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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Have you ever wondered what your talents and abilities might be? And wondered, "Okay, so now that I've found some talents and abilities, how do I develop them?" Or even better, have you ever wished that you had been able to discover your talents and abilities and interests at an earlier age?

I know that I have. And today, my guest is an expert at bringing out talent, especially talent, in young men and women. How can you discover and develop your child's talent? ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and I'm your host. Today is Tuesday, December 9, 2014.

Today, I'm going to share with you an interview with Jonathan Harris, founder of the website 10K2Talent. We're going to talk about how the process of talent discovery and talent development is a fundamental process for launching an independent young adult. ♪ I was thrilled when my guest today accepted my invitation, because this is a subject that I think a lot about.

And I think this is, for any parent or for any concerned uncle or aunt even, I think this is a subject that has a lot of application. And we're going to get very quickly to the interview here. But I want to give you about two minutes of background on this interview and also on this series, of this education series.

When I set out to essentially cover what in my mind I'm trying to create, which is a comprehensive curriculum of financial planning, I'm trying to make it as comprehensive as possible, there are many subjects and topics and things that I could cover. And in my mind, it's probably infinite, because even if I could get to the end of all of the topics that I'd like to cover, the law would change and I'd have to cover them again.

But I decided to pick the one that I think I have the best possibility of actually being able to get to the bottom of. And that's essentially what in financial planning we talk about college. I think of it as children and the financial questions and issues surrounding young men and women, children.

And so essentially what I'm trying to do from my own peace of mind is develop a comprehensive curriculum for you and for me. And there is a bit of self-serving motivation here, is that I'm obviously in a phase of life, I have a one-year-old son, as you've heard me say at least probably 50 times on the show.

And so I'm kind of thinking these things through for myself, but I'm also trying to create a bunch of episodes that can stand alone, so I can essentially be done with it. And so in my mind, there are a couple of stages of that. There's, I mentioned about early childhood, there's what do we do with education at a younger age, then there's the financial aspect, you know, do we do government education systems, do we do home education systems, what do we do, how do we pay for that?

That's why I've done so many shows on education. I'm trying to wrap up college and college funding. That's why I did the show on the Coverdell Educational Savings Accounts. I've got about a dozen more topics that I need to do in-depth like that on qualified tuition programs, student loans, student loans interest, student loan details, consolidation, some of those questions I get a lot of times.

I need to do some shows on scholarships, fellowships, grants, on opportunity credits, lifetime learning credits. I need to do some shows on educational savings bonds. So there's some specific financial planning topics that I need to talk about. But essentially, in my mind, I've got about these 20 to 30 to maybe 40 different shows that are building to create a comprehensive curriculum.

Then hopefully, I'm going to be done with talking about kids' education and kids' college and that. And how I'm doing some of these shows is with interview shows like today. I'm integrating an interview show like today into that financial technical aspect. Because ultimately, when people talk about, "Oh, I want to pay for college," what they often mean is, "I want my child to have a skill and a talent and an ability with which they can earn a living wage in the marketplace." Those two things are not necessarily synonymous.

So the technical details of financing college are important, but also the question of how do you develop talent, skill, ability, knowledge, and teach that. That's very important. So if you feel like there's been a concentration on the show recently on education topics, it's because there has been. And I really want to finish out the education topic.

And what I'm trying to do is sprinkle in and bring a real variety to the shows each day, have a little bit different, not do four shows in a week on education, but I'm trying to work through with a heavy focus on education. Because I think it's one of the few topics that can get through the most quickly as far as the curriculum, the outline that's in my head.

When I get to the technical aspects of investment planning, that's at least 50 shows right there and probably more. So I hope you're enjoying that. But I hope you're enjoying that. Today, this is not a show about home education. This is a show about talent development. And if you have children, I would commend to you that this is ultimately one of the major things that you are looking to do with your children is help them discover and develop their talents.

And I think if we can understand this, we can set them up in so many ways for a lifetime of financial success. Because guess what? You know those charts, those fancy compound interest charts you read at times that talk about how if you start investing at the age of 16 and you quit at 24, you're a multimillionaire at the age of 70?

True. They're true. If you do it well, they are true. But the key is, do you have any money at 16 to do that with? And I think that with the content of today's show, you can help your children have some money and a business and an understanding of what their talents are and how to exercise them in the marketplace.

Here's Jonathan. So Jonathan, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. Thank you, Joshua. Thanks for having me. I'm very interested in our topic of conversation today. And real quick, I want to have you introduce yourself and share your background. But I want to connect our topic of conversation to personal finance, which is what the show is about.

We're primarily going to talk today about developing talent in children and different ways to do that. And sometimes I have feedback sometimes from the audience when I venture into things that aren't specifically, how does a Roth IRA work as far as why do I do that? Well, the reason I do it is because personal finance and financial planning is far more than any technical detail about money.

And what I've learned working as a financial planner, that money is only good for one thing. It's to fund the goals that people have of life. Well, in a financial planner's office, often children are a big deal. And this usually comes in to how do I pay for my kids' college?

Sometimes it comes in to how do I pay for my kids' private school? And sometimes it comes in to how do I leave an inheritance for my kids? Or how do I make sure I'm not a burden on my kids in their old age? And oftentimes I feel there are entire sections of that conversation that are missing when we just focus on those technical aspects of financial planning.

And so clearly this is a subject of personal interest to me. I have a one-year-old son, but I also want to talk about it from a larger perspective because most of us have children, will have children, have had children, know people that have children, and are concerned in some regard with our children's future, both our individual children and then our children as a society.

So with that centering of the conversation, Jonathan, I'd love you to share a little bit about your background and introduce your website and how did you wind up, what was your personal journey to wind up talking about developing talent in children? Yes, well, my personal profile right now is that I do have children at home and I have eight children and the oldest is just about to turn 17, so he's 16 right now.

And I have children all the way down to the ages of three. My youngest is a daughter, so I've got six boys and two daughters. And what happened was a few years ago, I'm heavily involved, we homeschool, so I am personally also heavily involved in the homeschooling decisions and in certain aspects of it.

My wife shares some of that responsibility with me and I enjoy it. And so I started experimenting with some ideas and for making a bigger purpose to our education. And in the process of doing that, I was so excited with the results that we were getting that I decided I better write this down on a blog somewhere to share because I know that two, three years from now, I'd have a hard time remembering the fits and starts when you're getting off the ground.

I so wanted to share this with other people. So that's a big thing. Because a lot of times people, you see results and then the typical answer is, "Oh, you just must be lucky," which I know burns people with so much work. No, I wasn't lucky. Yes, I did have a lot of blessings, but you're like, "I had to work this hard." Right.

And so you want to document it along the way so that people can learn from it. Right. So your children, okay, 17 to 3, and at what age did you start getting interested in this topic and what was the catalyst to your interest? Well, they probably started getting, by the time my oldest was 12, I think I was already seriously modifying things in our schooling environment.

And the catalyst to it was that I had been laid off from Hewlett Packard. So I was in the corporate world, the project manager, and I worked from home, which was a fantastic blessing back then. And I could see the layoffs coming. Simply, the market had frothed up, way too many people in the market.

