RPF0115-Jonathan_Harris

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00:00:30.000 | Have you ever wondered what your talents and abilities might be?

00:00:34.400 | And wondered, "Okay, so now that I've found some talents and abilities, how do I develop them?"

00:00:39.760 | Or even better, have you ever wished that you had been able to discover

00:00:44.080 | your talents and abilities and interests at an earlier age?

00:00:49.200 | I know that I have. And today, my guest is an expert at bringing out talent,

00:00:55.280 | especially talent, in young men and women.

00:00:59.680 | How can you discover and develop your child's talent?

00:01:04.800 | ♪

00:01:20.960 | Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

00:01:23.360 | My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host.

00:01:25.600 | Today is Tuesday, December 9, 2014.

00:01:29.920 | Today, I'm going to share with you an interview with Jonathan Harris,

00:01:33.680 | founder of the website 10K2Talent.

00:01:36.960 | We're going to talk about how the process of talent discovery and talent development

00:01:41.680 | is a fundamental process for launching an independent young adult.

00:01:47.360 | ♪

00:01:53.600 | I was thrilled when my guest today accepted my invitation,

00:01:56.640 | because this is a subject that I think a lot about.

00:01:59.040 | And I think this is, for any parent or for any concerned uncle or aunt even,

00:02:04.240 | I think this is a subject that has a lot of application.

00:02:07.680 | And we're going to get very quickly to the interview here.

00:02:10.480 | But I want to give you about two minutes of background on this interview

00:02:14.960 | and also on this series, of this education series.

00:02:19.200 | When I set out to essentially cover what in my mind I'm trying to create,

00:02:23.040 | which is a comprehensive curriculum of financial planning,

00:02:26.480 | I'm trying to make it as comprehensive as possible,

00:02:29.200 | there are many subjects and topics and things that I could cover.

00:02:32.080 | And in my mind, it's probably infinite,

00:02:35.520 | because even if I could get to the end of all of the topics that I'd like to cover,

00:02:39.600 | the law would change and I'd have to cover them again.

00:02:42.160 | But I decided to pick the one that I think I have the best possibility

00:02:46.160 | of actually being able to get to the bottom of.

00:02:48.320 | And that's essentially what in financial planning we talk about college.

00:02:52.560 | I think of it as children and the financial questions and issues

00:02:57.040 | surrounding young men and women, children.

00:03:00.000 | And so essentially what I'm trying to do from my own peace of mind

00:03:03.840 | is develop a comprehensive curriculum for you and for me.

00:03:09.520 | And there is a bit of self-serving motivation here,

00:03:12.080 | is that I'm obviously in a phase of life,

00:03:14.320 | I have a one-year-old son, as you've heard me say at least probably 50 times on the show.

00:03:18.480 | And so I'm kind of thinking these things through for myself,

00:03:22.080 | but I'm also trying to create a bunch of episodes that can stand alone,

00:03:26.080 | so I can essentially be done with it.

00:03:28.160 | And so in my mind, there are a couple of stages of that.

00:03:30.560 | There's, I mentioned about early childhood,

00:03:32.400 | there's what do we do with education at a younger age,

00:03:35.280 | then there's the financial aspect, you know,

00:03:36.880 | do we do government education systems,

00:03:38.960 | do we do home education systems, what do we do, how do we pay for that?

00:03:42.720 | That's why I've done so many shows on education.

00:03:44.720 | I'm trying to wrap up college and college funding.

00:03:47.520 | That's why I did the show on the Coverdell Educational Savings Accounts.

00:03:51.040 | I've got about a dozen more topics that I need to do in-depth like that

00:03:54.400 | on qualified tuition programs, student loans, student loans interest,

00:03:57.840 | student loan details, consolidation, some of those questions I get a lot of times.

00:04:05.120 | I need to do some shows on scholarships, fellowships, grants,

00:04:08.880 | on opportunity credits, lifetime learning credits.

00:04:11.840 | I need to do some shows on educational savings bonds.

00:04:15.760 | So there's some specific financial planning topics that I need to talk about.

00:04:19.120 | But essentially, in my mind, I've got about these 20 to 30 to maybe 40 different shows

00:04:25.440 | that are building to create a comprehensive curriculum.

00:04:28.400 | Then hopefully, I'm going to be done with talking about

00:04:32.000 | kids' education and kids' college and that.

00:04:36.800 | And how I'm doing some of these shows is with interview shows like today.

00:04:41.360 | I'm integrating an interview show like today into that financial technical aspect.

00:04:48.000 | Because ultimately, when people talk about, "Oh, I want to pay for college,"

00:04:51.120 | what they often mean is, "I want my child to have a skill and a talent and an ability

00:04:56.320 | with which they can earn a living wage in the marketplace."

00:04:59.040 | Those two things are not necessarily synonymous.

00:05:01.920 | So the technical details of financing college are important,

00:05:05.520 | but also the question of how do you develop talent, skill, ability, knowledge, and teach that.

00:05:12.800 | That's very important.

00:05:15.040 | So if you feel like there's been a concentration on the show recently on education topics,

00:05:24.240 | it's because there has been.

00:05:25.760 | And I really want to finish out the education topic.

00:05:28.880 | And what I'm trying to do is sprinkle in and bring a real variety to the shows each day,

00:05:34.560 | have a little bit different, not do four shows in a week on education,

00:05:38.000 | but I'm trying to work through with a heavy focus on education.

00:05:41.040 | Because I think it's one of the few topics that can get through the most quickly as far as the

00:05:47.760 | curriculum, the outline that's in my head.

00:05:50.240 | When I get to the technical aspects of investment planning,

00:05:53.280 | that's at least 50 shows right there and probably more.

00:05:58.720 | So I hope you're enjoying that.

00:06:01.280 | But I hope you're enjoying that.

00:06:03.840 | Today, this is not a show about home education.

00:06:06.160 | This is a show about talent development.

00:06:09.360 | And if you have children, I would commend to you that this is ultimately one of the

00:06:15.520 | major things that you are looking to do with your children is help them discover

00:06:20.800 | and develop their talents.

00:06:22.640 | And I think if we can understand this, we can set them up in so many ways for a lifetime

00:06:28.720 | of financial success.

00:06:29.600 | Because guess what?

00:06:30.240 | You know those charts, those fancy compound interest charts you read at times that talk

00:06:34.560 | about how if you start investing at the age of 16 and you quit at 24, you're a multimillionaire

00:06:40.160 | at the age of 70?

00:06:40.960 | True.

00:06:41.440 | They're true.

00:06:41.920 | If you do it well, they are true.

00:06:43.680 | But the key is, do you have any money at 16 to do that with?

00:06:49.040 | And I think that with the content of today's show, you can help your children have some

00:06:56.400 | money and a business and an understanding of what their talents are and how to exercise

00:07:03.440 | them in the marketplace.

00:07:05.200 | Here's Jonathan.

00:07:05.920 | So Jonathan, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast.

00:07:10.880 | I appreciate you being with me today.

00:07:12.160 | Thank you, Joshua.

00:07:13.920 | Thanks for having me.

00:07:14.560 | I'm very interested in our topic of conversation today.

00:07:19.440 | And real quick, I want to have you introduce yourself and share your background.

00:07:22.720 | But I want to connect our topic of conversation to personal finance, which is what the show

00:07:28.480 | is about.

00:07:29.120 | We're primarily going to talk today about developing talent in children and different

00:07:33.520 | ways to do that.

00:07:34.960 | And sometimes I have feedback sometimes from the audience when I venture into things that

00:07:39.920 | aren't specifically, how does a Roth IRA work as far as why do I do that?

00:07:43.520 | Well, the reason I do it is because personal finance and financial planning is far more

00:07:47.840 | than any technical detail about money.

00:07:50.560 | And what I've learned working as a financial planner, that money is only good for one thing.

00:07:54.160 | It's to fund the goals that people have of life.

00:07:56.400 | Well, in a financial planner's office, often children are a big deal.

00:08:00.240 | And this usually comes in to how do I pay for my kids' college?

00:08:03.920 | Sometimes it comes in to how do I pay for my kids' private school?

00:08:07.280 | And sometimes it comes in to how do I leave an inheritance for my kids?

00:08:10.480 | Or how do I make sure I'm not a burden on my kids in their old age?

00:08:14.000 | And oftentimes I feel there are entire sections of that conversation that are missing when

00:08:18.480 | we just focus on those technical aspects of financial planning.

00:08:22.400 | And so clearly this is a subject of personal interest to me.

00:08:25.440 | I have a one-year-old son, but I also want to talk about it from a larger perspective

00:08:29.280 | because most of us have children, will have children, have had children, know people that

00:08:34.800 | have children, and are concerned in some regard with our children's future, both our individual

00:08:43.520 | children and then our children as a society.

00:08:45.680 | So with that centering of the conversation, Jonathan, I'd love you to share a little

00:08:51.200 | bit about your background and introduce your website and how did you wind up, what was

00:08:56.000 | your personal journey to wind up talking about developing talent in children?

00:08:59.520 | Yes, well, my personal profile right now is that I do have children at home and I have

00:09:09.360 | eight children and the oldest is just about to turn 17, so he's 16 right now.

00:09:15.120 | And I have children all the way down to the ages of three.

00:09:20.160 | My youngest is a daughter, so I've got six boys and two daughters.

00:09:24.800 | And what happened was a few years ago, I'm heavily involved, we homeschool, so I am

00:09:34.560 | personally also heavily involved in the homeschooling decisions and in certain aspects of it.

00:09:39.520 | My wife shares some of that responsibility with me and I enjoy it.

00:09:44.560 | And so I started experimenting with some ideas and for making a bigger purpose to our education.

00:09:52.080 | And in the process of doing that, I was so excited with the results that we were getting

00:09:56.400 | that I decided I better write this down on a blog somewhere to share because I know that

00:10:01.920 | two, three years from now, I'd have a hard time remembering the fits and starts when

00:10:07.760 | you're getting off the ground.

00:10:08.560 | I so wanted to share this with other people.

00:10:10.640 | So that's a big thing.

00:10:13.360 | Because a lot of times people, you see results and then the typical answer is, "Oh, you

00:10:17.280 | just must be lucky," which I know burns people with so much work.

00:10:21.520 | No, I wasn't lucky.

00:10:22.720 | Yes, I did have a lot of blessings, but you're like, "I had to work this hard."

00:10:25.920 | Right.

00:10:26.320 | And so you want to document it along the way so that people can learn from it.

00:10:30.320 | Right.

00:10:31.120 | So your children, okay, 17 to 3, and at what age did you start getting interested in this

00:10:36.400 | topic and what was the catalyst to your interest?

00:10:39.680 | Well, they probably started getting, by the time my oldest was 12, I think I was already

00:10:48.400 | seriously modifying things in our schooling environment.

00:10:52.240 | And the catalyst to it was that I had been laid off from Hewlett Packard.

00:10:58.960 | So I was in the corporate world, the project manager, and I worked from home, which was

00:11:04.480 | a fantastic blessing back then.

00:11:06.640 | And I could see the layoffs coming.

00:11:09.120 | Simply, the market had frothed up, way too many people in the market.

00:11:13.600 | Things were changing.

00:11:14.720 | This is, Apple was just starting to make its headway through all its tablets and stuff.

00:11:19.600 | So the market was changing all across the board.

00:11:22.320 | And long story short, we started another home business, which is now keeping us afloat and

00:11:29.760 | paying for the bills and doing a good job at it, my wife and I.

00:11:32.320 | And I just took over a lot more of the schooling aspect on a day-to-day than I did before.

00:11:39.520 | So now I really had my hands in the pie and I loved it.

00:11:42.720 | And I should say, the humorous part is that when we did, in our home business, this is

00:11:49.440 | really my wife markets to a female market, and I thought, "Hey, I could put my project

00:11:53.600 | management skills to work and I could communicate directly with all these women, giving them

00:11:58.480 | directions and stuff."

00:11:59.360 | It does not translate.

00:12:01.360 | My wife says, "You cannot say that."

00:12:04.480 | And I'm like, "What do you mean?"

00:12:05.440 | So we decided that we better partition the responsibilities a little more clearly.

00:12:12.240 | - Did you set up the home-based business to facilitate your being involved with the kids'

00:12:17.680 | education, or did it just seem to be a happy accident?

00:12:20.400 | Was it intentional or accidental?

00:12:21.840 | - Well, the home business was part of an overall desire to start our own business.

00:12:33.760 | And in that context was to be able to get their kids involved in the business because

00:12:39.200 | we wanted them to have a much more entrepreneurial spirit.

00:12:44.080 | But it was accidental in the sense that we didn't know exactly how this was going to

00:12:49.840 | work out this way, let's put it that way.

00:12:51.440 | The timing of the layoffs and so forth, those were all catalysts, but the desires were there.

00:12:56.000 | - Yeah, that's been similar for me, at least, is I've had a desire, and it's one of those

00:13:05.120 | generalized desires.

00:13:06.240 | When I sit down and kind of lay out my vision for my family and my plan, one of the things

00:13:10.160 | that I've wanted to do is to be very involved in my children's lives.

00:13:13.760 | And one of the things that discouraged me about the traditional way that financial planning

00:13:17.840 | was done is that it's a very professional environment.

00:13:21.360 | It would probably be hard for me to imagine me bringing my six or seven-year-old daughter

00:13:26.800 | with me to a confidential meeting with a client.

00:13:29.920 | Who knows?

00:13:30.480 | It's just not the kind of environment that that's easily focused on.

00:13:34.480 | But I didn't want my wife to have to bear all the responsibility of leading the educational

00:13:40.000 | charge, so I've been working for years to try to figure out how do I either get my business

00:13:44.720 | in such a way that it's not going to require me 60 hours a week to do that so I have more

00:13:48.800 | time away from the office, or what it's looking like now is I'm much more able to pursue a

00:13:53.600 | business out of the house where I'm more able to integrate my family together.

00:13:57.440 | And I see, even with my current venture here with this show and then other ideas that I'm

00:14:01.600 | working on, I see one of the primary benefits of them is to be able to use my business as

00:14:08.400 | a way to help my children develop skills and talents and abilities.

