How to Use Your Family’s Existing Goals to Accelerate Your Child’s Talent

Today, I want to introduce Jonathan Harris of 10KtoTalent.com.

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I have mentioned many times the wonderful information and help he has given our family, but I know many of you still have questions about what exactly 10KtoTalent is.  I decided to ask Jonathan to guest post here on Raising Arrows to explain the vision of guiding your child toward gleaning 10,000 hours of a skill to facilitate a productive youth leading into a productive and passionate adulthood, long before they ever begin to consider a college degree.  Feel free to ask any questions in the comments section or email Jonathan directly via his website:

Hi. I€™m a homeschooling father of eight children, all of whom are still living at home. I would describe our family as exhibiting a very warm and supportive environment, where both my wife and I are very committed to a homeschooling lifestyle. We bring to the family the benefits of having grown up in Christian households and, therefore; we enjoy the peace of being on the same page. We both have college degrees and feel comfortable being able to navigate and choose from among many wonderful curricula and courses available on the market today. All in all, homeschooling is and was going great for us, but there was a missing element that bothered me as a father€¦

There were two main areas that concerned me as I looked at acquaintances and friends who had children ahead of us who were entering college or the workforce after finishing high school at home. Do you think it was the fear that I had not grounded them enough in Godly spiritual instruction? Or do you think that I was concerned that as soon as my son would drive off to be on his own, he would throw himself in to a debauched lifestyle and succumb to the first temptations available to him? No, those were not my fears.
This is what I noticed: young people, especially young men, entered into adulthood with a gradual gloom and growing low funk during their early twenties, trying to find a purpose for all their education while looking for a way to move out of the cycle of low-paying jobs or the prospect of continuing more years of formal college education with no end in sight.

The problem seemed clear and simple: they had plenty of good general character formation but they seemed ill-equipped to take on the marketplace. As a result, career frustration and very often, years of delayed marriage, take their toll on the joy of working. The problem seemed simple – but how do you incorporate a solution to the problem into your homeschool life to avert having the problem in the first place?

I give you the plain answer right here: you must have your child start building an amazing talent early that will bring great value to others by the time he is in his early twenties. This means garnering 10,000 hours of practice and study starting early on in a talent that will bring him great career satisfaction and generous financial rewards to help provide for the family.  Building serious talent in your young person€™s life is the answer to the various difficulties your homechooled child will face: a fiery motivation to keep learning, an emotionally satisfying adult work life, and a financial support to him in his adult life.

You will find plenty of literature out there on the principles of building a world-class talent but I will let you in on a little secret:  homeschoolers have a natural advantage.  The authors of such talent-related books frequently mention that they are perplexed as to how to go about getting talent started at a young age, without it being by chance, family catastrophe, or lucky rebellion. You need time to get good enough at doing or creating something valuable so that it matters dramatically to others by the time you reach adulthood. If you wait too long to get critical mass, it will often not change your adult life as the distractions of college life and the draining of low paying jobs to put food on the table, will cause you to be passed by others who did not let themselves get distracted or who had a big enough lead on you in their childhood. As one young college friend who graduated with a music degree told me , (paraphrased):

€¦it was the dumbest thing for me to major in music. And it is the same for all the others in my graduation class, except for two individuals. The reason those two individuals are making it in the professional world is simply because they were already that good coming into the music program. They were already extremely good by the time they finished high school. Those two were already composing music and knew how to collaborate with professors. They already had massive talent to start with. The rest of us have to now find a real career or give up a normal family lifestyle by having to travel as an underpaid musician.

Bottom line: your child needs to get enough critical mass while still under your roof in order for his talent to wonderfully impact his future.

I am doing all of this so I can guide my children into a life-long passion early enough so they can avoid wandering aimlessly in their early twenties through unfocused college degrees or low-paying market skills. Passion, focus, discipline, creativity, productivity – why not get all those good things for our children before the age of 18? That is what I€™m doing for my children and I want to share with others the methods I am using to make that happen in a homeschool environment. Every family can do it for each of their children!

In my e-courses, I show you how you can find the talent focus without falling into the trap of a hobby for a talent. I show you how you can use your current school curriculum to support the development of your child€™s long term talent. I show you how you look at your own family€™s strengths and environment to find that meaningful, and unique, and affordable talent. I show you how developing massive talent in your child€™s life is in fact an easy and natural way to learn how to communicate at an early age on social media and on the Internet. It is the purpose of the communication that protects your child from wandering aimlessly into strange social situations. And the purpose is handed to you in the form of young man or young woman€™s passion for a particular talent.

To give you a glimpse of what that means in practice in a homeschooling home, I want to share with you what the pursuit of talent looks like in our family of 10 (specifically the older three):
* Our 16 year old already has a growing business in our area that earns him good money, and he’s sought after by local realtors to shoot aerial footage for their websites. We’ve coached him to learn to develop his own website, edit and create his own videos, cold call potential clients, learn from the experts in his field, and fly a drone. My wife and I personally don’t have all those skills but our homeschooling freedom allows us to show him where to go to learn.
* Our 15 year old is active on bladesmith forums where the top performers hang out. His blog earned him entrance into those private spaces. Because he’s active on those forums, he was able to spend a day each with four professional blade smiths in their workshops in Holland and the Czech Republic this summer when my in-laws took him on their spring European vacation. He also used his knowledge of bladesmithing to write his first fiction novel based on the OYAN (One Year Adventure Novel) curriculum. He’s also working an e-book, “The Broke Bladesmith,” a guide to help beginning bladesmiths use safe, inexpensive hacks to jumpstart their bladesmithing talent. As parents of a high school student, we choose the appropriate science and history courses that build on his talent development, not replace the time he could be spending on it.
* Our 12 year old published his first e-book on computer programming (Raspberry Pi and Minecraft) last November and has sold a few hundred ebooks this year on Amazon. He recently published a follow up e-book with continuing instruction for the budding young programmer. He also has a podcast and he’s been talked about in presentations by software developers.

So if you are looking for something in your homeschool that will create a future for your children significantly different and better than yours, then I want you to sign up for my newsletter for free tips. I will also keep you updated of any new e-courses that will help you accelerate the talent in your child€™s life. Currently, I have one particular e-course that will help you identify that elusive something that can be used to start this massive talent acquisition for your son or daughter. The hardest part of talent development is not the work (it is indeed work), the hardest part is finding something concrete enough that it starts driving your child forward today. There€™s usually no method or strategy. I have both clearly spelled out for your and that€™s where I can help you. I will show you as the parent how to discover and develop your child€™s first 100 hours of talent.

You can order my e-courses here and you can sign up for my free newsletter here (righthand sidebar).

God bless you on your exciting homeschooling journey.
Jonathan Harris
Talent Coach for www.10ktoTalent.com