Things were changing. This is, Apple was just starting to make its headway through all its tablets and stuff. So the market was changing all across the board. And long story short, we started another home business, which is now keeping us afloat and paying for the bills and doing a good job at it, my wife and I.

And I just took over a lot more of the schooling aspect on a day-to-day than I did before. So now I really had my hands in the pie and I loved it. And I should say, the humorous part is that when we did, in our home business, this is really my wife markets to a female market, and I thought, "Hey, I could put my project management skills to work and I could communicate directly with all these women, giving them directions and stuff." It does not translate.

My wife says, "You cannot say that." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" So we decided that we better partition the responsibilities a little more clearly. - Did you set up the home-based business to facilitate your being involved with the kids' education, or did it just seem to be a happy accident?

Was it intentional or accidental? - Well, the home business was part of an overall desire to start our own business. And in that context was to be able to get their kids involved in the business because we wanted them to have a much more entrepreneurial spirit. But it was accidental in the sense that we didn't know exactly how this was going to work out this way, let's put it that way.

The timing of the layoffs and so forth, those were all catalysts, but the desires were there. - Yeah, that's been similar for me, at least, is I've had a desire, and it's one of those generalized desires. When I sit down and kind of lay out my vision for my family and my plan, one of the things that I've wanted to do is to be very involved in my children's lives.

And one of the things that discouraged me about the traditional way that financial planning was done is that it's a very professional environment. It would probably be hard for me to imagine me bringing my six or seven-year-old daughter with me to a confidential meeting with a client. Who knows?

It's just not the kind of environment that that's easily focused on. But I didn't want my wife to have to bear all the responsibility of leading the educational charge, so I've been working for years to try to figure out how do I either get my business in such a way that it's not going to require me 60 hours a week to do that so I have more time away from the office, or what it's looking like now is I'm much more able to pursue a business out of the house where I'm more able to integrate my family together.

And I see, even with my current venture here with this show and then other ideas that I'm working on, I see one of the primary benefits of them is to be able to use my business as a way to help my children develop skills and talents and abilities. And to me, one of the issues that I have with the mainstream approach to education is that it seems to me, just from observation, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but it seems to me that education all takes place in an artificial environment, in a world where everything is essentially constructed in advance and you're just trying to get the right answer.

I think as an example, I think how many high school chemistry experiments are actually experiments? Usually, the chemistry teacher is often saying, "The chemistry teacher knows what's going to happen. It's all set up and we're doing an experiment," so-called, "but it's not an experiment. We already know what's going to happen.

An experiment would be let's start mixing things together and see what happens." Well, obviously, you can't do that because it's dangerous, but the point is how do you learn except you try things? And the biggest problem I have with that, especially for children, is that it causes, instead of conditioning for a love and a joy of trying things, some of which seem to work and some of which don't, but that all things are successful because you tried them, it's just that sometimes the results weren't results that you wanted.

It develops this fear of failure and then this fear of failure seems to come back. So I look at it and I say, "How can I create real-world scenarios such as, 'Hey, I need to redesign my … My one-year-old son is not going to redesign my website, but I see no reason why my 11-year-old son can't redesign my website if he's interested.' Or if we have other children, I need some photography done.

Well, why can't my son or daughter use that as an opportunity to practice their skills?" And then they're actually learning with me, contributing to the family business, knowing that what they do counts instead of being in this artificial environment where it's all fake and it doesn't matter except a bunch of grades.

>>Rick: Right. And you mentioned a little bit earlier the structural environment with the experiments and the chemistry. And I think that's one of the problems. And ironically, I think the problem is simply because our society from a material business, entrepreneurial point of view, has really progressed in general. And that's exactly what's happened.

You have this abundance of knowledge, of data out there, of facts, good stuff. And it just keeps pouring out and pouring out. And you have a structure of education that I think, honestly, is very good at establishing the basics. If you want to learn how to read and write, it's been done hundreds and thousands of times.

And despite all the problems that people have with maybe some slight mental handicaps or some techniques, at the end of the road, everybody is pretty much reading and writing. And so it's very systematized. And then as you go up the grades, you start delving into, like you say, this chemistry.

The first people who got around, who got to read the books-- in fact, I was reading an autobiography by someone-- he says, when I was a kid, I got to play around blowing up stuff in the labs. Well, that's right. And now everything's been systematized in that area. And there's no more joy.

That's why you never see anybody write about it. And so I think that as part of the issue is that the market, and as much as I criticize the educational system in general, has been very, very effective. The problem is that the parents are still locked in to that mode that this formal, one-size-fits-all education is going to work for their child.

And so in the beginning-- and that's why I think the differences start-- is in the beginning, you have a lot of nurturing with the children, which is absolutely necessary. It's the classic gender difference between mom and dad, who mom says, "Don't climb that tree. You're going to get hurt and fall out." And dad says, "Let him climb the tree.

See how far he can go." You get that tension. And you know what? It is true sometimes that little child should not be climbing up that tree, because bad things do happen at that age. But at some point, you need to transition over. And I think that's where dads have a more instinctive comfort level and know how far to take it.

And that's exactly what happens with education. You have those phases. And if you don't understand that you're phasing into a different area and type of learning for your child, then you can get stuck. And I think, honestly, it starts way sooner than what people think. And around the age of 12, it's probably hormonal-based and so forth.

I think that's when things really need to switch from a more nurturing, follow-step-by-step to a much more exploratory, a much more adventurous, decisive attack at the learning world. I'm going to come back to that age of 12, because I've been working hard to develop my vision. And I want to come back and hit on that.

But before there, I'd love for you to share a little bit. So you've got all these kids. You've got eight kids on this broad range of time horizon. I understand that you desire to be humble. It's always tough for a parent to brag on their kids. But lay that aside for a moment.

And what are the types of things that your children at this point are doing that is maybe different? And what are some examples? What's the output of that? And share with us the real details. And feel free to share the struggles, but don't be too humble with it. Well, right now, as we're doing this interview, my son is in Sacramento, and that's about two and a half, actually three hours drive from where we live in California.

So we're way up on the north end of California. And he's down there. He stayed over a couple of nights with some relatives. But he has a pain project that he's doing with his drone equipment. He has a camera on there where he does aerial photography. And he's doing a big construction project.

He has teamed up with an engineering team that he met here, where he did one project for them. And they're doing a big project in the downtown area of Sacramento, which is the capital of California. And this is part of his entrepreneurial talent building that we've been working on.

And so that right now... How old is he? He's 16. Okay, wow. Just about 17. That's great. Yeah. So it's been very exciting for him. And in fact, in the beginning, we had him much more involved in, and he still is, in the mechanics of our home business. But I didn't share that too much, because a lot of that stuff is just confidential to our own business, and people don't need to know.

And so he was not as much in the limelight. But now he's bursting out into the limelight, which we were talking about earlier. People think, "Oh my goodness, he was born like that." And I'm like, "No, he wasn't." There's a lot of planning in the background from the parent's perspective to be able to make that happen.

So he has a business then where he's doing aerial videography using drones, and then he's going to take that. And will he follow that all the way through? Is he having a video editing business where he's producing final video products or just raw footage? What's his business? Right now, his business is to be able to...