00:14:11.760 | And to me, one of the issues that I have with the mainstream approach to education is that

00:14:17.040 | it seems to me, just from observation, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but it seems

00:14:20.160 | to me that education all takes place in an artificial environment, in a world where everything

00:14:25.680 | is essentially constructed in advance and you're just trying to get the right answer.

00:14:31.360 | I think as an example, I think how many high school chemistry experiments are actually

00:14:35.520 | experiments?

00:14:37.280 | Usually, the chemistry teacher is often saying, "The chemistry teacher knows what's going

00:14:41.120 | to happen.

00:14:41.520 | It's all set up and we're doing an experiment," so-called, "but it's not an experiment.

00:14:46.880 | We already know what's going to happen.

00:14:48.000 | An experiment would be let's start mixing things together and see what happens."

00:14:51.760 | Well, obviously, you can't do that because it's dangerous, but the point is how do you

00:14:56.480 | learn except you try things?

00:14:57.680 | And the biggest problem I have with that, especially for children, is that it causes,

00:15:06.240 | instead of conditioning for a love and a joy of trying things, some of which seem to work

00:15:14.240 | and some of which don't, but that all things are successful because you tried them, it's

00:15:18.720 | just that sometimes the results weren't results that you wanted.

00:15:21.360 | It develops this fear of failure and then this fear of failure seems to come back.

00:15:25.120 | So I look at it and I say, "How can I create real-world scenarios such as, 'Hey, I need

00:15:29.440 | to redesign my … My one-year-old son is not going to redesign my website, but I see

00:15:33.120 | no reason why my 11-year-old son can't redesign my website if he's interested.'

00:15:37.840 | Or if we have other children, I need some photography done.

00:15:41.280 | Well, why can't my son or daughter use that as an opportunity to practice their skills?"

00:15:46.480 | And then they're actually learning with me, contributing to the family business, knowing

00:15:50.400 | that what they do counts instead of being in this artificial environment where it's

00:15:54.320 | all fake and it doesn't matter except a bunch of grades.

00:15:56.880 | >>Rick: Right.

00:15:58.000 | And you mentioned a little bit earlier the structural environment with the experiments

00:16:02.080 | and the chemistry.

00:16:03.840 | And I think that's one of the problems.

00:16:09.920 | And ironically, I think the problem is simply because our society from a material business,

00:16:16.400 | entrepreneurial point of view, has really progressed in general.

00:16:20.800 | And that's exactly what's happened.

00:16:22.000 | You have this abundance of knowledge, of data out there, of facts, good stuff.

00:16:28.240 | And it just keeps pouring out and pouring out.

00:16:30.880 | And you have a structure of education that I think, honestly, is very good at establishing

00:16:38.320 | the basics.

00:16:39.320 | If you want to learn how to read and write, it's been done hundreds and thousands of times.

00:16:43.560 | And despite all the problems that people have with maybe some slight mental handicaps or

00:16:49.280 | some techniques, at the end of the road, everybody is pretty much reading and writing.

00:16:53.600 | And so it's very systematized.

00:16:55.680 | And then as you go up the grades, you start delving into, like you say, this chemistry.

00:16:59.520 | The first people who got around, who got to read the books-- in fact, I was reading an

00:17:03.160 | autobiography by someone-- he says, when I was a kid, I got to play around blowing up

00:17:07.000 | stuff in the labs.

00:17:08.320 | Well, that's right.

00:17:09.680 | And now everything's been systematized in that area.

00:17:12.160 | And there's no more joy.

00:17:13.160 | That's why you never see anybody write about it.

00:17:15.640 | And so I think that as part of the issue is that the market, and as much as I criticize

00:17:22.440 | the educational system in general, has been very, very effective.

00:17:25.920 | The problem is that the parents are still locked in to that mode that this formal, one-size-fits-all

00:17:33.800 | education is going to work for their child.

00:17:36.840 | And so in the beginning-- and that's why I think the differences start-- is in the beginning,

00:17:44.800 | you have a lot of nurturing with the children, which is absolutely necessary.

00:17:50.960 | It's the classic gender difference between mom and dad, who mom says, "Don't climb that

00:17:54.960 | tree.

00:17:55.960 | You're going to get hurt and fall out."

00:17:57.240 | And dad says, "Let him climb the tree.

00:17:58.720 | See how far he can go."

00:18:00.400 | You get that tension.

00:18:02.200 | And you know what?

00:18:03.800 | It is true sometimes that little child should not be climbing up that tree, because bad

00:18:07.480 | things do happen at that age.

00:18:10.080 | But at some point, you need to transition over.

00:18:11.960 | And I think that's where dads have a more instinctive comfort level and know how far

00:18:16.880 | to take it.

00:18:17.880 | And that's exactly what happens with education.

00:18:20.360 | You have those phases.

00:18:22.320 | And if you don't understand that you're phasing into a different area and type of learning

00:18:29.240 | for your child, then you can get stuck.

00:18:31.820 | And I think, honestly, it starts way sooner than what people think.

00:18:35.720 | And around the age of 12, it's probably hormonal-based and so forth.

00:18:41.360 | I think that's when things really need to switch from a more nurturing, follow-step-by-step

00:18:48.280 | to a much more exploratory, a much more adventurous, decisive attack at the learning world.

00:18:55.120 | I'm going to come back to that age of 12, because I've been working hard to develop

00:18:59.000 | my vision.

00:19:00.000 | And I want to come back and hit on that.

00:19:01.160 | But before there, I'd love for you to share a little bit.

00:19:04.440 | So you've got all these kids.

00:19:05.440 | You've got eight kids on this broad range of time horizon.

00:19:09.040 | I understand that you desire to be humble.

00:19:12.000 | It's always tough for a parent to brag on their kids.

00:19:13.920 | But lay that aside for a moment.

00:19:15.680 | And what are the types of things that your children at this point are doing that is maybe

00:19:19.960 | different?

00:19:21.200 | And what are some examples?

00:19:22.840 | What's the output of that?

00:19:25.160 | And share with us the real details.

00:19:27.200 | And feel free to share the struggles, but don't be too humble with it.

00:19:31.080 | Well, right now, as we're doing this interview, my son is in Sacramento, and that's about

00:19:37.360 | two and a half, actually three hours drive from where we live in California.

00:19:42.000 | So we're way up on the north end of California.

00:19:45.240 | And he's down there.

00:19:46.320 | He stayed over a couple of nights with some relatives.

00:19:49.800 | But he has a pain project that he's doing with his drone equipment.

00:19:56.080 | He has a camera on there where he does aerial photography.

00:19:59.840 | And he's doing a big construction project.

00:20:02.040 | He has teamed up with an engineering team that he met here, where he did one project

00:20:06.040 | for them.

00:20:07.040 | And they're doing a big project in the downtown area of Sacramento, which is the capital of

00:20:12.440 | California.

00:20:13.440 | And this is part of his entrepreneurial talent building that we've been working on.

00:20:19.440 | And so that right now...

00:20:20.440 | How old is he?

00:20:21.440 | He's 16.

00:20:22.440 | Okay, wow.

00:20:23.440 | Just about 17.

00:20:24.440 | That's great.

00:20:25.440 | Yeah.

00:20:26.440 | So it's been very exciting for him.

00:20:28.800 | And in fact, in the beginning, we had him much more involved in, and he still is, in

00:20:36.200 | the mechanics of our home business.

00:20:41.560 | But I didn't share that too much, because a lot of that stuff is just confidential to

00:20:45.440 | our own business, and people don't need to know.

00:20:47.960 | And so he was not as much in the limelight.

00:20:50.000 | But now he's bursting out into the limelight, which we were talking about earlier.

00:20:53.960 | People think, "Oh my goodness, he was born like that."

00:20:56.000 | And I'm like, "No, he wasn't."

00:20:59.480 | There's a lot of planning in the background from the parent's perspective to be able to

00:21:05.480 | make that happen.

00:21:08.320 | So he has a business then where he's doing aerial videography using drones, and then

00:21:12.800 | he's going to take that.

00:21:13.960 | And will he follow that all the way through?

00:21:15.360 | Is he having a video editing business where he's producing final video products or just

00:21:20.200 | raw footage?

00:21:21.280 | What's his business?

00:21:24.480 | Right now, his business is to be able to...

00:21:28.520 | The end product is you get two to three minutes of video that people would use for their customers,

00:21:34.200 | or they would use it to pitch for their next big project.

00:21:38.680 | So they would come to a customer and say, "Look at the work we've done."

00:21:41.280 | And of course, these are projects that have a special advantage if they're seen from the

00:21:46.000 | air.

00:21:47.000 | So if you'll do commercial property, for example, where you can show all the access points,

00:21:51.240 | you can see where the property is laid out in relationship to the city and so forth.

00:21:55.800 | So you might do something like a big gas company that has trucks coming and going.

00:21:59.480 | They want to see where the train tracks are and the freeways and so forth.

00:22:03.140 | And so they'll want an aerial view of the property in addition to just the financial

00:22:08.440 | data.

00:22:09.440 | And then that will be sent to investors, which are typically in another state, bankers, insurance

00:22:15.760 | agents.

00:22:16.760 | Everybody who wants a piece of this wants that visual confirmation that the commercial

00:22:22.280 | property is in a viable spot.

00:22:24.480 | I look at that business idea and I just say, "That is a business idea that there's so much

00:22:28.520 | room for."

00:22:29.860 | The interesting thing is that if he has the technical skill to create a quality product,

00:22:35.620 | there's no difference between him at 16 years old being able to do it versus somebody else

00:22:40.980 | at 36 years old.

00:22:41.980 | Absolutely.

00:22:42.980 | And he can earn at 16 years old, assuming he's proficient and good at it, he could earn

00:22:48.580 | an adult's wage doing that.

00:22:50.540 | I had a client here in South Florida who was a photographer, but his only business was

00:22:57.720 | photographing large, fancy houses for upper-end real estate.

00:23:02.860 | So a lot of houses on Palm Beach, a lot of waterfront property, things like that.

00:23:06.200 | And they would be staged for sale.

00:23:08.620 | But one of the things that set him apart is he was doing aerial photography.

00:23:12.780 | This was before drones came out.

00:23:14.340 | I don't know if he still does this, but in his day he would use a balloon and he would

00:23:18.180 | float the camera up with kind of like a small weather balloon and he would do this from

00:23:22.540 | the water.

00:23:23.540 | So he would go out in a kayak with the balloon tied to it and he would be able to shoot pictures.

00:23:27.700 | He would take pictures of the house so you get this nice aerial photograph, but you had

00:23:31.020 | no need to rent a helicopter for whatever that cost to get these aerial photographs.

00:23:34.860 | And lots of people, he would sell these to real estate agents.

00:23:37.580 | He would also just go out and take pictures of people's houses and then he would offer

00:23:42.460 | them to people.

00:23:44.340 | He would go out from a public space, take a beautiful picture of somebody's mansion,

00:23:48.220 | and then offer it to them, offer them a print, and many times people would buy it.

00:23:52.580 | And he just created this business, created a marketing with a minimum amount of equipment,

00:23:56.820 | and he was making a very nice income.

00:23:58.700 | Your 16-year-old son, there's no barrier to entry in that market because it's purely based

00:24:03.380 | upon his skill and talent as compared to an adult.

00:24:06.300 | What a cool story.

00:24:07.300 | Yeah, it is.

00:24:08.300 | And to get back, my basic premise is that you can get your children to start developing

00:24:18.700 | some kind of talent that brings value to other people at an early age.

00:24:26.140 | But, and here's the big thing where people get normally tripped up about it, is when

00:24:30.460 | you're talking about developing talent, it's not a static thing that you're developing.

00:24:37.780 | In other words, I didn't wake up my son, "Hey, son, you're 12 years old now.

00:24:42.100 | I know what your talent is.

00:24:43.580 | It's videography with drones."

00:24:45.220 | Well, let me tell you what, when he was 12, drones weren't even out there from a commercial,

00:24:52.580 | accessible point of view like they are right now.

00:24:55.180 | So that's the one thing that really, I try to encourage people, and sometimes I try to

00:25:02.700 | knock some heads together too, it's like, "Look, your child wasn't born genetically

00:25:07.940 | to fly a drone."

00:25:11.100 | And 10 years from now, who knows how that's going to morph.

00:25:14.100 | And so what I tell people to do is you're looking in your environment, look around,

00:25:19.980 | you look for your hidden assets in your family.

00:25:22.460 | There's so much.

00:25:23.460 | You have so many things on hand.

00:25:24.980 | You have so many blessings, some unique quirkiness in your family that defines you.

00:25:32.700 | And instead of seeing it as, "Oh, whatever.

00:25:34.260 | Okay, let me go see if I can go and enroll him in soccer to discover his talent," because

00:25:40.620 | people are still genetically looking for that genetic predisposition to be born for soccer

00:25:45.860 | or some other, it's always some kind of mass group sport, which has its place, but not

00:25:52.220 | in the way most people think.

00:25:53.340 | And so I want people to see that when you're looking at developing talent in someone's

00:25:58.580 | life, you're taking what you have, which is very spiritual too, in a way, because you

00:26:04.460 | look at, in the Bible, one of the famous passages, which is where we get the word "talent" from

00:26:10.940 | in this context, is the parable of the talents, which of course was money and coins.

00:26:19.300 | And it's the parable of the master that leaves and gives everyone various amounts of cash

00:26:24.340 | - talent.

00:26:27.140 | And he goes on this long trip, and of course this whole parable is making a spiritual point,

00:26:34.020 | but I think the principles are just fascinating here, is that when he comes back, he goes

00:26:38.220 | through the line of the servants, the stewards that worked with the money, some multiplied

00:26:44.780 | it a hundred times, some did ten times, various degrees, then he comes down to the last guy,

00:26:50.300 | which is the whole point of this parable, and the guy says, "You know what?

00:26:53.860 | I know you're such a tough guy, I didn't want to mess it up, I didn't want to take what

00:26:58.380 | I have and try to multiply it and take risk."

00:27:02.820 | He's specifically talking about this, "I didn't want to take any risk, I didn't want to multiply

00:27:06.700 | it because I knew you're such a tough guy, you'd probably beat up on me if I failed a

00:27:11.020 | little bit," and of course in the parable, the master just goes off on him and says,

00:27:17.580 | "You know what?

