T-shirts and summer camp activities were doing for her. ”
Finding focus is necessary in order to build a real talent for your child – there’s a big difference between enjoying watching planes in the sky vs knowing how they operate (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Your child is finding talent-worthy focus if you are reporting something similar to fictional “Frazzled-Mom”:
“At first, my 13 year old son panicked at the thought of not seeing all the many friends in his different programs, but once he realized how much more interesting the two remaining activities were because he was able to focus, he quickly forgot about the other (shallow) friendships. One of the activities we kept involves participating in the Remote Control Airplane Club of our town and getting pointers on how to fine tune gas and electric motors from older retired men. He feels like he is ‘one of the guys’ and is getting all scientific on us at the lunch table talking about aerodynamics. We don’t understand all this new found knowledge he is explaining to us, but we love it!”
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.
Look into your extended family’s skills and abilities and you might be able to strengthen family bonds while developing your child’s talent (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Your child is strengthening his family bonds by developing his talent if you can report something like this fictional ‘Love-My-Alma-Mater-But-Not-That-Much-Dad‘:
We had always felt that if it wasn’t an official course taken at an official school, that somehow it had little value. Once we realized how shortsighted we were, we redesigned six months ago a “custom curriculum” of our own that involved me, my sister who is math professor in another state, and my father who is a retired pharmacist. The children’s grandpa sent us by Fed-Ex his old microscopes and even some old-fashioned lab coats. Skype came to the rescue with lots of fun late night conversations and tutorials and I was surprised by the amount of family bonding that has come out of this.
Even a guitar loving boy can morph his hobby into a talent by bringing value to others. (Photo credit: Wikipedia; author: Dane Austin Carney; Permission: Creative Commons License)
Your child is moving from hobby (value to self only) to talent (value to others) if you can report something like this fictional Mother-of-an-Artist:
My 14 year old guitar playing son started making custom guitar decals over the past year for his friends, discovered that some styles are more popular than others, and is even selling a few of those on Etsy and eBay. As a result, he is interacting with a lot of other guitar players and is starting to buy and sell and fix up used guitars. Just last week, he got his first request to do the web art for a small online music store because a music composer saw his art on a student’s guitar. He still loves his music, but he seems a lot more energetic and upbeat about the future.
Is your child developing a hobby or a talent? Find out before his time runs out and you have to let him loose on the world.
What is the difference between a hobby and a talent?
A hobby is a skill that is designed primarily to please yourself.
A talent is a skill set that is designed to please others.
You know that a developed talent pleases others because they are willing to pay cold, hard cash for your output. For your hobby they will only pay you with a smile.
Twaddle Face is what your child will get if you let your curriculum drive all your memory lists. Take control and make memory work serve your child’s talent instead.
Busy, busy, busy, but do you care whether your child is memorizing the list of names of the California Missions or memorizing the list of Vice-Presidents of United States? If it is all the same indifference to you and your child, then your homeschool curriculum is turning into dreaded twaddle. STOP! Your child is probably mentally purging that information as fast he is finishing his history quizzes. Focus on the purpose of your curriculum and make memory lists count toward your child’s 10,000 hours of talent development. Your child with science talent can memorize the names of the most influential inventors of the 1800s and your child with art talent can memorize the names of the top art pieces of the 18th century.