The end product is you get two to three minutes of video that people would use for their customers, or they would use it to pitch for their next big project. So they would come to a customer and say, "Look at the work we've done." And of course, these are projects that have a special advantage if they're seen from the air.

So if you'll do commercial property, for example, where you can show all the access points, you can see where the property is laid out in relationship to the city and so forth. So you might do something like a big gas company that has trucks coming and going. They want to see where the train tracks are and the freeways and so forth.

And so they'll want an aerial view of the property in addition to just the financial data. And then that will be sent to investors, which are typically in another state, bankers, insurance agents. Everybody who wants a piece of this wants that visual confirmation that the commercial property is in a viable spot.

I look at that business idea and I just say, "That is a business idea that there's so much room for." The interesting thing is that if he has the technical skill to create a quality product, there's no difference between him at 16 years old being able to do it versus somebody else at 36 years old.

Absolutely. And he can earn at 16 years old, assuming he's proficient and good at it, he could earn an adult's wage doing that. I had a client here in South Florida who was a photographer, but his only business was photographing large, fancy houses for upper-end real estate. So a lot of houses on Palm Beach, a lot of waterfront property, things like that.

And they would be staged for sale. But one of the things that set him apart is he was doing aerial photography. This was before drones came out. I don't know if he still does this, but in his day he would use a balloon and he would float the camera up with kind of like a small weather balloon and he would do this from the water.

So he would go out in a kayak with the balloon tied to it and he would be able to shoot pictures. He would take pictures of the house so you get this nice aerial photograph, but you had no need to rent a helicopter for whatever that cost to get these aerial photographs.

And lots of people, he would sell these to real estate agents. He would also just go out and take pictures of people's houses and then he would offer them to people. He would go out from a public space, take a beautiful picture of somebody's mansion, and then offer it to them, offer them a print, and many times people would buy it.

And he just created this business, created a marketing with a minimum amount of equipment, and he was making a very nice income. Your 16-year-old son, there's no barrier to entry in that market because it's purely based upon his skill and talent as compared to an adult. What a cool story.

Yeah, it is. And to get back, my basic premise is that you can get your children to start developing some kind of talent that brings value to other people at an early age. But, and here's the big thing where people get normally tripped up about it, is when you're talking about developing talent, it's not a static thing that you're developing.

In other words, I didn't wake up my son, "Hey, son, you're 12 years old now. I know what your talent is. It's videography with drones." Well, let me tell you what, when he was 12, drones weren't even out there from a commercial, accessible point of view like they are right now.

So that's the one thing that really, I try to encourage people, and sometimes I try to knock some heads together too, it's like, "Look, your child wasn't born genetically to fly a drone." And 10 years from now, who knows how that's going to morph. And so what I tell people to do is you're looking in your environment, look around, you look for your hidden assets in your family.

There's so much. You have so many things on hand. You have so many blessings, some unique quirkiness in your family that defines you. And instead of seeing it as, "Oh, whatever. Okay, let me go see if I can go and enroll him in soccer to discover his talent," because people are still genetically looking for that genetic predisposition to be born for soccer or some other, it's always some kind of mass group sport, which has its place, but not in the way most people think.

And so I want people to see that when you're looking at developing talent in someone's life, you're taking what you have, which is very spiritual too, in a way, because you look at, in the Bible, one of the famous passages, which is where we get the word "talent" from in this context, is the parable of the talents, which of course was money and coins.

And it's the parable of the master that leaves and gives everyone various amounts of cash - talent. And he goes on this long trip, and of course this whole parable is making a spiritual point, but I think the principles are just fascinating here, is that when he comes back, he goes through the line of the servants, the stewards that worked with the money, some multiplied it a hundred times, some did ten times, various degrees, then he comes down to the last guy, which is the whole point of this parable, and the guy says, "You know what?

I know you're such a tough guy, I didn't want to mess it up, I didn't want to take what I have and try to multiply it and take risk." He's specifically talking about this, "I didn't want to take any risk, I didn't want to multiply it because I knew you're such a tough guy, you'd probably beat up on me if I failed a little bit," and of course in the parable, the master just goes off on him and says, "You know what?

You didn't even try, so since you think I'm such a tough guy, I'm going to give you a taste of what it's like," and so forth. And so in that parable, I think we find something really fascinating. One, there's acknowledgement that people are sometimes blessed in life with various degrees of advantages, and you can define them in any number of ways, money, you're super smart when you were born, you've got good looks, whatever it is, you've got friends in high places, and those are all stuff that you get started off and you didn't particularly earn.

But that's only part of the story, and this is again where most people miss it. You've got to be working it, so no matter what it is, you're expected to work it. I think it's a spiritual principle in addition to a material principle. You have to multiply it and work it, and that really has an impact about it in your educational life when you apply it to your children.

So you're not looking, you're not walking around and saying, "Hey, where's that treasure trove? I'm going to trip over it, here's the gold in the casket from my kid. Oh, there he is, a drone videographer. Oh, there he is, a doctor." You have certain assets in your environment. You've got to know what they are, and then you've got to take risks, and you've got to multiply it.

And that's really a different approach than a scene as you're just filling up your son or your daughter with a certain amount of knowledge or data, which is kind of how you approach normally an educational system. What about your other children? What are some examples of some of the things that they're doing to develop their talents?

Well, I have a 15-year-old, and he has been working on some bladesmithing projects of his own. How cool is that? Like old-fashioned blacksmithing of making knives by hand? What do you mean? Yeah, they call that bladesmithing now to differentiate that from blacksmithing, but basically you're playing around with the properties of metal in order to give them particular qualities of flexibility but also great sharpness.

So in the last few years, what's happened is that they've been able to understand how to manipulate metals at the molecular level a lot more. And you can do it in your home if you know what the techniques are. And so he's been going on to online forums, closed forums for professional bladesmiths, and getting ideas from them, practicing in his garage.

We've got a little setup for him. I've told him how to do that. And then just recently we came back from a meetup in California for bladesmiths. I think he was the only teenager there. And he just loved that. But that's again an example where when we started off, we live in an area where there's a lot of leftover folklore and people have a memory of the gold rush here.

Not that they were in it, but their grandparents are, and they know these locations. And so we have clubs, what we call gem clubs, where there's tons and tons of equipment for grinding stones and people know where things are. So we started there. That's a local asset, a local talent that we had.

And we started going there and things evolved and progressed from there to the point where we started working more with metals because there was a lot of grinding and understanding properties. Then we went to jewelry and then from there we went into more of the metalsmithing and still making some progress there.

So that was, we took something that we had in our environment, something we had access to, something we could afford, and then we climbed up the ranks and took advantage of new opportunities until he is where he is now. Wow. How cool is that? That's awesome. Yeah, it really is.

It really is nifty. I have a friend who's into that. He's doing the same kind of thing. He built himself a forge and he does it in his garage and took a leaf spring from a car and banged it into a knife and just totally, he was showing me how he did it and I was fascinated.

I had no idea that you could change the grain of the metal and change the direction. What a cool thing. I'm just curious, and I don't think making money actually should be, I mean for a 15 year old, I don't think making money should be the arbiter of what you do, but I'm curious.