00:27:18.580 | You didn't even try, so since you think I'm such a tough guy, I'm going to give you a

00:27:22.700 | taste of what it's like," and so forth.

00:27:24.940 | And so in that parable, I think we find something really fascinating.

00:27:28.220 | One, there's acknowledgement that people are sometimes blessed in life with various degrees

00:27:34.940 | of advantages, and you can define them in any number of ways, money, you're super smart

00:27:41.940 | when you were born, you've got good looks, whatever it is, you've got friends in high

00:27:47.020 | places, and those are all stuff that you get started off and you didn't particularly earn.

00:27:53.260 | But that's only part of the story, and this is again where most people miss it.

00:27:57.220 | You've got to be working it, so no matter what it is, you're expected to work it.

00:28:02.060 | I think it's a spiritual principle in addition to a material principle.

00:28:08.420 | You have to multiply it and work it, and that really has an impact about it in your educational

00:28:15.260 | life when you apply it to your children.

00:28:16.780 | So you're not looking, you're not walking around and saying, "Hey, where's that treasure

00:28:20.020 | trove?

00:28:21.020 | I'm going to trip over it, here's the gold in the casket from my kid.

00:28:24.060 | Oh, there he is, a drone videographer.

00:28:25.940 | Oh, there he is, a doctor."

00:28:28.240 | You have certain assets in your environment.

00:28:30.540 | You've got to know what they are, and then you've got to take risks, and you've got to

00:28:35.820 | multiply it.

00:28:38.220 | And that's really a different approach than a scene as you're just filling up your son

00:28:44.340 | or your daughter with a certain amount of knowledge or data, which is kind of how you

00:28:51.060 | approach normally an educational system.

00:28:54.380 | What about your other children?

00:28:55.380 | What are some examples of some of the things that they're doing to develop their talents?

00:28:59.420 | Well, I have a 15-year-old, and he has been working on some bladesmithing projects of

00:29:08.420 | his own.

00:29:09.420 | How cool is that?

00:29:10.420 | Like old-fashioned blacksmithing of making knives by hand?

00:29:13.860 | What do you mean?

00:29:14.860 | Yeah, they call that bladesmithing now to differentiate that from blacksmithing, but

00:29:18.620 | basically you're playing around with the properties of metal in order to give them particular

00:29:27.740 | qualities of flexibility but also great sharpness.

00:29:32.020 | So in the last few years, what's happened is that they've been able to understand how

00:29:36.920 | to manipulate metals at the molecular level a lot more.

00:29:41.780 | And you can do it in your home if you know what the techniques are.

00:29:45.140 | And so he's been going on to online forums, closed forums for professional bladesmiths,

00:29:50.580 | and getting ideas from them, practicing in his garage.

00:29:54.540 | We've got a little setup for him.

00:29:56.140 | I've told him how to do that.

00:29:57.980 | And then just recently we came back from a meetup in California for bladesmiths.

00:30:03.300 | I think he was the only teenager there.

00:30:06.180 | And he just loved that.

00:30:08.900 | But that's again an example where when we started off, we live in an area where there's

00:30:12.140 | a lot of leftover folklore and people have a memory of the gold rush here.

00:30:20.220 | Not that they were in it, but their grandparents are, and they know these locations.

00:30:23.500 | And so we have clubs, what we call gem clubs, where there's tons and tons of equipment for

00:30:28.700 | grinding stones and people know where things are.

00:30:31.580 | So we started there.

00:30:32.580 | That's a local asset, a local talent that we had.

00:30:35.580 | And we started going there and things evolved and progressed from there to the point where

00:30:41.820 | we started working more with metals because there was a lot of grinding and understanding

00:30:45.100 | properties.

00:30:46.100 | Then we went to jewelry and then from there we went into more of the metalsmithing and

00:30:53.100 | still making some progress there.

00:30:55.380 | So that was, we took something that we had in our environment, something we had access

00:30:59.780 | to, something we could afford, and then we climbed up the ranks and took advantage of

00:31:06.060 | new opportunities until he is where he is now.

00:31:08.940 | Wow.

00:31:09.940 | How cool is that?

00:31:10.940 | That's awesome.

00:31:11.940 | Yeah, it really is.

00:31:12.940 | It really is nifty.

00:31:13.940 | I have a friend who's into that.

00:31:14.940 | He's doing the same kind of thing.

00:31:15.940 | He built himself a forge and he does it in his garage and took a leaf spring from a car

00:31:20.700 | and banged it into a knife and just totally, he was showing me how he did it and I was

00:31:26.780 | fascinated.

00:31:27.780 | I had no idea that you could change the grain of the metal and change the direction.

00:31:33.420 | What a cool thing.

00:31:34.420 | I'm just curious, and I don't think making money actually should be, I mean for a 15

00:31:39.580 | year old, I don't think making money should be the arbiter of what you do, but I'm curious.

00:31:43.700 | Has he made any money?

00:31:45.580 | Has he done anything associated where there's been any profit with this talent yet?

00:31:49.100 | No, no, not yet.

00:31:50.660 | In fact, that's something I'm working on with him.

00:31:56.220 | I'm not advocating that you should have to make money with your talent right away, though

00:32:00.940 | eventually yes.

00:32:03.220 | I'm putting him onto a lot more business books.

00:32:06.820 | In fact, lately he's about halfway through, I think, what was it, Gerber's book on?

00:32:13.180 | E-Myth.

00:32:14.180 | E-Myth.

00:32:15.180 | He's loving it.

00:32:16.180 | Right.

00:32:17.180 | He's really getting it because he's also in the process of following these forums.

00:32:21.580 | He follows these big guys, which he totally admires.

00:32:25.100 | Every world has their experts and their gurus.

00:32:28.420 | He can tell already, some of them are really, really good technically, but they fail on

00:32:32.820 | the business side.

00:32:34.300 | Another guy may be good technically, maybe not as good, but succeeding with a vengeance.

00:32:40.140 | He's able to provide for his family.

00:32:42.660 | They're doing really well financially, and he can tell the difference.

00:32:46.940 | So he's just so ripe for that information to think about when you're doing your technical

00:32:53.740 | skill like a bladesmith.

00:32:54.740 | A lot of these guys can get so wrapped up in the process itself that they forget that

00:33:01.780 | it's supposed to serve a purpose, basically a purpose for someone else.

00:33:07.020 | You have to find that balance in enjoying the craft, but also remembering you're always

00:33:11.020 | serving the public or serving someone with your craft.

00:33:14.620 | So it's important that it's not just the object you're bringing to them, but it's done on

00:33:20.100 | their time, their schedule, their needs, their aesthetics, whatever other concerns that they

00:33:25.380 | have.

00:33:26.380 | So part of the talent development, like my firstborn, was really understanding that you're

00:33:33.740 | serving people with your skill set, and you develop that early on.

00:33:39.540 | In the process of serving, you're actually modifying your talent, which is an interesting

00:33:43.180 | thing, so it's like a feedback loop that you've got going.

00:33:47.060 | So far you've mentioned two of your boys.

00:33:48.600 | Do they keep blogs on their work?

00:33:50.580 | Do they chronicle their...do they have websites?

00:33:53.380 | Do they chronicle what they're learning?

00:33:55.380 | Yes.

00:33:56.380 | My oldest one, he's one called ReddingDrone.com.

00:34:00.180 | So Redding, R-E-D-D-I-N-G, dot drone dot com.

00:34:05.940 | And Redding is the biggest town or city that we have near us, so he used that for SEO search

00:34:13.140 | engine and he puts his videos that he's done up there as a portfolio for his customers

00:34:20.980 | to check out.

00:34:22.420 | The thing that I see about it, and this is one of my major concerns with how we approach

00:34:27.940 | education and schooling, is I think that what we get paid for is the application of knowledge

00:34:36.700 | and skills to a specific problem that solves a customer's need.

00:34:40.180 | That's how I think about it.

00:34:41.180 | So financial planning, for example, what I get paid for as a financial planner is to

00:34:45.620 | apply knowledge about technical knowledge, about the law, about the tax code, about certain

00:34:51.740 | investment and insurance products.

00:34:53.940 | And then so I get to apply that knowledge, then I apply the skill of understanding what

00:34:58.340 | a client is looking for, what their actual goals are, and then to be able to apply all

00:35:03.340 | of that accumulated knowledge to a specific scenario.

00:35:06.900 | And so what I actually get paid for is not showing up and working and showing up to an

00:35:11.700 | office.

00:35:12.700 | I get paid for applying skill and knowledge to a specific scenario such that it helps

00:35:17.020 | somebody and it helps them more, then they value the help more than it costs them to

00:35:22.860 | have that.

00:35:23.860 | My concern with focusing solely on academic knowledge is that academic knowledge is often

00:35:29.460 | not applied or there's not an easy path where the person can see how to apply it.

00:35:34.180 | But with learning skills and knowledge through a specific interest or talent, I see that

00:35:40.060 | as being able to develop marketing, just a wealth, a broad array of skills.

00:35:44.180 | So if your son has a website, Reading Drone, he has to learn how to make a website, write

00:35:50.140 | copy, take pictures, take video, figure out what's compelling marketing.

00:35:56.060 | He has a real life project to which he can apply all those skills.

00:35:59.380 | And whether he does this for another six months or another six years doesn't matter.

00:36:03.180 | Those skills are many and they're varied and they can be applied to new ventures.

00:36:08.340 | Absolutely.

00:36:09.340 | And in fact, which I forgot to mention here, Caleb was my second one.

00:36:15.500 | So my first one, my first son, carries the same name I do, Jonathan.

00:36:21.500 | And my second one, Caleb, is also writing an e-guide called The Broke Bladesmith.

00:36:27.900 | So he got onto one of the programs that we bought for adults in the marketing world where

00:36:37.500 | they say, "Hey, if you want to break into a field, one good way to do it is write it

00:36:40.780 | from the perspective of a beginner because you're the expert.

00:36:44.140 | There's other people just behind you that need that information."

00:36:47.820 | And it's exactly it.

00:36:48.860 | That's my son got in there.

00:36:50.100 | There's a lot of information for experts, but nothing that was broken down to his level.

00:36:54.440 | So he's in the process, he's about two-thirds of the way done of writing that.

00:37:00.220 | And the inspiration for him to write that in part was because of my third son, who's

00:37:04.300 | 13.

00:37:05.420 | And when he was, I think 11, I'm getting confused on the age, but 11 or 12, he wrote two books

00:37:12.300 | on Amazon and has been making cash off of this.

00:37:15.580 | And yes, and so he's my, people can check that out.

00:37:18.660 | He loves getting mail.

00:37:20.060 | He has a website called scarabcoder.com, so scarab, S-C-A-R-A-B-E-R, coder, C-O-D-E-R,

00:37:28.300 | dot com.

00:37:29.860 | And you can check him out there.

00:37:32.780 | And he's connected with people around the world.

00:37:35.260 | In fact, with him, he's really into programming.

00:37:38.680 | He loves computer stuff.

00:37:40.760 | And I don't know, when he was 10 or 11, I had this old programming book on my bookshelf

00:37:46.600 | that I had from years ago, and he said, "Why don't you take a look at this?"

00:37:51.280 | And so he started taking a look at it.

00:37:53.120 | Check on him a couple of days later.

00:37:55.320 | And he says, "Well, you know, so-and-so told me that I should try it this way."

00:38:01.640 | "Who are you talking about?"

00:38:03.000 | He had email, which we monitor at that age.

00:38:06.640 | And I'm like, "Who is that?"

00:38:09.120 | He says, "Well, you know, the author of that book."

00:38:11.840 | I'm like, "What, that guy?

00:38:14.000 | He's a big guy in the world."

00:38:15.320 | "Oh yeah, he lives in Sweden now.

00:38:16.960 | He immigrated from the States to Sweden."

00:38:19.440 | And I'm like, "He wrote to me personally and gave me an updated version of the book."

00:38:24.480 | So he's having this correspondence directly with him, and then there's some other people

00:38:30.960 | where he was featured in some big conference in the UK on the screen as an example of what

00:38:36.880 | a young person can do with their information.

00:38:40.720 | Now the interesting thing with all of this is that as much as I love my children, I wouldn't

00:38:45.000 | -- I don't think that, "Oh my goodness, these kids were born with incredible IQ.

00:38:50.520 | I'm just blown away by their initiative," and so forth.

00:38:53.840 | It's something we actually cultivate in the house.

00:38:56.720 | And that's why I want to give people hope is that this type of greatness that people

00:39:00.440 | think of in terms of talent is actually something you cultivate and you spend a lot of time.

00:39:06.120 | And when it's at a young age, it does not depend so much on the children as it does

00:39:11.240 | on the parents.

00:39:12.680 | And so if there's one thing I could tell parents is that if you wait for your children to discover

00:39:18.880 | that thing that turns them on, like you and I are both turned on by this passion of you

00:39:25.560 | sharing finance with the rest of the world and me for talent, this is late in our life.

00:39:31.000 | What happens if we could have discovered something along those lines when we were 16 or 17?

00:39:37.840 | It just boggles the mind.

00:39:39.720 | But the only way kids can do this is with the help of their parents.

00:39:43.920 | Not that the parents are doing it for them, but their parents are creating a structure.

00:39:48.800 | You talked about that chemistry issue.

00:39:50.680 | You're creating a structure to be able to explore and go down that road.

00:39:57.440 | And that's a big key component is that parents have a huge impact and they can do it without

00:40:02.720 | spending a lot of money.

00:40:03.720 | One of the things I'm so incredibly grateful for for my parents is that they did that for

00:40:09.360 | me.

00:40:10.360 | They worked hard to expose me to lots of opportunities, to expose me to lots of things.

00:40:18.520 | Everything from on the one end art such as music, piano and singing and instruments.

00:40:24.560 | They were always willing to go and buy the instrument for their children that expressed

00:40:28.800 | an interest.

00:40:29.800 | So all of my family had instruments.

00:40:33.160 | When I was a kid I had an opportunity to learn it.

00:40:34.920 | I hated it.

00:40:36.000 | And so I quit after a while.