Has he made any money? Has he done anything associated where there's been any profit with this talent yet? No, no, not yet. In fact, that's something I'm working on with him. I'm not advocating that you should have to make money with your talent right away, though eventually yes. I'm putting him onto a lot more business books.

In fact, lately he's about halfway through, I think, what was it, Gerber's book on? E-Myth. E-Myth. He's loving it. Right. He's really getting it because he's also in the process of following these forums. He follows these big guys, which he totally admires. Every world has their experts and their gurus.

He can tell already, some of them are really, really good technically, but they fail on the business side. Another guy may be good technically, maybe not as good, but succeeding with a vengeance. He's able to provide for his family. They're doing really well financially, and he can tell the difference.

So he's just so ripe for that information to think about when you're doing your technical skill like a bladesmith. A lot of these guys can get so wrapped up in the process itself that they forget that it's supposed to serve a purpose, basically a purpose for someone else. You have to find that balance in enjoying the craft, but also remembering you're always serving the public or serving someone with your craft.

So it's important that it's not just the object you're bringing to them, but it's done on their time, their schedule, their needs, their aesthetics, whatever other concerns that they have. So part of the talent development, like my firstborn, was really understanding that you're serving people with your skill set, and you develop that early on.

In the process of serving, you're actually modifying your talent, which is an interesting thing, so it's like a feedback loop that you've got going. So far you've mentioned two of your boys. Do they keep blogs on their work? Do they chronicle their...do they have websites? Do they chronicle what they're learning?

Yes. My oldest one, he's one called ReddingDrone.com. So Redding, R-E-D-D-I-N-G, dot drone dot com. And Redding is the biggest town or city that we have near us, so he used that for SEO search engine and he puts his videos that he's done up there as a portfolio for his customers to check out.

The thing that I see about it, and this is one of my major concerns with how we approach education and schooling, is I think that what we get paid for is the application of knowledge and skills to a specific problem that solves a customer's need. That's how I think about it.

So financial planning, for example, what I get paid for as a financial planner is to apply knowledge about technical knowledge, about the law, about the tax code, about certain investment and insurance products. And then so I get to apply that knowledge, then I apply the skill of understanding what a client is looking for, what their actual goals are, and then to be able to apply all of that accumulated knowledge to a specific scenario.

And so what I actually get paid for is not showing up and working and showing up to an office. I get paid for applying skill and knowledge to a specific scenario such that it helps somebody and it helps them more, then they value the help more than it costs them to have that.

My concern with focusing solely on academic knowledge is that academic knowledge is often not applied or there's not an easy path where the person can see how to apply it. But with learning skills and knowledge through a specific interest or talent, I see that as being able to develop marketing, just a wealth, a broad array of skills.

So if your son has a website, Reading Drone, he has to learn how to make a website, write copy, take pictures, take video, figure out what's compelling marketing. He has a real life project to which he can apply all those skills. And whether he does this for another six months or another six years doesn't matter.

Those skills are many and they're varied and they can be applied to new ventures. Absolutely. And in fact, which I forgot to mention here, Caleb was my second one. So my first one, my first son, carries the same name I do, Jonathan. And my second one, Caleb, is also writing an e-guide called The Broke Bladesmith.

So he got onto one of the programs that we bought for adults in the marketing world where they say, "Hey, if you want to break into a field, one good way to do it is write it from the perspective of a beginner because you're the expert. There's other people just behind you that need that information." And it's exactly it.

That's my son got in there. There's a lot of information for experts, but nothing that was broken down to his level. So he's in the process, he's about two-thirds of the way done of writing that. And the inspiration for him to write that in part was because of my third son, who's 13.

And when he was, I think 11, I'm getting confused on the age, but 11 or 12, he wrote two books on Amazon and has been making cash off of this. And yes, and so he's my, people can check that out. He loves getting mail. He has a website called scarabcoder.com, so scarab, S-C-A-R-A-B-E-R, coder, C-O-D-E-R, dot com.

And you can check him out there. And he's connected with people around the world. In fact, with him, he's really into programming. He loves computer stuff. And I don't know, when he was 10 or 11, I had this old programming book on my bookshelf that I had from years ago, and he said, "Why don't you take a look at this?" And so he started taking a look at it.

Check on him a couple of days later. And he says, "Well, you know, so-and-so told me that I should try it this way." "Who are you talking about?" He had email, which we monitor at that age. And I'm like, "Who is that?" He says, "Well, you know, the author of that book." I'm like, "What, that guy?

He's a big guy in the world." "Oh yeah, he lives in Sweden now. He immigrated from the States to Sweden." And I'm like, "He wrote to me personally and gave me an updated version of the book." So he's having this correspondence directly with him, and then there's some other people where he was featured in some big conference in the UK on the screen as an example of what a young person can do with their information.

Now the interesting thing with all of this is that as much as I love my children, I wouldn't -- I don't think that, "Oh my goodness, these kids were born with incredible IQ. I'm just blown away by their initiative," and so forth. It's something we actually cultivate in the house.

And that's why I want to give people hope is that this type of greatness that people think of in terms of talent is actually something you cultivate and you spend a lot of time. And when it's at a young age, it does not depend so much on the children as it does on the parents.

And so if there's one thing I could tell parents is that if you wait for your children to discover that thing that turns them on, like you and I are both turned on by this passion of you sharing finance with the rest of the world and me for talent, this is late in our life.

What happens if we could have discovered something along those lines when we were 16 or 17? It just boggles the mind. But the only way kids can do this is with the help of their parents. Not that the parents are doing it for them, but their parents are creating a structure.

You talked about that chemistry issue. You're creating a structure to be able to explore and go down that road. And that's a big key component is that parents have a huge impact and they can do it without spending a lot of money. One of the things I'm so incredibly grateful for for my parents is that they did that for me.

They worked hard to expose me to lots of opportunities, to expose me to lots of things. Everything from on the one end art such as music, piano and singing and instruments. They were always willing to go and buy the instrument for their children that expressed an interest. So all of my family had instruments.

When I was a kid I had an opportunity to learn it. I hated it. And so I quit after a while. But now I've actually recently decided to start playing the piano again. But I have a foundation that even though I can't play anymore, it's coming back more quickly than if I had to start over today.

But all the way to the other extreme of building things. I did at one time leather work and all these. And then plus a wide range of diverse jobs which helped to give me a lot of confidence to where I felt a lot more confident in my own ability and my own knowledge and my ability to learn new things because I wasn't arriving fresh on the employment scene at the age of 22 years old having just graduated from college ready to learn for the first time.

I had already been through that process a couple of dozen times of starting new things, learning new skills, being instructed, learning how to be a good student, learning how to be taught and then learning how to provide value and help an employer be happy. And it just gave me not a false sense of self-confidence but a legitimate sense of confidence in who I was.

And for a young man, I mean that is an incredibly powerful gift that you can give a young man. Absolutely. And when I was documenting this, I had already had some thoughts of my own but then I started actively reading some of the popular books, well-written books on talent development.