00:40:37.280 | But now I've actually recently decided to start playing the piano again.

00:40:41.880 | But I have a foundation that even though I can't play anymore, it's coming back more

00:40:47.160 | quickly than if I had to start over today.

00:40:49.880 | But all the way to the other extreme of building things.

00:40:53.160 | I did at one time leather work and all these.

00:40:55.240 | And then plus a wide range of diverse jobs which helped to give me a lot of confidence

00:41:01.080 | to where I felt a lot more confident in my own ability and my own knowledge and my ability

00:41:04.760 | to learn new things because I wasn't arriving fresh on the employment scene at the age of

00:41:10.440 | 22 years old having just graduated from college ready to learn for the first time.

00:41:14.760 | I had already been through that process a couple of dozen times of starting new things,

00:41:20.840 | learning new skills, being instructed, learning how to be a good student, learning how to

00:41:25.040 | be taught and then learning how to provide value and help an employer be happy.

00:41:29.440 | And it just gave me not a false sense of self-confidence but a legitimate sense of confidence in who

00:41:35.680 | I was.

00:41:36.680 | And for a young man, I mean that is an incredibly powerful gift that you can give a young man.

00:41:45.280 | Absolutely.

00:41:46.920 | And when I was documenting this, I had already had some thoughts of my own but then I started

00:41:54.400 | actively reading some of the popular books, well-written books on talent development.

00:42:02.280 | You know, what is that elusive something that some people seem to be able to latch on to?

00:42:09.320 | A lot of good information out there from different angles, different perspectives.

00:42:14.720 | A lot of it is not contradictory at all.

00:42:16.360 | I think it's pretty clear.

00:42:18.160 | And obviously one of them that seems so obvious to people but still is misapplied in their

00:42:24.000 | own personal lives is that it takes time.

00:42:28.280 | It takes time, lots of time to be able to be as good as you get.

00:42:33.800 | And this includes famous people.

00:42:35.560 | And so it's interesting because this comes up a lot in magazine or popular articles or

00:42:40.240 | biographies and systematically without fail, every person that can be considered great

00:42:46.320 | in their field really resents it whenever you start off with, "Well, you were probably

00:42:52.160 | born that way."

00:42:53.960 | And they come back with, "You don't understand.

00:42:56.360 | My hands were bleeding every night for four years straight doing this physical activity."

00:43:01.320 | Or, "I read 20,000 books."

00:43:06.760 | And that's what I think most people don't seem to really grasp.

00:43:10.000 | They think that, "Okay, I'm going to put my kid in front of the piano.

00:43:13.160 | Huh, can they sing on pitch while playing the piano and within five hours?"

00:43:17.800 | And they're like, "Oh, it must not be their talent.

00:43:19.760 | Let's move on to the next.

00:43:20.760 | Oh, let's do some woodworking.

00:43:22.360 | Oh, he cut himself.

00:43:23.360 | It must not be his talent."

00:43:24.480 | Because advanced woodworkers don't cut their fingers.

00:43:27.640 | And there's that merry-go-round that people go through.

00:43:31.320 | I think 80% of the people, parents, are in that category.

00:43:35.160 | They're looking to fall into talent.

00:43:37.440 | You walk around and then worse, worse.

00:43:41.640 | My son seems to have a talent playing video games.

00:43:44.280 | So now they're cursed.

00:43:47.360 | Your child is blessed to be born a doctor.

00:43:50.480 | My son is cursed to be born a video game player.

00:43:54.480 | And you want to like, "You know what?

00:43:56.200 | Maybe it has something to do with more with the parents, how they're managing and structuring

00:43:59.480 | his time."

00:44:00.480 | But that's a delicate subject.

00:44:01.720 | So it goes back again to the parents, to of course the children carry responsibility.

00:44:06.640 | But in the bigger picture, at a young age, it's the structure, the way you approach it,

00:44:12.400 | that can make a huge difference in your child's life.

00:44:17.080 | The 10,000-hour idea, which I assume that's what 10K to Talent is based upon.

00:44:21.920 | Yes, yes, exactly.

00:44:23.200 | So it's very well popularized after Gladwell wrote his book, this idea that it takes a

00:44:27.840 | certain amount of hours.

00:44:28.840 | I mean, to me, it's such an important concept to grasp.

00:44:34.280 | And it's why the way that we approach a young person's time is such an important issue.

00:44:40.540 | Two things that came to mind out of what you were saying.

00:44:43.240 | One is the idea that it does take time.

00:44:45.400 | I recently finished reading Josh Kaufman's book called The First 20 Hours.

00:44:50.400 | He's the one who wrote the book, Your Personal MBA, and curates the website personalmba.com.

00:44:55.360 | He wrote a book about how the first 20 hours make a huge difference.

00:45:00.280 | And one thing I liked is that there's all this war about, "Well, you can find these

00:45:04.080 | life hacks.

00:45:05.080 | You can find a way to cheat the system."

00:45:07.680 | You can't find a way to cheat true expertise.

00:45:12.800 | Like a true master, there's no way to become a master.

00:45:16.460 | You can start at a different place, and you can have a much more effective way to learn,

00:45:20.380 | which I think is what, when you actually look at the literature, Josh Kaufman is very clear.

00:45:24.000 | He says, "I can't become an expert," and one of the things he learned to play the ukulele,

00:45:27.520 | "I can't become to be an expert at playing the ukulele in 20 hours, but I can set myself

00:45:32.960 | up in such a way that I approach it in an intelligent way with a clear outcome so that

00:45:38.800 | 20 hours in, I can find out, 'Is this something that I want to pursue into the 10,000 hours

00:45:44.040 | to mastery, or is this something that I'm content with?'"

00:45:47.480 | And I think the challenge that parents face today, which is why I feel so strongly about

00:45:51.540 | home education, is that the first 15,000 hours of your child's life is essentially spoken

00:45:57.620 | for with pre-K through 12th grade education.

00:46:01.480 | And if you look at the daily schedule of what that requires, then from, essentially, I'm

00:46:06.720 | going to say 7 a.m., whether school starts, here we have some schools that start at 7.30,

00:46:11.520 | whether it's 7 a.m. to call it conservatively 3 o'clock, every day is already spoken for

00:46:17.520 | for a child's time, plus after-school activities, which for many people, they find a lot of

00:46:22.960 | value in sports and the character development and the skills that come with sports, and

00:46:26.440 | then you have homework.

00:46:27.680 | And so you have all of this time that is devoted to one skill, academic ability, where is there

00:46:34.400 | the time for a child to explore other talents and other opportunities?

00:46:37.920 | I don't see where it can even happen.

00:46:41.320 | And you're right.

00:46:42.560 | That is typically what does happen, and it's not systematic.

00:46:47.760 | It's not too, because I think some parents, without adopting my method or understanding

00:46:53.920 | it, do have some instinct of that, and they will structure their family life and their

00:47:03.040 | educational life so that there is no such thing as that kind of idea of a runaway education,

00:47:08.360 | where basically you're consuming education for education's sake.

00:47:13.200 | So you're not producing new knowledge, you're just consuming.

00:47:17.680 | So you read two Jane Austen books, well then ten Jane Austen books must be better.

00:47:21.160 | If they had 30 Jane Austen books, it must be even better, rather than you out there

00:47:25.120 | saying, "Maybe I should write something for the world or for my friends that's going to

00:47:30.520 | make an impact on them."

00:47:32.320 | So you've got to change your mindset from just consuming education, kind of like confusing

00:47:40.120 | - if you want to become a great chef, what are you doing?

00:47:42.800 | You're not porking out on every possible food dish out there, going from restaurant to restaurant

00:47:48.400 | every day, every night.

00:47:49.400 | You think, "Well that's absurd, you're just consuming."

00:47:52.960 | A chef is producing.

00:47:55.080 | You see, that's a huge difference in the - of course you're tasting and you are consuming

00:47:58.960 | at some level, so it's absolutely necessary to consume.

00:48:02.240 | But that's what's happened in the education world.

00:48:04.080 | There's like, there's a thousand different classes in math you can take, a thousand different

00:48:07.880 | classes in accounting.

00:48:09.280 | My goodness, history, politics, I mean your head couldn't explode.

00:48:13.800 | And so, and that's a sense of franticness that parents get, and I get that too sometimes.

00:48:18.720 | I have to go back to the drawing board and say, "Okay, halt.

00:48:21.520 | Why are we doing this?

00:48:22.520 | I mean I know this course is fantastic, I know this guy is amazing, but how does this

00:48:26.660 | fit in the bigger picture for my children?"

00:48:30.800 | And so you have to go back and say, "Are we just consuming knowledge for knowledge's sake?

00:48:35.920 | Or are we consuming it with an idea that we want to be able to produce and do something

00:48:41.200 | with this?"

00:48:42.200 | Not everything has an immediate purpose, and I totally understand that there is such a

00:48:45.920 | thing as you need to learn your alphabet first before you can write a book.

00:48:51.920 | But still, there's a concept, you don't just consume, and that's what people feel.

00:48:55.760 | They feel so bloated on the education.

00:48:58.240 | Their kids are just slapped from one place to the other.

00:49:01.000 | So of course, here's the irony, is that then in order to counter that sense of constant

00:49:07.320 | feeling of being on a treadmill, then you throw them into these group activities where

00:49:12.040 | everybody's sort of brain dead to counter.

00:49:14.000 | It's the same thing.

00:49:15.000 | You're in a dead-end job, you hate it, you come home, what do you do?

00:49:18.160 | You don't hit the books a lot of times, you just turn on the boob tube.

00:49:21.040 | And you go at it for hours.

00:49:23.040 | Yeah, exactly.

00:49:24.040 | And there's a place for some medication.

00:49:25.040 | Sure, absolutely.

00:49:26.040 | But if that defines you, which I feel people, they don't feel like there's no way out, from

00:49:31.200 | K-12 has been defined for them, or they feel it has.

00:49:34.720 | And by default it will be if you don't take control.

00:49:37.760 | Right, absolutely.

00:49:38.760 | I want to go back to the age, you mentioned the age of 12, and I'm first just going to

00:49:44.280 | ask a question without any preamble, then I'm going to give you my idea, and I'm interested

00:49:47.000 | in your response as a father.

00:49:48.880 | But how do you approach, with your three-year-old, how do you imagine with your son or daughter

00:49:55.000 | now that you have a little bit of hindsight, how do you imagine their education and talent

00:50:02.280 | developing in an age-appropriate way?

00:50:04.800 | Is it appropriate for your five-year-old that you're focusing on saying, "You need to start

00:50:08.240 | working on this talent," or are you trying to give raw material at that age?

00:50:12.000 | What's the age-appropriateness of this?

00:50:14.400 | Well, the reason I, when I talk about, on my website, my selling point to people to

00:50:24.560 | come to my website and learn from me is I'm trying, I had to narrow it down, you know,

00:50:28.720 | talent is such a huge topic, and I'm not there to talk about teenage rebellion or that kind

00:50:33.880 | of stuff, I'm just focused on one topic, how do you get started at the first 100 hours?

00:50:38.880 | And so one of the keys to starting the first 100 hours is the age issue.

00:50:43.960 | A lot of these techniques with talent can start young, they can start later, but I'm

00:50:48.520 | looking at it more from the optimum perspective.

00:50:51.040 | I use the age 12, not because all of a sudden at age 12 something clicks on, but around

00:50:56.080 | that age.

00:50:57.760 | I think that physically, mentally, emotionally, that's when you see kids starting to chomp

00:51:01.920 | at the bit, you know?

00:51:03.360 | They start wanting a little more intellectual reasons, they've got the drive, they'll stay

00:51:08.000 | up till midnight, you know, they don't need their naps during the day.

00:51:12.120 | It's getting pretty clear cut.

00:51:14.640 | And so at the age of 12 they can start focusing on something, and if they're excited about

00:51:21.120 | it, they will usually carry it through.

00:51:25.600 | You know, you do have some distraction.

00:51:27.000 | When you're younger, it's a lot more about mom and dad hugging you and holding you.

00:51:30.920 | Yes, you can make it through the next page, you can make it through the next exercise.

00:51:34.800 | So their sense of affirmation really comes from that closeness of their parents in order

00:51:41.240 | to be able to keep going forward on something.

00:51:44.400 | Whereas when you get to the age of 12, I think most everybody can remember that, that's when

00:51:48.320 | girls can get a little sassy, guys can get a little dangerous, and I think it's that

00:51:52.600 | natural, good natural instinct to go out there and try something and find a uniqueness for

00:51:59.440 | themselves, but it has to be channeled.

00:52:01.840 | And so I think a talent is a perfect fit.

00:52:04.560 | I have a working theory, and I'm interested in your feedback, and also I want you to share

00:52:08.080 | just what you're doing with your children, but I have a working theory that if we...

00:52:14.160 | So I read some material on basically childhood versus adulthood in historical cultures, and

00:52:20.920 | one of the things I learned when reading, I read some psychological papers and also

00:52:24.200 | just some different books and anecdotes about history.

00:52:29.500 | One of the things I learned is that throughout history, in many if not most civilizations,

00:52:35.480 | if the civilization recognized even childhood, 'cause some civilizations didn't even recognize

00:52:41.280 | the concept of childhood, you're either a baby who required care or you were a person,

00:52:46.680 | and this idea of child versus adult, this artificial distinction didn't really exist.

00:52:52.280 | It doesn't exist in some cultures, but in many cultures, there's a transition, there's

00:52:56.160 | a coming of age, and whether that's in the Jewish culture, we're probably most familiar

00:53:00.520 | with the Bar Mitzvah, the Bat Mitzvah at about 12.

00:53:04.480 | Many cultures have a rite of passage if it's a tribal culture in that early age.

00:53:11.040 | In the Latin culture, it's certain things.

00:53:13.200 | Every culture seems to have this rite of passage, except in our US American culture, and in

00:53:19.040 | the US American context, we don't really have this.

00:53:21.520 | We extend out the age of adulthood to essentially 18, or maybe 21 seems to be our transition

00:53:28.560 | point.

00:53:29.560 | But what I watch, I look and I say, if I think back to myself at 12, I was certainly entering

00:53:34.760 | that phase, we call it adolescence, I was entering that phase of desiring basically

00:53:39.200 | to say that my life matters.

00:53:41.240 | And if I have an outlet for that mattering, a way to productively use that, then I can

00:53:47.680 | be channeled.

00:53:48.680 | If not, then I'll often act out in what society considers to be inappropriate ways, and that's

00:53:53.880 | why we have this fear of adolescence.

00:53:56.920 | My thinking is, if I could integrate this from an educational perspective, I don't know

00:54:00.440 | what your and your wife's philosophy is with regard to how you've approached the academic

00:54:06.000 | side of schooling, but I've wondered if the basic foundation of academics couldn't be

00:54:10.920 | basically settled by the age of 12.

00:54:13.240 | Historically, we talk about a sixth grade education, eighth grade education, so and

00:54:17.000 | so famous American forefather only had a sixth grade education, but their sixth grade education

00:54:24.040 | was the equivalent of a college degree in today's world in many instances, not the depth

00:54:28.520 | of subject matter knowledge, but the basics of it.

00:54:31.480 | And I've wondered if age 12 isn't a good place to transition from that intensively guided

00:54:39.240 | academic approach over to a more free thinking, follow your interests type of approach.

00:54:45.760 | My concern, there's a philosophy of unschooling, which is essentially child-led education.

00:54:50.920 | My concern with that is I don't think a child knows what they don't know or what they need

00:54:54.960 | to know at a young age, but that doesn't mean that at 16 necessarily I need to exert the

00:54:59.480 | same kind of control, so I've wondered if 12 couldn't be a good for my family.

00:55:04.160 | We're going to focus on academics.

00:55:05.160 | I'm going to tell you, here's what are the things you need to do until 12, and then after

00:55:09.440 | 12 I'm much more of a guide and allowing you to follow your interests, and now I'm going

00:55:15.040 | to be that teacher, that guide who's been a little farther down the road to bring along

00:55:19.200 | the resources and the materials and the tools that are going to help you to really explore

00:55:23.120 | your interests in an appropriate way.

00:55:25.760 | What do you think about my idea?

00:55:27.360 | Absolutely.

00:55:28.360 | I think you're totally right on.

00:55:30.280 | That's exactly it.

00:55:31.280 | And if you listen to most people when they talk about their childhood, when they've got

00:55:35.040 | no agenda to try to explain to you, when they look back on it, I think that's what everybody

00:55:38.880 | wished they had.

00:55:39.880 | I mean, here's the typical thing.

00:55:42.120 | Girls, everybody, there are gender differences, and one of the gender differences typically

00:55:48.760 | with young teenage girls, what is it everybody's afraid of?

00:55:52.120 | It's either two extremes.

00:55:53.560 | Either they're discovering they're beautiful, everybody wants them, and then they're all

00:55:57.800 | over the place, no restraint.

00:55:59.960 | Or they're turned inward, exploring their emotions, almost suicidal.

00:56:05.400 | There's that extreme, those extreme emotions.

00:56:09.240 | But when you look at people that you know in your wide circle of friends and so forth,

00:56:15.000 | and they have healthy teenage daughters, just to focus on that a bit, and I have a 13-year-old

00:56:22.240 | daughter, and they've got, they usually, the more I think about it, they have some kind

00:56:30.200 | of outlet for all that intense perception, is actually what it is, intense perception,

00:56:38.800 | which is why we love our wives, right?

00:56:40.800 | Well, you know, our wives hopefully by then have gotten more under control.

00:56:45.200 | But they've got this perception, everybody talks about this woman's intuition, and I

00:56:50.040 | think that, as an example, at a young age there is all this intensity, and it can be

00:56:58.400 | channeled.

00:56:59.400 | And if it's not channeled, you can't make it go away.

00:57:02.080 | And I think most people listening to this show will chuckle when I say, "I see a lot

00:57:06.400 | of old grandmas out there dressing their dogs as poodles, and it's usually when they have

00:57:10.520 | no grandchildren around."

00:57:11.600 | I think there are some things in our lives, and for men it's the same thing too, you can't

00:57:19.120 | turn it off, you can only misdirect it.

00:57:21.960 | And I think that's something, you know, deep, and I think most people would agree with that,

00:57:26.000 | but if you actually really understand that, you need to embrace it, and then actively

00:57:30.840 | find something for your daughter or your son to really focus their energies in something

00:57:36.440 | positive.

00:57:37.440 | And it can't be a fake, by the way.

00:57:38.440 | I hope this is one thing, a hobby is not the same thing as building a talent.

00:57:43.600 | Now there are some resemblances, and they can overlap, but it's not the same thing.

00:57:47.760 | A hobby is for your pure personal consumption.

00:57:50.400 | It's like writing in a diary for yourself, and then when you get older you hope no one

00:57:55.600 | finds it and you burn it.

00:57:58.880 | That's for yourself, it's personal consumption, maybe there's some value at some level to

00:58:03.240 | it, versus writing letters to someone, or even better yet, writing encouraging letters

00:58:09.240 | to someone, or even writing a new story for your friends or a sibling, or writing on a

00:58:13.760 | blog even better about the progress of your talent.

00:58:17.800 | That's producing, that's creative, and in one case you may actually be exacerbating

00:58:23.400 | your senses of, you know, worthlessness or exploring too much of your emotions, you don't

00:58:28.560 | have enough information, whereas in the other one you're focused on other people.

00:58:32.080 | Again, you're back to serving people in a very narrow and specific sense, and usually

00:58:37.600 | people find great personal self-worth in doing that.

00:58:40.320 | I think it's a total good spiritual principle at work in people's lives.

00:58:46.000 | So if your child has a hobby, don't stay there.

00:58:49.840 | In fact, be very careful, because this hobby can become self-destructive, where they become

00:58:53.720 | so good at something, and then it dawns on them when they're 17 or 18 that no one really

00:58:58.640 | wants to hear them play the ukulele on a professional level, and they go, "Oh my goodness, I should

00:59:03.720 | have insert the blank, focus some of my energies down this path," and they feel betrayed.

00:59:10.800 | So to clarify, my next question was going to be, how do you define talent?

00:59:16.740 | So in your mind, what I hear you saying is that a talent is something that you perhaps

00:59:24.300 | have an interest in, that you perhaps have an ability for, and that it's perceived in

00:59:31.840 | the marketplace as something that is valued in the marketplace.

00:59:36.140 | Is that how you define talent, and how you're making this distinction between a hobby and

00:59:39.160 | a talent?

00:59:40.160 | Right.

00:59:41.160 | Right, that's exactly it.

00:59:42.160 | I mean, you can modify it a little bit.

00:59:45.200 | There are some talents that bring value to other people that maybe don't have a cash

00:59:48.680 | transaction value.

00:59:49.680 | Right.

00:59:50.680 | So I can say like a Mother Teresa example, which is definitely bringing value to people,

00:59:55.220 | and people, you may not want to use the word talent, but it takes a certain skill set in

00:59:59.440 | order to get to that level of service, and that's what I mean by that.

01:00:03.500 | In other words, it's not about yourself.

01:00:05.180 | It's not about, "Can I write 10,000 private diaries on myself?"

01:00:08.940 | It's more about, "Can I produce a book for other people to enjoy?"

01:00:12.220 | That's the dividing line.

01:00:13.780 | Now you've not talked much about natural ability, which is often how we think of talent.

01:00:18.340 | So-and-so, you're so talented.

01:00:20.720 | What role does natural ability play in this?

01:00:24.700 | It plays a much smaller role than people think.

01:00:29.020 | You have to have a certain, and I'm not at all original in this, and I think all the

01:00:33.980 | books on talent that I've read said that natural ability plays a role only in the sense that

01:00:40.300 | if you're going to become a gymnast, you may have some hormonal issues at some point where

01:00:46.620 | your muscles are able to stretch out more, but beyond that, most of those things are

01:00:50.780 | the, you just need the basics.

01:00:52.660 | It turns out that it's much more important to cultivate particular skills to an applied

01:00:57.540 | situation to make an impact.

01:01:00.320 | So they talk a lot about that, and I agree.

01:01:02.020 | I mean, I agree simply because I look around me.

01:01:04.220 | They found that IQ is not a hindrance, but neither is it really a guarantee that you're

01:01:09.620 | going to become great in your field.

01:01:11.020 | You just might have a high IQ.

01:01:12.700 | So you can recite data points or you can do math formulas, but you're not bringing anything

01:01:18.540 | new to the world, and especially for men, to the marketplace.

01:01:25.260 | Yeah, that certainly lines up with my experience.

01:01:28.260 | I really don't.

01:01:30.020 | I'm sure that natural ability does play some role.

01:01:33.780 | It seems hard for me to say that it plays no role, but many of the things that I consider

01:01:38.860 | myself to have an ability in, I can place the time, I mean, even this show, I feel like

01:01:44.700 | I'm in many ways, I'm inept at, still not very good at broadcasting, but I've had many

01:01:49.580 | people compliment me and say that it is natural, and I think to myself, "It's not natural."

01:01:57.540 | I was scared silly to talk to people.

01:02:00.100 | I actually am an introvert, and I can remember the times in my childhood when I decided that

01:02:05.340 | being an introvert and being scared wasn't serving me.

01:02:08.500 | It wasn't helping me, and I forced myself to pretend I was differently until I could

01:02:12.980 | learn how to do something different.

01:02:15.140 | And then even with the ability to think things through and to speak and to articulate, I

01:02:21.220 | had an intention.

01:02:22.220 | I wanted to learn to speak.

01:02:23.220 | I wanted to compose thoughts, and I joined Toastmasters.

01:02:27.020 | I've developed abilities.

01:02:28.460 | So it seems as though, and at this point, I am working hard on saying I need to develop

01:02:33.660 | ability to a much higher level because I feel as though I have a lot to learn, but the natural

01:02:39.900 | ability seems like the least important thing because I could recount, "Here was when I

01:02:44.180 | made this decision.

01:02:45.420 | Here was when I practiced that.

01:02:48.100 | Here were the books that I read on this other subject.

01:02:50.900 | Here were the influences, the people that encouraged me.

01:02:53.500 | Here is who I modeled."

01:02:54.500 | So that seems to line up at least with my experience, however anecdotal.

01:02:58.580 | Yeah, and it should be encouraging to people because you don't have to think, "Oh my

01:03:03.380 | goodness, my child is born to be a concert pianist."

01:03:06.100 | And I'm like, "Okay, that's a death sentence for someone to be born a concert pianist."

01:03:10.540 | I had a friend who told me that one of the worst decisions he ever did was to get a music

01:03:15.500 | degree because everybody told him, "Oh, you look at him."

01:03:21.020 | It was dumb because first of all, he wanted to be able to support a family.

01:03:26.380 | It was more important.

01:03:27.380 | Then he found out that if you really go down that road, most of it involves living in cheap

01:03:31.500 | motels traveling under the tour buses.

01:03:33.940 | You don't get to compose anything of unique for yourself, but not to anyone.

01:03:38.940 | He feels like it was such a big ripoff because had he been, and he partly takes the blame,

01:03:44.380 | had he been more thoughtful about where he was going with this, it could have turned

01:03:50.380 | out differently.

01:03:51.540 | So he was super trained to do something very specialized that had no market value.

01:03:57.740 | Once or last, maybe you do, but very few people will willingly, on their own, go to town,

01:04:03.580 | "Hey, honey, what do you want to do on a Friday night?"

01:04:05.900 | "Oh, yeah, let's go listen to a piano concert in town."

01:04:08.740 | The only time you do is when you have to go see a relative or whatever.

01:04:12.940 | And so why?

01:04:13.940 | Because if you really want to hear it, you just pop in the CD or turn on Pandora.

01:04:16.700 | I just do YouTube.

01:04:17.700 | It's better.

01:04:18.700 | I can see it.

01:04:19.700 | There you go.

01:04:20.900 | But it's not to say that that music is not good.

01:04:23.860 | It's just that it's been done.

01:04:25.260 | The market is fulfilled.

01:04:26.260 | I think that's why we should be rejoiced.

01:04:27.260 | We should be happy.

01:04:28.260 | I mean, you don't want to have to--it's been done.

01:04:31.380 | People aren't demanding more.

01:04:32.420 | It's been done so well.

01:04:34.300 | And if those people from the past came back from the dead, I'm sure they would have packed

01:04:39.540 | concerts.

01:04:40.540 | People would want to listen to them.

01:04:41.540 | It would just be exciting to see them.

01:04:43.980 | But usually people don't want another Beethoven again.

01:04:47.740 | Beethoven's been done.

01:04:49.260 | So it's not that you can't learn and so forth.

01:04:51.460 | It's just that you have to wrap your mind around it that you're not born with a specific

01:04:58.740 | job title.

01:04:59.740 | Maybe that's the best way to say it.

01:05:00.740 | You're not born with a job title.

01:05:02.980 | You're born with certain abilities.

01:05:06.720 | You're born in a particular place and time.

01:05:08.620 | You're born in a particular family.

01:05:11.060 | You're born with certain advantages.

01:05:13.100 | Maybe your dad is wealthy enough that you can have two, three cars, a pickup truck and

01:05:18.180 | a cool-looking car convertible, whereas another person doesn't, but they live in the country.

01:05:23.220 | You have all sorts of advantages and you have to look at it and say, "Okay, what can I combine

01:05:29.700 | together that's going to make it really interesting and get us started today?"

01:05:36.620 | The worst compliment that people think they're making, which to me is the thing I despise

01:05:41.180 | people saying to me, is many people have said, "Joshua, you're a born salesman."

01:05:45.700 | And that one, people are well-intentioned and I understand why they say it.

01:05:50.100 | And so obviously I just say, "Thank you very much," and smile.

01:05:52.780 | But inside I'm saying, "When was the last time you saw a baby pop out and you said,

01:05:57.980 | 'Ah, look, here's little Richard.

01:05:59.340 | This little Richard is a born salesman.'"

01:06:01.220 | I think the other thing is that it feels, in a sense, I try very hard, because I've

01:06:06.700 | experienced that myself, I try very hard not to ever compliment people on natural ability,

01:06:12.620 | but to compliment people on hard work.