You know, what is that elusive something that some people seem to be able to latch on to? A lot of good information out there from different angles, different perspectives. A lot of it is not contradictory at all. I think it's pretty clear. And obviously one of them that seems so obvious to people but still is misapplied in their own personal lives is that it takes time.

It takes time, lots of time to be able to be as good as you get. And this includes famous people. And so it's interesting because this comes up a lot in magazine or popular articles or biographies and systematically without fail, every person that can be considered great in their field really resents it whenever you start off with, "Well, you were probably born that way." And they come back with, "You don't understand.

My hands were bleeding every night for four years straight doing this physical activity." Or, "I read 20,000 books." And that's what I think most people don't seem to really grasp. They think that, "Okay, I'm going to put my kid in front of the piano. Huh, can they sing on pitch while playing the piano and within five hours?" And they're like, "Oh, it must not be their talent.

Let's move on to the next. Oh, let's do some woodworking. Oh, he cut himself. It must not be his talent." Because advanced woodworkers don't cut their fingers. And there's that merry-go-round that people go through. I think 80% of the people, parents, are in that category. They're looking to fall into talent.

You walk around and then worse, worse. My son seems to have a talent playing video games. So now they're cursed. Your child is blessed to be born a doctor. My son is cursed to be born a video game player. And you want to like, "You know what? Maybe it has something to do with more with the parents, how they're managing and structuring his time." But that's a delicate subject.

So it goes back again to the parents, to of course the children carry responsibility. But in the bigger picture, at a young age, it's the structure, the way you approach it, that can make a huge difference in your child's life. The 10,000-hour idea, which I assume that's what 10K to Talent is based upon.

Yes, yes, exactly. So it's very well popularized after Gladwell wrote his book, this idea that it takes a certain amount of hours. I mean, to me, it's such an important concept to grasp. And it's why the way that we approach a young person's time is such an important issue.

Two things that came to mind out of what you were saying. One is the idea that it does take time. I recently finished reading Josh Kaufman's book called The First 20 Hours. He's the one who wrote the book, Your Personal MBA, and curates the website personalmba.com. He wrote a book about how the first 20 hours make a huge difference.

And one thing I liked is that there's all this war about, "Well, you can find these life hacks. You can find a way to cheat the system." You can't find a way to cheat true expertise. Like a true master, there's no way to become a master. You can start at a different place, and you can have a much more effective way to learn, which I think is what, when you actually look at the literature, Josh Kaufman is very clear.

He says, "I can't become an expert," and one of the things he learned to play the ukulele, "I can't become to be an expert at playing the ukulele in 20 hours, but I can set myself up in such a way that I approach it in an intelligent way with a clear outcome so that 20 hours in, I can find out, 'Is this something that I want to pursue into the 10,000 hours to mastery, or is this something that I'm content with?'" And I think the challenge that parents face today, which is why I feel so strongly about home education, is that the first 15,000 hours of your child's life is essentially spoken for with pre-K through 12th grade education.

And if you look at the daily schedule of what that requires, then from, essentially, I'm going to say 7 a.m., whether school starts, here we have some schools that start at 7.30, whether it's 7 a.m. to call it conservatively 3 o'clock, every day is already spoken for for a child's time, plus after-school activities, which for many people, they find a lot of value in sports and the character development and the skills that come with sports, and then you have homework.

And so you have all of this time that is devoted to one skill, academic ability, where is there the time for a child to explore other talents and other opportunities? I don't see where it can even happen. And you're right. That is typically what does happen, and it's not systematic.

It's not too, because I think some parents, without adopting my method or understanding it, do have some instinct of that, and they will structure their family life and their educational life so that there is no such thing as that kind of idea of a runaway education, where basically you're consuming education for education's sake.

So you're not producing new knowledge, you're just consuming. So you read two Jane Austen books, well then ten Jane Austen books must be better. If they had 30 Jane Austen books, it must be even better, rather than you out there saying, "Maybe I should write something for the world or for my friends that's going to make an impact on them." So you've got to change your mindset from just consuming education, kind of like confusing - if you want to become a great chef, what are you doing?

You're not porking out on every possible food dish out there, going from restaurant to restaurant every day, every night. You think, "Well that's absurd, you're just consuming." A chef is producing. You see, that's a huge difference in the - of course you're tasting and you are consuming at some level, so it's absolutely necessary to consume.

But that's what's happened in the education world. There's like, there's a thousand different classes in math you can take, a thousand different classes in accounting. My goodness, history, politics, I mean your head couldn't explode. And so, and that's a sense of franticness that parents get, and I get that too sometimes.

I have to go back to the drawing board and say, "Okay, halt. Why are we doing this? I mean I know this course is fantastic, I know this guy is amazing, but how does this fit in the bigger picture for my children?" And so you have to go back and say, "Are we just consuming knowledge for knowledge's sake?

Or are we consuming it with an idea that we want to be able to produce and do something with this?" Not everything has an immediate purpose, and I totally understand that there is such a thing as you need to learn your alphabet first before you can write a book.

But still, there's a concept, you don't just consume, and that's what people feel. They feel so bloated on the education. Their kids are just slapped from one place to the other. So of course, here's the irony, is that then in order to counter that sense of constant feeling of being on a treadmill, then you throw them into these group activities where everybody's sort of brain dead to counter.

It's the same thing. You're in a dead-end job, you hate it, you come home, what do you do? You don't hit the books a lot of times, you just turn on the boob tube. And you go at it for hours. Yeah, exactly. And there's a place for some medication.

Sure, absolutely. But if that defines you, which I feel people, they don't feel like there's no way out, from K-12 has been defined for them, or they feel it has. And by default it will be if you don't take control. Right, absolutely. I want to go back to the age, you mentioned the age of 12, and I'm first just going to ask a question without any preamble, then I'm going to give you my idea, and I'm interested in your response as a father.

But how do you approach, with your three-year-old, how do you imagine with your son or daughter now that you have a little bit of hindsight, how do you imagine their education and talent developing in an age-appropriate way? Is it appropriate for your five-year-old that you're focusing on saying, "You need to start working on this talent," or are you trying to give raw material at that age?

What's the age-appropriateness of this? Well, the reason I, when I talk about, on my website, my selling point to people to come to my website and learn from me is I'm trying, I had to narrow it down, you know, talent is such a huge topic, and I'm not there to talk about teenage rebellion or that kind of stuff, I'm just focused on one topic, how do you get started at the first 100 hours?

And so one of the keys to starting the first 100 hours is the age issue. A lot of these techniques with talent can start young, they can start later, but I'm looking at it more from the optimum perspective. I use the age 12, not because all of a sudden at age 12 something clicks on, but around that age.

I think that physically, mentally, emotionally, that's when you see kids starting to chomp at the bit, you know? They start wanting a little more intellectual reasons, they've got the drive, they'll stay up till midnight, you know, they don't need their naps during the day. It's getting pretty clear cut.

And so at the age of 12 they can start focusing on something, and if they're excited about it, they will usually carry it through. You know, you do have some distraction. When you're younger, it's a lot more about mom and dad hugging you and holding you. Yes, you can make it through the next page, you can make it through the next exercise.