01:06:14.660 | Because I think if you only knew, if you only knew how hard it is for me to, when I was

01:06:20.860 | in Outbound Sales, if you knew how hard it was to pick up the phone and face the fear

01:06:25.980 | of rejection, if you knew how hard it was to sit in the car outside of a prospective

01:06:30.560 | client's office and screw up your courage and say, "I'm going to go in there and I'm

01:06:34.660 | going to do it."

01:06:35.660 | Now with time it gets easier.

01:06:37.420 | What happens is if there's this idea that somehow you're a born salesperson, then the

01:06:42.460 | new person getting in who's sitting there staring at their phone, and I remember the

01:06:46.380 | first time when I got into the insurance business, I remember the first time I had to make an

01:06:50.180 | outbound call to a friend of mine to say, "Hey, I'm in the insurance and investment

01:06:54.500 | business.

01:06:55.500 | I'd like to talk to you."

01:06:56.500 | I stared at the phone for 20 minutes.

01:06:58.940 | I just scared to pick it up.

01:07:00.660 | And finally I said, "That's it.

01:07:01.980 | I'm going to do it."

01:07:02.980 | And I did it.

01:07:04.300 | And we diminish, I feel like we diminish people's hard work if we focus on natural ability and

01:07:10.140 | not on their personal self-development achievements, which is probably what they are more than

01:07:18.260 | anything else.

01:07:19.260 | Absolutely.

01:07:20.260 | You say that, and every person that is great in a field, even the sales, I've listened

01:07:27.180 | to some of those guys.

01:07:29.300 | Every single one of them, I cannot think of one exception, has said they have worked their

01:07:34.860 | little behinds off getting to where they are.

01:07:38.220 | Now it does not mean, for example, if somebody had truly a speech impediment, a physical

01:07:42.260 | speech impediment, it might have been difficult for them to reach that.

01:07:45.920 | Maybe it would have been offensive enough to people, difficult enough for people to

01:07:49.540 | ... No matter how to understand.

01:07:52.740 | So yeah, okay, there are some physical things.

01:07:54.820 | You may not be ... If you're born with a limp in your foot, you probably won't become an

01:07:58.520 | ultra marathon runner.

01:08:00.300 | Though sometimes that's amazing too.

01:08:02.580 | Sometimes with technology you can overcome that.

01:08:05.060 | So there are some obviously common sense stuff, but most of it's not true.

01:08:08.740 | I think people kind of know that.

01:08:11.260 | They kind of know that.

01:08:12.260 | It's just that when you get down and you look at your own children, you do.

01:08:18.060 | I think this is overall a sense of maybe despair is too strong of a word, of resignation.

01:08:23.140 | That's the right word.

01:08:24.140 | Resignation that has already been laid out for their kids.

01:08:27.020 | So really what they're doing is your children are fighting the same as thousands of other

01:08:32.740 | children on exactly the same data points of knowledge.

01:08:37.420 | There's no other room.

01:08:38.420 | So if you're really going to climb up, you're fighting against thousands of other students

01:08:41.380 | to become the best calculus students so you can get into the colleges, get in, and so

01:08:44.820 | forth and so on.

01:08:46.380 | Not to say that there's not a need for society for certain very well, well-defined skill

01:08:52.900 | sets, but there is a huge world of opportunity.

01:08:56.340 | In fact, that's where always the excitement comes in.

01:08:58.820 | People don't make movies about well-defined skill sets.

01:09:01.660 | They make movies, exaggerated or not, about people combining new skill sets in unusual

01:09:09.180 | ways and breaking ground.

01:09:10.780 | In fact, that's the other little secret is that the 10,000-hour principle is the basic

01:09:17.180 | idea that if you do this for 10 years, day in and day out, and you focus at it, and you're

01:09:20.940 | not just lollygagging, but you're thinking about it, breaking down what you're doing,

01:09:25.780 | and wrapping your mind around it, you'll become the top in your field in that area.

01:09:29.140 | Well, the other little secret is that that's only, I think, if you compete in exactly the

01:09:34.180 | same space that thousands of other people are doing it.

01:09:37.220 | If you decide, "Hey, I'm going to become like a Dilbert cartoon guy where I have a little

01:09:42.340 | bit of modeling skills, and I've read business books, and I've worked somewhat in the corporate

01:09:47.060 | environment, I'm going to make some witty comments about corporate life and philosophy

01:09:51.220 | and put it out there in a cartoon format."

01:09:53.460 | In fact, that's one of the examples that I give, and people laugh about it.

01:09:57.300 | Now, that combination of skills is unique, and to become that good where you find that

01:10:02.620 | balance of rhetoric and cartooning and so forth becomes unique.

01:10:08.260 | You don't need to compete against Van Gogh or all these other famous painters or graphic

01:10:13.180 | designers.

01:10:14.180 | You just have to find a unique combination of skills.

01:10:17.380 | We live in an age where, oh my goodness, I think this is the best age for this, and maybe

01:10:22.260 | a century to come we'll even be better.

01:10:24.620 | There's so much stuff out there, and you just combine it in a unique way, and wow, that

01:10:30.940 | can be so exciting for kids and for parents.

01:10:33.260 | It really is an exciting time, and go where the competition is less.

01:10:38.020 | It makes me just think of how I have a personal pet peeve, and this is my issue.

01:10:42.060 | I have a personal hatred of GPA calculations, test-taking, and things like SATs and ACTs,

01:10:48.980 | standardized methods of measurement.

01:10:52.180 | It makes me think of an anecdote when you talk about developing a unique skill.

01:10:55.860 | I remember, and the source of this was I listened to, it's available on YouTube.

01:11:00.500 | There's a YouTube video called The Ultimate History Lesson, and it's an interview with

01:11:04.460 | a man named John Taylor Gatto, who's one of my favorite authors on the subject of education.

01:11:09.740 | Somewhere in the middle of the interview, it's about a four to five hour interview,

01:11:12.900 | and it's available free on YouTube.

01:11:14.500 | Somewhere in the middle of that interview, he's talking about some experiences that he

01:11:17.820 | had.

01:11:18.820 | He was a teacher in New York City, and he was interviewing college admissions counselors

01:11:23.740 | to the big schools.

01:11:25.060 | I think it was one of the Ivy Leagues, either Harvard or Yale.

01:11:27.580 | He's talking with them and asking, "What do you really care about?"

01:11:30.700 | He was talking with them.

01:11:31.700 | What came out of the discussion was that the Harvard or Yale admissions officer, they really

01:11:36.660 | didn't care about standardized testing.

01:11:39.100 | They didn't really care about GPA very much because they had many, many, many thousands

01:11:44.180 | of people with absolutely the top ranked scores applying, and they couldn't accept all of

01:11:50.340 | them, so they had to come up with different criteria.

01:11:52.860 | He probed, Gatto did, he probed and he said, "What is it that really stands out to you?"

01:11:57.060 | He says, "We like to find people who have basically set off on dangerous, individualized

01:12:03.860 | sports activities."

01:12:05.220 | Things like sailing, offshore sailing.

01:12:07.780 | They gave an example that stuck with me of this young man who they had just accepted,

01:12:12.900 | and he didn't have very good test scores, but he had invented a sport.

01:12:16.940 | He had invented the sport of off-road, seatless, unicycle riding.

01:12:23.500 | He had built this whole entire way to track his performance and build all these rules

01:12:31.120 | for himself of off-road, seatless, unicycle riding.

01:12:35.860 | Here he was.

01:12:36.860 | It was such a rare, abnormal thing.

01:12:39.580 | He invented the sport, but that got him admission to the prestigious Ivy League University where

01:12:45.140 | there are dozens of excellent academic, high school, all-American football players who

01:12:51.860 | were probably denied access where he was able to get in simply because he was unique and

01:12:56.500 | different.

01:12:57.500 | The basic rule of sailing 101 applies in every single aspect.

01:13:02.220 | What is your unique selling proposition?

01:13:04.740 | It matters whether you're selling video services to a construction company or whether

01:13:09.380 | you're selling yourself to a college entrance exam or whether you're selling yourself on

01:13:13.420 | a podcast or whatever it is.

01:13:14.980 | What is your unique selling proposition?

01:13:17.380 | Nobody ever taught me that in high school and college.

01:13:18.980 | Not once.

01:13:19.980 | I had to learn that myself.

01:13:21.980 | Well, that's because that's not their structure, their business.

01:13:26.300 | They're not even set up structurally to do it that way.

01:13:30.860 | In some ways, you're asking the public school classroom to do more than it's possible

01:13:36.020 | of delivering.

01:13:37.940 | You have to take charge as a parent.

01:13:39.900 | You can use that environment, even the public school classroom.

01:13:43.860 | That's one thing that people can honestly take a look at.

01:13:47.660 | If you're in a situation where you feel like you don't have that much control over the

01:13:52.660 | educational course that your child is taking for all sorts of reasons, then you can actually

01:13:57.300 | – and by the way, this is an open call to your listeners.

01:14:01.140 | If they've done something like this, I would love to hear from them – where you can negotiate

01:14:06.460 | probably with your teachers.

01:14:07.900 | This takes effort on the side of the parents to say, "Hey, I heard that you're working

01:14:13.060 | through the history of the Renaissance in history class.

01:14:18.580 | Instead of my child doing XYZ book report, would you mind if they did – my child has

01:14:25.340 | a talent in music, a core talent.

01:14:26.980 | She's really into this.

01:14:28.740 | Would you mind that instead of using that particular book, they chose this other book

01:14:32.980 | about that time period, but talking about the music development and the basic songs

01:14:40.020 | and lyrics that are used during that time period?"

01:14:42.100 | She could write her book report on that.

01:14:43.940 | That would be a simple example of how you could insert yourself as a parent.

01:14:49.820 | Clear the way.

01:14:51.140 | Clear the way for your child because your child won't be able to have that negotiation

01:14:54.060 | capability with the teachers.

01:14:56.700 | The teacher might say, "Sure.

01:14:58.100 | If you're behind it, I'm okay with this.

01:15:00.260 | I just don't want to take the responsibility to have to negotiate with 30 kids, everyone

01:15:03.340 | clamoring for something."

01:15:06.700 | Every history class, you could hijack and use it so that your musically inclined child

01:15:15.260 | is developing historical perspective on music.

01:15:18.940 | You do this all across the academic subjects.

01:15:22.300 | Thousands of hours later, I guarantee you, your child is going to be phenomenal.

01:15:27.180 | It's not just going to understand the mechanics of playing music, they're going to understand

01:15:30.860 | all the stuff that goes behind the scenes in being able to compose music, why it's

01:15:37.900 | used, where it's used, and so forth.

01:15:40.140 | You can still hijack your child's standard curriculum and make it serve your purposes.

01:15:45.780 | It would take a little more work if you don't have direct control over it, but I do believe

01:15:50.740 | it can be done.

01:15:51.740 | By the way, I would love to hear from your listeners if they've done something like

01:15:55.220 | that where they have a technique for systematically negotiating with their teachers so they get

01:16:00.340 | their child to focus more on what they're trying to develop long term.

01:16:06.060 | Right, absolutely.

01:16:07.060 | I have a weakness that I often go to the extreme of, "Pull the kids out!"

01:16:10.460 | I do believe that, but the reality is that many parents aren't in that situation.

01:16:15.940 | Every study I've ever seen that has connected improvements in a child's academic ability

01:16:21.100 | and preparation for life, the only thing that's statistically verifiable is the parental involvement,

01:16:26.340 | and the parental involvement makes all the difference.

01:16:29.620 | What it makes me think of, just one anecdote for you of how I think you could apply things

01:16:33.160 | like history in an interesting way, I've never found a teacher who, when I've shown an interest

01:16:38.220 | in their subject, that hasn't bent over backward to help me.

01:16:42.340 | I feel like most teachers, many teachers, exist in a world where they're dying for a

01:16:47.580 | student to show a little bit of interest.

01:16:50.740 | When their student shows some interest, they will do, I've never met a teacher that wouldn't,

01:16:55.140 | the makeup of a teacher is one who lays down their life for their students.

01:16:59.060 | There are exceptions, of course, but the majority of teachers I know are the most giving, kind-hearted

01:17:05.020 | people who lay down their lives for their students.

01:17:07.300 | The student or the parent, a little bit of extra effort can make a huge difference.

01:17:11.420 | My favorite history project I ever did was, I always liked guns when I was a kid.

01:17:14.900 | I thought it was fun, so I traced the history of the firearm.

01:17:18.420 | I made this video for a seventh grade history class.

01:17:21.540 | In that video, I had video of me shooting every gun from a Revolutionary War musket,

01:17:29.020 | a Minuteman rifle.

01:17:30.020 | I had a buddy of mine who was a gun collector, and he brought his whole collection from muskets

01:17:35.020 | all the way through, we went through World War I, World War II, we shot all the way up

01:17:40.500 | through modern day AR-15 and AK-47s.

01:17:42.700 | We couldn't get our hands on an automatic one, but I shot a semi-automatic AR-15.

01:17:47.620 | You want to talk about feeling like a top dog.

01:17:50.300 | It wouldn't fly, I don't think, in 2014, but when you're a seventh grader and your history

01:17:54.180 | project has a video of you shooting an AK-47, an AR-15, how cool is that as far as history

01:18:01.140 | that I know and that I remember?

01:18:04.260 | Application to a specific interest with extra effort from a teacher and parent and a friend

01:18:08.600 | of mine who was really gracious toward me.

01:18:12.100 | I'd like to close with two subjects, and you actually just hit on one of the final three

01:18:18.060 | questions I was going to ask, which are basically ideas for parents in different contexts.

01:18:22.580 | Home education is one thing.

01:18:24.140 | If you're in government schooling, that's another thing.

01:18:26.980 | What do you do if a child simply doesn't seem to be exhibiting any motivation?

01:18:33.380 | Because I think that's something that many people struggle with and say, "This kid is

01:18:36.260 | totally unmotivated."

01:18:37.580 | What do you do with the topic of motivation?

01:18:39.780 | >> Yeah, actually, that's interesting.

01:18:42.980 | My observation is that you tend to have two extremes.

01:18:48.380 | It's that either you have children who are very motivated in the sense that they take

01:18:53.300 | on every project they can find.