So their sense of affirmation really comes from that closeness of their parents in order to be able to keep going forward on something. Whereas when you get to the age of 12, I think most everybody can remember that, that's when girls can get a little sassy, guys can get a little dangerous, and I think it's that natural, good natural instinct to go out there and try something and find a uniqueness for themselves, but it has to be channeled.

And so I think a talent is a perfect fit. I have a working theory, and I'm interested in your feedback, and also I want you to share just what you're doing with your children, but I have a working theory that if we... So I read some material on basically childhood versus adulthood in historical cultures, and one of the things I learned when reading, I read some psychological papers and also just some different books and anecdotes about history.

One of the things I learned is that throughout history, in many if not most civilizations, if the civilization recognized even childhood, 'cause some civilizations didn't even recognize the concept of childhood, you're either a baby who required care or you were a person, and this idea of child versus adult, this artificial distinction didn't really exist.

It doesn't exist in some cultures, but in many cultures, there's a transition, there's a coming of age, and whether that's in the Jewish culture, we're probably most familiar with the Bar Mitzvah, the Bat Mitzvah at about 12. Many cultures have a rite of passage if it's a tribal culture in that early age.

In the Latin culture, it's certain things. Every culture seems to have this rite of passage, except in our US American culture, and in the US American context, we don't really have this. We extend out the age of adulthood to essentially 18, or maybe 21 seems to be our transition point.

But what I watch, I look and I say, if I think back to myself at 12, I was certainly entering that phase, we call it adolescence, I was entering that phase of desiring basically to say that my life matters. And if I have an outlet for that mattering, a way to productively use that, then I can be channeled.

If not, then I'll often act out in what society considers to be inappropriate ways, and that's why we have this fear of adolescence. My thinking is, if I could integrate this from an educational perspective, I don't know what your and your wife's philosophy is with regard to how you've approached the academic side of schooling, but I've wondered if the basic foundation of academics couldn't be basically settled by the age of 12.

Historically, we talk about a sixth grade education, eighth grade education, so and so famous American forefather only had a sixth grade education, but their sixth grade education was the equivalent of a college degree in today's world in many instances, not the depth of subject matter knowledge, but the basics of it.

And I've wondered if age 12 isn't a good place to transition from that intensively guided academic approach over to a more free thinking, follow your interests type of approach. My concern, there's a philosophy of unschooling, which is essentially child-led education. My concern with that is I don't think a child knows what they don't know or what they need to know at a young age, but that doesn't mean that at 16 necessarily I need to exert the same kind of control, so I've wondered if 12 couldn't be a good for my family.

We're going to focus on academics. I'm going to tell you, here's what are the things you need to do until 12, and then after 12 I'm much more of a guide and allowing you to follow your interests, and now I'm going to be that teacher, that guide who's been a little farther down the road to bring along the resources and the materials and the tools that are going to help you to really explore your interests in an appropriate way.

What do you think about my idea? Absolutely. I think you're totally right on. That's exactly it. And if you listen to most people when they talk about their childhood, when they've got no agenda to try to explain to you, when they look back on it, I think that's what everybody wished they had.

I mean, here's the typical thing. Girls, everybody, there are gender differences, and one of the gender differences typically with young teenage girls, what is it everybody's afraid of? It's either two extremes. Either they're discovering they're beautiful, everybody wants them, and then they're all over the place, no restraint. Or they're turned inward, exploring their emotions, almost suicidal.

There's that extreme, those extreme emotions. But when you look at people that you know in your wide circle of friends and so forth, and they have healthy teenage daughters, just to focus on that a bit, and I have a 13-year-old daughter, and they've got, they usually, the more I think about it, they have some kind of outlet for all that intense perception, is actually what it is, intense perception, which is why we love our wives, right?

Well, you know, our wives hopefully by then have gotten more under control. But they've got this perception, everybody talks about this woman's intuition, and I think that, as an example, at a young age there is all this intensity, and it can be channeled. And if it's not channeled, you can't make it go away.

And I think most people listening to this show will chuckle when I say, "I see a lot of old grandmas out there dressing their dogs as poodles, and it's usually when they have no grandchildren around." I think there are some things in our lives, and for men it's the same thing too, you can't turn it off, you can only misdirect it.

And I think that's something, you know, deep, and I think most people would agree with that, but if you actually really understand that, you need to embrace it, and then actively find something for your daughter or your son to really focus their energies in something positive. And it can't be a fake, by the way.

I hope this is one thing, a hobby is not the same thing as building a talent. Now there are some resemblances, and they can overlap, but it's not the same thing. A hobby is for your pure personal consumption. It's like writing in a diary for yourself, and then when you get older you hope no one finds it and you burn it.

That's for yourself, it's personal consumption, maybe there's some value at some level to it, versus writing letters to someone, or even better yet, writing encouraging letters to someone, or even writing a new story for your friends or a sibling, or writing on a blog even better about the progress of your talent.

That's producing, that's creative, and in one case you may actually be exacerbating your senses of, you know, worthlessness or exploring too much of your emotions, you don't have enough information, whereas in the other one you're focused on other people. Again, you're back to serving people in a very narrow and specific sense, and usually people find great personal self-worth in doing that.

I think it's a total good spiritual principle at work in people's lives. So if your child has a hobby, don't stay there. In fact, be very careful, because this hobby can become self-destructive, where they become so good at something, and then it dawns on them when they're 17 or 18 that no one really wants to hear them play the ukulele on a professional level, and they go, "Oh my goodness, I should have insert the blank, focus some of my energies down this path," and they feel betrayed.

So to clarify, my next question was going to be, how do you define talent? So in your mind, what I hear you saying is that a talent is something that you perhaps have an interest in, that you perhaps have an ability for, and that it's perceived in the marketplace as something that is valued in the marketplace.

Is that how you define talent, and how you're making this distinction between a hobby and a talent? Right. Right, that's exactly it. I mean, you can modify it a little bit. There are some talents that bring value to other people that maybe don't have a cash transaction value. Right.

So I can say like a Mother Teresa example, which is definitely bringing value to people, and people, you may not want to use the word talent, but it takes a certain skill set in order to get to that level of service, and that's what I mean by that. In other words, it's not about yourself.

It's not about, "Can I write 10,000 private diaries on myself?" It's more about, "Can I produce a book for other people to enjoy?" That's the dividing line. Now you've not talked much about natural ability, which is often how we think of talent. So-and-so, you're so talented. What role does natural ability play in this?

It plays a much smaller role than people think. You have to have a certain, and I'm not at all original in this, and I think all the books on talent that I've read said that natural ability plays a role only in the sense that if you're going to become a gymnast, you may have some hormonal issues at some point where your muscles are able to stretch out more, but beyond that, most of those things are the, you just need the basics.

It turns out that it's much more important to cultivate particular skills to an applied situation to make an impact. So they talk a lot about that, and I agree. I mean, I agree simply because I look around me. They found that IQ is not a hindrance, but neither is it really a guarantee that you're going to become great in your field.

You just might have a high IQ. So you can recite data points or you can do math formulas, but you're not bringing anything new to the world, and especially for men, to the marketplace. Yeah, that certainly lines up with my experience. I really don't. I'm sure that natural ability does play some role.