01:18:56.820 | That is quite common, where they're just hyper-involved.

01:19:01.700 | And then you have the other extreme where kids seem to be almost listless with no energy,

01:19:07.740 | no motivation, and so forth.

01:19:13.220 | The root cause is pretty much the same.

01:19:15.800 | In the one case, the over-involvement is simply because they don't have a focus.

01:19:25.580 | Typically, that can often be because the parents are wealthy enough or they have enough emotional

01:19:30.380 | time to spare where they can drive them around to all these activities, do all these events,

01:19:34.940 | and so forth.

01:19:35.940 | So you're kind of on a high all the time.

01:19:40.020 | The other one is the same thing.

01:19:42.100 | They have a lack of focus also, but in that case, they're usually completely left to themselves

01:19:48.260 | as a general rule.

01:19:49.260 | And I mean by left to themselves.

01:19:50.260 | I don't mean that they're latchkey kids.

01:19:51.580 | I'm just saying that you tend to think of your child as he does.

01:19:57.180 | School is something that's not part of your world.

01:19:59.020 | It's something they do over there.

01:20:00.340 | All you're doing is making sure you're sitting down and are you doing your exercises.

01:20:04.040 | It's about the level of involvement that people have.

01:20:06.760 | And that's, I think, a tendency of you're going to find that where people are going

01:20:11.900 | to become listless.

01:20:12.900 | I hope I'm saying that word correctly.

01:20:16.180 | But with no motivation.

01:20:18.440 | So it depends on the age.

01:20:20.880 | If they're 12 versus 16, I think you have something else on your hands.

01:20:26.240 | If it's 12, it's going to be very easy to turn it around, honestly.

01:20:30.240 | 100% guarantee.

01:20:31.440 | If they're 16 or 17, it is going to be more difficult if this has been going on for years

01:20:38.280 | because they are transitioning to adult life.

01:20:41.380 | And the boost you're going to need to give them, the guidance that you're going to need

01:20:46.580 | to give them, is going to have to be a lot stronger, a lot bigger, bolder than when they

01:20:50.600 | are younger.

01:20:52.720 | It is true that when you're younger, a hug from mom and dad is probably going to do it.

01:20:57.560 | Or an ice cream cone is going to help you push through that difficult part.

01:21:00.920 | When you're 16 or 17, that's not going to cut it.

01:21:03.680 | You're going to need a bigger reason for everything or a bigger motivation in order to break through.

01:21:10.040 | So what I would recommend is that you sit down and you don't look at the personal interest

01:21:14.900 | only.

01:21:15.900 | And in fact, a non-motivated child, that's the problem.

01:21:17.800 | He doesn't have a real personal interest going on.

01:21:20.980 | So that's only one aspect you want to look at.

01:21:23.280 | You want to look at three other things.

01:21:24.560 | You want to look at your family goals or your family identity.

01:21:27.720 | So what makes you strong as a family.

01:21:31.200 | And you want to look at your environmental advantages.

01:21:33.760 | And by that I mean you want to look at all the people, the network of friends, the environment

01:21:38.720 | that you live in if you're in a city versus living on a ranch versus living near the beach

01:21:43.320 | or on the mountain.

01:21:45.000 | You want to look at all of that and count your assets.

01:21:49.960 | And you want to also look at your academic passions, your academic goals that you want

01:21:56.200 | for your child.

01:21:57.200 | And you're going to combine them together so that you're going to come up with a focus,

01:22:02.560 | an action focus.

01:22:03.560 | In other words, you're going to do something.

01:22:06.200 | You're going to do something where you're going to combine your personal interest, a

01:22:10.040 | family goal, and something in your environment where you can draw on and your academic intellectual

01:22:15.640 | side to it and combine it in one directed action.

01:22:21.540 | So that when you're going to go out there and act on it, you're going to have success

01:22:24.480 | almost right away.

01:22:25.920 | And that's exactly what people need when they're that unmotivated.

01:22:29.440 | If you listen to them, they say, "I'm not good at anything."

01:22:32.560 | That's what they'll say when they're not.

01:22:34.720 | Usually if they're unmotivated, they're also broody.

01:22:37.040 | They feel useless.

01:22:38.040 | They feel stupid.

01:22:40.000 | They're not good at anything that anybody cares about.

01:22:43.120 | And that is correct.

01:22:44.520 | That is correct.

01:22:45.520 | They have actually philosophically perceived their problem, that what they are doing does

01:22:49.200 | not matter.

01:22:51.360 | And by telling them, "Do more of what does not matter," is not going to solve their

01:22:54.680 | problem.

01:22:56.640 | So that's what I'm saying.

01:22:58.120 | You need to find that focus where you're combining all of your advantages.

01:23:02.800 | And this is where the family has a huge advantage over waiting to leave after high school to

01:23:09.240 | find it, because you can find your way after high school.

01:23:12.560 | But it is so much more difficult.

01:23:14.080 | It is.

01:23:15.080 | Absolutely.

01:23:16.080 | It is so much more difficult.

01:23:17.080 | If your family's identity is behind you, you're going to explode with motivation.

01:23:25.800 | Explode with motivation.

01:23:28.040 | And families really need to look inward and say, "What is it that makes us who we are?"

01:23:34.940 | And let's use that strength to help our child go forward.

01:23:39.680 | That's a whole topic in itself, because it's not about replicating your family into your

01:23:44.760 | child's life.

01:23:45.760 | It's about using your energy and your strength so that your child can act inside that environment

01:23:54.720 | and start making progress.

01:23:56.280 | Absolutely.

01:23:57.280 | Yeah, because at 16, you're already getting blocked, by the way.

01:24:01.640 | You're already being ... you're moving out of the cute phase.

01:24:06.360 | And now mothers are worried about their daughters.

01:24:09.600 | You're 16 or 17, but you still have room to sleep on someone's couch if you had to in

01:24:14.040 | order to spend the weekend learning something.

01:24:16.920 | But the older you get, that window is closing.

01:24:19.280 | And society rightly gives you an opportunity to go out on the edge, but that window closes.

01:24:27.160 | Right.

01:24:28.160 | Yep.

01:24:29.160 | It does.

01:24:30.160 | And so you need to grab that and run with it.

01:24:34.120 | And that's where the family really comes into play.

01:24:37.680 | Your authority to clear the way for you to negotiate on your behalf is tremendous.

01:24:44.120 | And that's the biggest influence, just the permission to follow something.

01:24:48.160 | Absolutely.

01:24:49.160 | You know, for me, if my mom or my dad were opposed to something, or if my mom or my dad

01:24:54.560 | gave me permission to explore something, in many ways, that's all I needed.

01:24:59.280 | And I could have gone ahead because of that confidence that we have in our parents.

01:25:02.960 | I could go against any societal norm because of that confidence that I have in my parents

01:25:08.160 | and in their direction in my life.

01:25:11.160 | But down the road, once you're an adult, you have to, in many ways, your parents' approval

01:25:16.720 | or disapproval becomes much less important.

01:25:20.480 | And now you have to deal with your going against societal norms on your own, in your own strength.

01:25:28.640 | And you usually don't have the reserves to do that.

01:25:30.960 | Right.

01:25:31.960 | And so, in fact, that's what came out in the talent literature.

01:25:34.320 | They said the one common thread is that no one ever achieved that level of greatness

01:25:40.960 | without investing that level of time.

01:25:42.680 | And so that came up.

01:25:44.240 | So why is it that so many talented people start when they're young?

01:25:47.680 | And they are all unanimously in agreement, and this is from different perspectives, that

01:25:51.280 | it had nothing to do with age, per se.

01:25:53.560 | It had simply to do with the fact that when you're that young, the parents are usually

01:25:56.600 | clearing the way for that level of commitment.

01:25:59.960 | And they said that usually when somebody finally wakes up and says, "Hey, I can do something

01:26:03.440 | great with my life and focus," they're 18, 19, 21, but they might be trying to juggle.

01:26:08.560 | People are not giving you breaks anymore.

01:26:10.240 | You have to put food on the table, and you don't have time to experiment.

01:26:13.400 | You say, "I've got to pay for the gas in my car, or am I going to go buy a drone and break

01:26:17.560 | it?"

01:26:18.560 | You don't have time anymore.

01:26:19.560 | You can do it, but it can become very extreme.

01:26:22.980 | And that's another side we don't have to talk about.

01:26:25.940 | But people can achieve greatness in their talent, but also destroy their families at

01:26:29.880 | the same time.

01:26:30.880 | That's another dark side of it, which does not have to exist.

01:26:35.240 | And again, it goes back to, basically, frankly, it's the parents behind it in most cases.

01:26:41.400 | Or in other extreme cases, the parents were taken out of the picture through tragedy or

01:26:47.280 | abandonment, and they were adopted by a mentor that just poured themselves into them.

01:26:52.960 | So there's pretty much no exception that they can think of, where these people have not

01:26:56.960 | invested tons of time, and most of the time, it's simply, the young age is simply because

01:27:03.120 | time is on their side.

01:27:04.500 | And they said most of these things can still be achieved, and they are, in adulthood and

01:27:08.000 | later on, it's just much more difficult.

01:27:09.720 | Right.

01:27:10.720 | It is.

01:27:11.720 | So you just don't get that's why there's so many young people when they say, "When I was

01:27:16.400 | seven," and then they start, "I was at," you know, the Tiger Woods is a typical example.

01:27:21.040 | The Bill Gates is another one.

01:27:22.920 | You know, when you read the story of Bill Gates, I read the summary, but I didn't read

01:27:27.720 | the alibi.

01:27:28.720 | Basically, you have someone who's playing hooking in school, who is theoretically in

01:27:32.640 | class, but really he was in the lab.

01:27:35.000 | And the other big one is that he and Steve Ballmer, whoever his partner was, would sneak

01:27:41.160 | in.

01:27:42.160 | They found out that the university lab not far from their home was basically unattended,

01:27:45.840 | what, from three to six in the morning.

01:27:48.200 | So they would sneak in there and play on one of the very few computers that were available.

01:27:54.240 | I guess they had multitasking or multithreading at that time.

01:27:57.280 | And they said, "There's no secret.

01:27:58.520 | These guys spent tens of thousands of hours."

01:28:00.720 | And then an opportunity came up at a nearby plant.

01:28:02.840 | They said, "Does anyone know how to program in this?"

01:28:04.400 | And the lab teacher said, "Yeah, I know a young so-and-so."

01:28:07.680 | So there's more to it than just that.

01:28:09.780 | But the point is, their parents were benignly looking the other way.

01:28:14.000 | Right.

01:28:15.000 | Right.

01:28:16.000 | And I think Outliers makes a big deal about it, that people owe a lot to other people

01:28:20.080 | in the sense that had the parents not looked the other way conveniently, had the lab person

01:28:24.280 | not looked the other way, obviously they could have, but they saw that, "Hey, this person's

01:28:28.680 | taken off with it.

01:28:30.640 | Let's let him go with it."

01:28:32.720 | And you see this repeated over and over where people have invested themselves into a child.

01:28:41.480 | And it doesn't mean that they are teaching the skills directly.

01:28:43.760 | Rather, they are creating the structure where they can blow up the lab if they have to and

01:28:49.800 | no one gets hurt.

01:28:50.800 | One of the most valuable things we can do, I think, is protect people's safety but give

01:28:59.000 | people room to explore.

01:29:00.960 | How valuable.

01:29:01.960 | I was going to make a comment.

01:29:05.520 | I'm actually going to ask a question.

01:29:06.880 | Do you have any idea how much you've spent on helping your kids with some of these talent

01:29:13.600 | development, I guess would be the term?

01:29:15.360 | I mean, financially, you mean?

01:29:18.200 | Yeah.

01:29:19.200 | Actually, money.

01:29:20.200 | Do you have any idea?

01:29:21.200 | Very, very, very little.

01:29:23.200 | Even all the drone equipment that my son does, he bought with his own money that he earned

01:29:27.160 | by working in our business.

01:29:29.960 | And that's actually an important part, is that I might subsidize or I might buy a couple

01:29:37.520 | to get him started, but I actually do want them to have a taste of what it feels like

01:29:42.960 | to take care of whatever tools or equipment that you're needing.

01:29:48.320 | For example, just recently, Nicholas, a 13-year-old, he likes to run his own Minecraft hosting

01:29:55.320 | site with all the administrative stuff that goes on it, but he has to pay for it out of

01:29:59.800 | his own cash.

01:30:00.800 | I could easily pay for it.

01:30:02.160 | It's no big deal.

01:30:03.320 | But I want him to feel, "Hey, you're giving up your soda and your drinks," or whatever

01:30:07.080 | it is that you would normally do with that, in order to run your site.

01:30:11.640 | I do this on a small level, and the higher up they go, the more they are invested in

01:30:16.160 | buying their tools.

01:30:19.240 | They are very aware of the cost trade-off.

01:30:25.960 | Most of my investment has been a time investment.

01:30:29.680 | When they are younger, I've had to drive them and sometimes sit in the back with my computer

01:30:34.240 | because the adults simply wouldn't tolerate having a child there with dangerous equipment.

01:30:39.440 | They don't want to be responsible.

01:30:40.440 | I understand that.

01:30:41.960 | But it is a burden on me, so I will come with my work and catch up with my laptop while

01:30:48.960 | he's in the other room with dangerous bandsaws and whatever it is.

01:30:52.560 | So it's mainly a time investment more than anything else, because I use that principle.

01:30:56.480 | I'm using my environment.

01:30:57.880 | I don't think, "Hey, my son is going to become a deep-sea diver, but we live five hours away

01:31:03.560 | from the ocean."

01:31:04.560 | Well, okay, I could force it, which means either my family would never see me on the

01:31:07.920 | weekend while he and I are developing that skill, or it would bankrupt me because I don't

01:31:13.360 | have the financial resources to pay for someone else to take him.

01:31:16.560 | So I work within my environment and I go with it.

01:31:20.720 | Now, as they get older, they make more money, and so they can go places and do more things

01:31:26.800 | on their own, which is a natural progression.

01:31:30.520 | That's part of the talent development, is understanding it's not just the actual core

01:31:34.080 | skill that people see in the outward part, it's all the stuff behind the scenes that

01:31:38.800 | needs to get done.