It seems hard for me to say that it plays no role, but many of the things that I consider myself to have an ability in, I can place the time, I mean, even this show, I feel like I'm in many ways, I'm inept at, still not very good at broadcasting, but I've had many people compliment me and say that it is natural, and I think to myself, "It's not natural." I was scared silly to talk to people.

I actually am an introvert, and I can remember the times in my childhood when I decided that being an introvert and being scared wasn't serving me. It wasn't helping me, and I forced myself to pretend I was differently until I could learn how to do something different. And then even with the ability to think things through and to speak and to articulate, I had an intention.

I wanted to learn to speak. I wanted to compose thoughts, and I joined Toastmasters. I've developed abilities. So it seems as though, and at this point, I am working hard on saying I need to develop ability to a much higher level because I feel as though I have a lot to learn, but the natural ability seems like the least important thing because I could recount, "Here was when I made this decision.

Here was when I practiced that. Here were the books that I read on this other subject. Here were the influences, the people that encouraged me. Here is who I modeled." So that seems to line up at least with my experience, however anecdotal. Yeah, and it should be encouraging to people because you don't have to think, "Oh my goodness, my child is born to be a concert pianist." And I'm like, "Okay, that's a death sentence for someone to be born a concert pianist." I had a friend who told me that one of the worst decisions he ever did was to get a music degree because everybody told him, "Oh, you look at him." It was dumb because first of all, he wanted to be able to support a family.

It was more important. Then he found out that if you really go down that road, most of it involves living in cheap motels traveling under the tour buses. You don't get to compose anything of unique for yourself, but not to anyone. He feels like it was such a big ripoff because had he been, and he partly takes the blame, had he been more thoughtful about where he was going with this, it could have turned out differently.

So he was super trained to do something very specialized that had no market value. Once or last, maybe you do, but very few people will willingly, on their own, go to town, "Hey, honey, what do you want to do on a Friday night?" "Oh, yeah, let's go listen to a piano concert in town." The only time you do is when you have to go see a relative or whatever.

And so why? Because if you really want to hear it, you just pop in the CD or turn on Pandora. I just do YouTube. It's better. I can see it. There you go. But it's not to say that that music is not good. It's just that it's been done.

The market is fulfilled. I think that's why we should be rejoiced. We should be happy. I mean, you don't want to have to--it's been done. People aren't demanding more. It's been done so well. And if those people from the past came back from the dead, I'm sure they would have packed concerts.

People would want to listen to them. It would just be exciting to see them. But usually people don't want another Beethoven again. Beethoven's been done. So it's not that you can't learn and so forth. It's just that you have to wrap your mind around it that you're not born with a specific job title.

Maybe that's the best way to say it. You're not born with a job title. You're born with certain abilities. You're born in a particular place and time. You're born in a particular family. You're born with certain advantages. Maybe your dad is wealthy enough that you can have two, three cars, a pickup truck and a cool-looking car convertible, whereas another person doesn't, but they live in the country.

You have all sorts of advantages and you have to look at it and say, "Okay, what can I combine together that's going to make it really interesting and get us started today?" The worst compliment that people think they're making, which to me is the thing I despise people saying to me, is many people have said, "Joshua, you're a born salesman." And that one, people are well-intentioned and I understand why they say it.

And so obviously I just say, "Thank you very much," and smile. But inside I'm saying, "When was the last time you saw a baby pop out and you said, 'Ah, look, here's little Richard. This little Richard is a born salesman.'" I think the other thing is that it feels, in a sense, I try very hard, because I've experienced that myself, I try very hard not to ever compliment people on natural ability, but to compliment people on hard work.

Because I think if you only knew, if you only knew how hard it is for me to, when I was in Outbound Sales, if you knew how hard it was to pick up the phone and face the fear of rejection, if you knew how hard it was to sit in the car outside of a prospective client's office and screw up your courage and say, "I'm going to go in there and I'm going to do it." Now with time it gets easier.

What happens is if there's this idea that somehow you're a born salesperson, then the new person getting in who's sitting there staring at their phone, and I remember the first time when I got into the insurance business, I remember the first time I had to make an outbound call to a friend of mine to say, "Hey, I'm in the insurance and investment business.

I'd like to talk to you." I stared at the phone for 20 minutes. I just scared to pick it up. And finally I said, "That's it. I'm going to do it." And I did it. And we diminish, I feel like we diminish people's hard work if we focus on natural ability and not on their personal self-development achievements, which is probably what they are more than anything else.

Absolutely. You say that, and every person that is great in a field, even the sales, I've listened to some of those guys. Every single one of them, I cannot think of one exception, has said they have worked their little behinds off getting to where they are. Now it does not mean, for example, if somebody had truly a speech impediment, a physical speech impediment, it might have been difficult for them to reach that.

Maybe it would have been offensive enough to people, difficult enough for people to ... No matter how to understand. So yeah, okay, there are some physical things. You may not be ... If you're born with a limp in your foot, you probably won't become an ultra marathon runner. Though sometimes that's amazing too.

Sometimes with technology you can overcome that. So there are some obviously common sense stuff, but most of it's not true. I think people kind of know that. They kind of know that. It's just that when you get down and you look at your own children, you do. I think this is overall a sense of maybe despair is too strong of a word, of resignation.

That's the right word. Resignation that has already been laid out for their kids. So really what they're doing is your children are fighting the same as thousands of other children on exactly the same data points of knowledge. There's no other room. So if you're really going to climb up, you're fighting against thousands of other students to become the best calculus students so you can get into the colleges, get in, and so forth and so on.

Not to say that there's not a need for society for certain very well, well-defined skill sets, but there is a huge world of opportunity. In fact, that's where always the excitement comes in. People don't make movies about well-defined skill sets. They make movies, exaggerated or not, about people combining new skill sets in unusual ways and breaking ground.

In fact, that's the other little secret is that the 10,000-hour principle is the basic idea that if you do this for 10 years, day in and day out, and you focus at it, and you're not just lollygagging, but you're thinking about it, breaking down what you're doing, and wrapping your mind around it, you'll become the top in your field in that area.

Well, the other little secret is that that's only, I think, if you compete in exactly the same space that thousands of other people are doing it. If you decide, "Hey, I'm going to become like a Dilbert cartoon guy where I have a little bit of modeling skills, and I've read business books, and I've worked somewhat in the corporate environment, I'm going to make some witty comments about corporate life and philosophy and put it out there in a cartoon format." In fact, that's one of the examples that I give, and people laugh about it.

Now, that combination of skills is unique, and to become that good where you find that balance of rhetoric and cartooning and so forth becomes unique. You don't need to compete against Van Gogh or all these other famous painters or graphic designers. You just have to find a unique combination of skills.

We live in an age where, oh my goodness, I think this is the best age for this, and maybe a century to come we'll even be better. There's so much stuff out there, and you just combine it in a unique way, and wow, that can be so exciting for kids and for parents.

It really is an exciting time, and go where the competition is less. It makes me just think of how I have a personal pet peeve, and this is my issue. I have a personal hatred of GPA calculations, test-taking, and things like SATs and ACTs, standardized methods of measurement. It makes me think of an anecdote when you talk about developing a unique skill.