01:31:40.480 | So with my son, we didn't talk about that, but a lot of it had to do with learning how

01:31:44.160 | to pitch to grown-up people.

01:31:46.240 | So my son actually enjoys that.

01:31:47.680 | He actually likes going to complete strangers, like at a real estate presentation, and show

01:31:52.720 | how it works and tell them what he can do.

01:31:54.320 | He got those tips from other people.

01:31:56.800 | So a lot of the skills are working in the background to make the visible one happen.

01:32:04.520 | You sparked another idea.

01:32:05.960 | Have you done anything in addition to working with your children to run their businesses,

01:32:11.520 | have you done anything specific with teaching them personal finance that you think has been

01:32:16.080 | helpful?

01:32:17.080 | I know your oldest is still only 17, but have you employed any tactics or strategies that

01:32:21.480 | you think have...

01:32:23.480 | We are big podcast junkies in our household.

01:32:28.280 | My wife is probably the biggest consumer of it because as part of our business, there's

01:32:33.120 | a lot of manual work that needs to get done.

01:32:37.080 | And so we have lots of MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, and we listen to financial podcasts.

01:32:46.120 | My oldest likes to listen to some of those too.

01:32:48.120 | So we'll get some of it that way, but most of it happens as conversations around the

01:32:51.920 | table.

01:32:52.920 | And they'll be like, "Why are we so busy?"

01:32:56.920 | And we'll do special treats like we'll have some food brought in or something because

01:33:00.680 | we've got a sales campaign going on.

01:33:02.360 | We've got to work around the clock pretty much.

01:33:04.600 | And so we'll talk about that to say, "When does the campaign end?"

01:33:07.760 | And the younger ones will say, "Why can't we just give it to them?"

01:33:11.280 | We'll say, "Well, we could, but then you'd only want to give it to people who might be

01:33:15.240 | qualified."

01:33:16.240 | So we have these ongoing business discussions as a part of our life and we encourage it.

01:33:21.040 | And the older they get, the more we let them in on the actual finances of what's going

01:33:24.760 | on.

01:33:26.000 | When they're younger, they don't need to know everything.

01:33:27.640 | But as they get older, our oldest is very well aware of the money flowing in and out

01:33:32.320 | of our business, which is what we personally allow him to see because we can have those

01:33:39.280 | conversations.

01:33:40.280 | So a lot of that stuff we learn, my wife and I.

01:33:41.880 | In fact, we're going through the whole issue of whether or not to incorporate him.

01:33:47.280 | And so we're having this discussion, the pros and cons.

01:33:49.240 | I go and see some financial consultants and they give me their advice.

01:33:52.840 | Another one gives me a different opinion and we'll talk it over with him and I'll ask

01:33:56.920 | him, "Can you afford it?"

01:33:58.400 | And then we have this session, but I also want to make sure that no one's going to

01:34:03.040 | come back and sue me if you accidentally crash your drone into a portion and now I've got

01:34:07.560 | to pay for the paint job.

01:34:08.600 | So we have these discussions.

01:34:09.680 | So he's learning in a very conversational way.

01:34:14.480 | Right.

01:34:15.480 | Prior to the other question was simply one of the things that I was, why I asked about

01:34:22.320 | how much you've invested is I look at investing in kids and having done a good bit of formal

01:34:27.680 | financial planning, I oftentimes am working with a client and they're working on their

01:34:31.600 | estate plan and I'm looking at them and they're saying, "Joshua, how do I transfer along

01:34:35.940 | this million dollars that I want to leave behind to my kids?"

01:34:39.160 | Or we're working on, again, college is a common thing.

01:34:41.800 | And I've often looked at that and I've thought to myself, "A million dollars is nice, but

01:34:47.360 | if you've done a good job," and what I mean by good job is if your child is financially

01:34:53.440 | effective, by the time the parent dies at, what, 18 years old and the child is 50, is

01:34:59.400 | an extra million dollars going to make that big of a difference in the 50-year-old's life?

01:35:04.120 | Sometimes it is, especially if you haven't done a good job and your child is financially

01:35:07.320 | irresponsible.

01:35:08.320 | Right.

01:35:09.320 | And I think for people who's financially irresponsible, they probably pretty much have things set.

01:35:12.560 | They're not going to change.

01:35:13.560 | The average 50-year-old, at least that I've worked with, that's all of a sudden inherited

01:35:17.400 | a half a million bucks from their parents, they don't really change anything.

01:35:21.200 | I mean, maybe they buy a fancy red car because they know it would have made their parents

01:35:24.840 | happy to buy a fancy red car.

01:35:26.400 | But inheriting a half a million or a million bucks doesn't really make any difference to

01:35:30.640 | their life.

01:35:31.920 | And I think, did you invest in your child when they were young?

01:35:35.680 | And so, as some people's virtual financial advisor, I guess, here on the show, I hereby

01:35:41.440 | give you permission to not worry so much about the financial estate that you leave behind

01:35:47.680 | at your death and to invest in your children when they're young.

01:35:51.040 | And if that investment means switching from a job where you're working out of the house

01:35:55.120 | to where you're working in the house, so you can take your computer with you to the local

01:35:58.840 | maker's shop to help where your child needs to spend time, they're building a wooden knife

01:36:04.440 | handle, or whether it means taking a year off and not saving for retirement so that

01:36:09.520 | you can expose your children to traveling to 15 countries all around the world in 15

01:36:14.600 | months, or whatever the cost is, if it's the cost of time for one parent to stay home so

01:36:19.800 | that you can educate your kids at home, so instead of spending eight hours a day in a

01:36:25.240 | formal thing, you can spend four hours a day taking care of academic stuff and six hours

01:36:29.880 | a day of working on talent development.

01:36:32.680 | I hereby give you permission to spend the money now while your kids are young, because

01:36:37.760 | that's going to make a much bigger difference to where your 50-year-old child is, rather

01:36:42.840 | than them inheriting a million bucks because you worked in slaves so that you could save

01:36:46.600 | the million dollars in your 401(k).

01:36:48.960 | Money is only good to buy the thing, money is utterly pointless except for the things

01:36:54.920 | that it can buy.

01:36:56.480 | And when your child is young, you have a small window of time over that, I don't know, 12

01:37:01.680 | to 20 years, I guess, you have a small window of time to make a dramatic difference in where

01:37:07.240 | they wind up long-term.

01:37:09.440 | Spend the money there, and chances are you won't need to leave the million dollars behind

01:37:14.600 | at the end, and if you do, it's not going to wreck their life.

01:37:17.760 | So I give you permission to put that very high on your financial plan of spending the

01:37:23.280 | money now while it actually does some good, and then while you're alive and you can enjoy

01:37:27.260 | watching it do the good instead of wondering if it did any good after you were dead and

01:37:32.400 | gone.

01:37:34.560 | So that would be my encouragement.

01:37:37.720 | Any last words that you have?

01:37:38.800 | Tell us about your website, 10k2talent, and then you have a book, the book is for sale

01:37:43.000 | there, right?

01:37:44.800 | So tell us about that and who it would be a good fit for and who it wouldn't be a good

01:37:47.820 | fit for.

01:37:48.820 | Yeah, my website is 10k2talent, so one zero K like kilo, that's short for 10,000, so it's

01:37:58.440 | 10K and then 2TALENT, T-A-L-E-N-T dot com, go there, and I have lots of blog posts, tips

01:38:06.600 | on how to get started, and I actually explain the basic principle out there.

01:38:10.040 | I also have the e-guide that I sell, I have a coaching course that can help parents go

01:38:15.240 | through that.

01:38:16.760 | I have another course that teaches people how to use a blog to showcase their child's

01:38:21.960 | talent, like a living portfolio that you build over time.

01:38:25.760 | And actually if your listeners are interested, for the next 30 days, if they just want to

01:38:30.560 | email me, I'll send them the free guide.

01:38:32.400 | I'd be glad to do that.

01:38:34.160 | They email me at talentcoach@10k2talent.com and just tell me, you heard me on Joshua's

01:38:48.640 | interview, and I'll send you the guide, it's a PDF guide, and you can work through it.

01:38:54.600 | It's basically a worksheet that you can go through and it's easy to understand.

01:38:59.080 | Emotionally it might be challenging as you work through it, especially when you look

01:39:03.600 | through your family goals, but it's very easy to do.

01:39:06.400 | I think if people come away with just one idea from it, it'll be worth reading.

01:39:09.800 | That's great.

01:39:10.800 | Man, I appreciate you doing that.

01:39:12.280 | That'll be an awesome resource for people.

01:39:15.640 | So you can email Jonathan at talentcoach@10k2talent.com and then also I'll put links to your site

01:39:20.440 | and then to your son's site, it's actually in the show notes.

01:39:22.440 | I did want to correct, because I think you misspelled it earlier, it's scarabcoder.com.

01:39:26.480 | Oh, thank you.

01:39:27.480 | You said scarabcoder.com.

01:39:28.480 | Thank you.

01:39:29.480 | It's scarabcoder.com.

01:39:30.480 | Thank you.

01:39:31.480 | So that's for your younger son.

01:39:35.920 | So what an awesome resource.

01:39:37.320 | So if you want this in the 30 days, you'll see the date, whatever the date is that this

01:39:41.320 | goes live, 30 days out from that, there'll be an option.

01:39:44.360 | If not, just go by the site.

01:39:45.960 | If you're listening to this after 30 days, just go by 10k2talent and you can buy the

01:39:50.440 | guide if you're interested.

01:39:51.440 | I've got a copy of it here and it looks like a really cool resource.

01:39:55.000 | Not quite there with my one-year-old son.

01:39:56.680 | He's not quite working on his bladesmithing skills yet, but I'll give him two years.

01:40:01.960 | Yeah, don't give him a blade yet.

01:40:05.320 | Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show.

01:40:07.760 | I really, really appreciate it.

01:40:09.080 | This has been great.

01:40:10.080 | Thank you.

01:40:11.080 | I enjoyed this.

01:40:12.080 | Isn't that awesome?

01:40:15.080 | Do you have some ideas of some things that you can do with your children, even in your

01:40:19.560 | own life?

01:40:20.560 | I think about this for myself.

01:40:22.480 | What are the talents that I can identify and develop?

01:40:25.640 | I hope you really enjoyed that and I hope you learned a lot.

01:40:28.960 | Make sure to take Jonathan up on his generous offer to take a look at his course.

01:40:35.920 | I've taken a look at it myself.

01:40:37.840 | My child is a little bit young at this point, but it's in my resource file for organizing

01:40:43.600 | my thinking.

01:40:45.000 | I found it to be really useful.

01:40:46.320 | I know Jonathan is semi-obsessed with the topic of learning and developing and improving

01:40:51.360 | it.

01:40:52.360 | He's a talent coach at 10k2talent.com.

01:40:57.080 | Mention that you heard it on Joshua's show on Radical Personal Finance and he will hook

01:41:03.600 | you up with a copy of that course.

01:41:06.680 | That's it for today's show.

01:41:07.680 | If you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe.

01:41:10.840 | Subscribe on iTunes or on Stitcher.

01:41:12.080 | If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can email me joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com

01:41:16.960 | or on Twitter @radicalpf, Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

01:41:25.520 | If you'd like to support the show, I would be thrilled if you would consider becoming

01:41:29.360 | a member of the Irregulars program.

01:41:32.000 | That's the membership program that I have designed to allow you to support the show

01:41:37.480 | but get a ton of value in exchange for your support even beyond just the value that you

01:41:46.640 | receive listening to the show.

01:41:48.160 | Details can be found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/membership.

01:41:50.160 | I'm getting ready to launch a members only podcast that's going to have some of the

01:41:55.400 | back story on the show.

01:41:56.560 | I'm going to share with you a lot of what I'm learning as I create the show and many

01:42:00.040 | of you would like to do something similar to what I'm doing and I haven't been able

01:42:03.040 | to find the kind of resource that I would like to find so I'm going to create it.

01:42:06.920 | Check that out.

01:42:07.920 | Thank you to those of you who are leaving reviews on iTunes or Stitcher.

01:42:11.600 | I've got the last one here in the iTunes reviews, the most recent that I haven't read

01:42:14.920 | on the show.

01:42:16.120 | So today's review comes from Dee and Dee says, "Practical road to financial freedom.

01:42:22.000 | Joshua's passionate and excellent in-depth discussion, fascinating and inspiring interviews.

01:42:26.760 | I consider myself fairly well versed in financial topics and I am still learning something daily

01:42:31.440 | from Joshua's podcast."

01:42:33.240 | Thank you, Dee.

01:42:34.240 | I appreciate it.

01:42:35.240 | That's the last review on iTunes.

01:42:36.240 | I'm going to switch to Stitcher reviews now.

01:42:38.380 | If you wouldn't mind, if you haven't done it already, I'd be thrilled if you would

01:42:40.640 | leave a review for the show on iTunes or on Stitcher.

01:42:43.500 | That would help a ton and make sure to subscribe on either of those devices.

01:42:46.800 | I'm working right now on a new app for the show so on any device it will work and you'll

01:42:50.400 | be able to have direct access to the show with the new app once I get it launched.

01:42:54.320 | Thanks so much for listening.

01:42:55.320 | Be back with you tomorrow.

01:42:56.320 | [Music]

01:43:06.320 | [Music]

01:43:29.320 | Thank you for listening to today's show.

01:43:31.680 | This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment.

01:43:39.680 | Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything

01:43:45.980 | about you.

01:43:47.700 | This show is not, and is not intended to be any form of financial advice.

01:43:55.040 | Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and

01:44:03.440 | trustworthy and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific

01:44:09.480 | needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

01:44:16.280 | Hold them accountable for your results.

01:44:19.160 | I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person

01:44:24.160 | and I make mistakes.

01:44:25.720 | If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so

01:44:30.320 | we can all learn together.

01:44:32.680 | Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

01:44:35.320 | The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions

01:44:39.560 | old and new.

01:44:40.800 | Whether you're making a traditional roasted turkey or spicy turkey tacos, your go-to shrimp

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01:44:55.000 | We've locked in low prices to help you save big store wide.

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RPF0115-Jonathan_Harris_Interview