I remember, and the source of this was I listened to, it's available on YouTube. There's a YouTube video called The Ultimate History Lesson, and it's an interview with a man named John Taylor Gatto, who's one of my favorite authors on the subject of education. Somewhere in the middle of the interview, it's about a four to five hour interview, and it's available free on YouTube.

Somewhere in the middle of that interview, he's talking about some experiences that he had. He was a teacher in New York City, and he was interviewing college admissions counselors to the big schools. I think it was one of the Ivy Leagues, either Harvard or Yale. He's talking with them and asking, "What do you really care about?" He was talking with them.

What came out of the discussion was that the Harvard or Yale admissions officer, they really didn't care about standardized testing. They didn't really care about GPA very much because they had many, many, many thousands of people with absolutely the top ranked scores applying, and they couldn't accept all of them, so they had to come up with different criteria.

He probed, Gatto did, he probed and he said, "What is it that really stands out to you?" He says, "We like to find people who have basically set off on dangerous, individualized sports activities." Things like sailing, offshore sailing. They gave an example that stuck with me of this young man who they had just accepted, and he didn't have very good test scores, but he had invented a sport.

He had invented the sport of off-road, seatless, unicycle riding. He had built this whole entire way to track his performance and build all these rules for himself of off-road, seatless, unicycle riding. Here he was. It was such a rare, abnormal thing. He invented the sport, but that got him admission to the prestigious Ivy League University where there are dozens of excellent academic, high school, all-American football players who were probably denied access where he was able to get in simply because he was unique and different.

The basic rule of sailing 101 applies in every single aspect. What is your unique selling proposition? It matters whether you're selling video services to a construction company or whether you're selling yourself to a college entrance exam or whether you're selling yourself on a podcast or whatever it is. What is your unique selling proposition?

Nobody ever taught me that in high school and college. Not once. I had to learn that myself. Well, that's because that's not their structure, their business. They're not even set up structurally to do it that way. In some ways, you're asking the public school classroom to do more than it's possible of delivering.

You have to take charge as a parent. You can use that environment, even the public school classroom. That's one thing that people can honestly take a look at. If you're in a situation where you feel like you don't have that much control over the educational course that your child is taking for all sorts of reasons, then you can actually – and by the way, this is an open call to your listeners.

If they've done something like this, I would love to hear from them – where you can negotiate probably with your teachers. This takes effort on the side of the parents to say, "Hey, I heard that you're working through the history of the Renaissance in history class. Instead of my child doing XYZ book report, would you mind if they did – my child has a talent in music, a core talent.

She's really into this. Would you mind that instead of using that particular book, they chose this other book about that time period, but talking about the music development and the basic songs and lyrics that are used during that time period?" She could write her book report on that. That would be a simple example of how you could insert yourself as a parent.

Clear the way. Clear the way for your child because your child won't be able to have that negotiation capability with the teachers. The teacher might say, "Sure. If you're behind it, I'm okay with this. I just don't want to take the responsibility to have to negotiate with 30 kids, everyone clamoring for something." Every history class, you could hijack and use it so that your musically inclined child is developing historical perspective on music.

You do this all across the academic subjects. Thousands of hours later, I guarantee you, your child is going to be phenomenal. It's not just going to understand the mechanics of playing music, they're going to understand all the stuff that goes behind the scenes in being able to compose music, why it's used, where it's used, and so forth.

You can still hijack your child's standard curriculum and make it serve your purposes. It would take a little more work if you don't have direct control over it, but I do believe it can be done. By the way, I would love to hear from your listeners if they've done something like that where they have a technique for systematically negotiating with their teachers so they get their child to focus more on what they're trying to develop long term.

Right, absolutely. I have a weakness that I often go to the extreme of, "Pull the kids out!" I do believe that, but the reality is that many parents aren't in that situation. Every study I've ever seen that has connected improvements in a child's academic ability and preparation for life, the only thing that's statistically verifiable is the parental involvement, and the parental involvement makes all the difference.

What it makes me think of, just one anecdote for you of how I think you could apply things like history in an interesting way, I've never found a teacher who, when I've shown an interest in their subject, that hasn't bent over backward to help me. I feel like most teachers, many teachers, exist in a world where they're dying for a student to show a little bit of interest.

When their student shows some interest, they will do, I've never met a teacher that wouldn't, the makeup of a teacher is one who lays down their life for their students. There are exceptions, of course, but the majority of teachers I know are the most giving, kind-hearted people who lay down their lives for their students.

The student or the parent, a little bit of extra effort can make a huge difference. My favorite history project I ever did was, I always liked guns when I was a kid. I thought it was fun, so I traced the history of the firearm. I made this video for a seventh grade history class.

In that video, I had video of me shooting every gun from a Revolutionary War musket, a Minuteman rifle. I had a buddy of mine who was a gun collector, and he brought his whole collection from muskets all the way through, we went through World War I, World War II, we shot all the way up through modern day AR-15 and AK-47s.

We couldn't get our hands on an automatic one, but I shot a semi-automatic AR-15. You want to talk about feeling like a top dog. It wouldn't fly, I don't think, in 2014, but when you're a seventh grader and your history project has a video of you shooting an AK-47, an AR-15, how cool is that as far as history that I know and that I remember?

Application to a specific interest with extra effort from a teacher and parent and a friend of mine who was really gracious toward me. I'd like to close with two subjects, and you actually just hit on one of the final three questions I was going to ask, which are basically ideas for parents in different contexts.

Home education is one thing. If you're in government schooling, that's another thing. What do you do if a child simply doesn't seem to be exhibiting any motivation? Because I think that's something that many people struggle with and say, "This kid is totally unmotivated." What do you do with the topic of motivation?

>> Yeah, actually, that's interesting. My observation is that you tend to have two extremes. It's that either you have children who are very motivated in the sense that they take on every project they can find. That is quite common, where they're just hyper-involved. And then you have the other extreme where kids seem to be almost listless with no energy, no motivation, and so forth.

The root cause is pretty much the same. In the one case, the over-involvement is simply because they don't have a focus. Typically, that can often be because the parents are wealthy enough or they have enough emotional time to spare where they can drive them around to all these activities, do all these events, and so forth.

So you're kind of on a high all the time. The other one is the same thing. They have a lack of focus also, but in that case, they're usually completely left to themselves as a general rule. And I mean by left to themselves. I don't mean that they're latchkey kids.

I'm just saying that you tend to think of your child as he does. School is something that's not part of your world. It's something they do over there. All you're doing is making sure you're sitting down and are you doing your exercises. It's about the level of involvement that people have.

And that's, I think, a tendency of you're going to find that where people are going to become listless. I hope I'm saying that word correctly. But with no motivation. So it depends on the age. If they're 12 versus 16, I think you have something else on your hands. If it's 12, it's going to be very easy to turn it around, honestly.

100% guarantee. If they're 16 or 17, it is going to be more difficult if this has been going on for years because they are transitioning to adult life. And the boost you're going to need to give them, the guidance that you're going to need to give them, is going to have to be a lot stronger, a lot bigger, bolder than when they are younger.

It is true that when you're younger, a hug from mom and dad is probably going to do it. Or an ice cream cone is going to help you push through that difficult part. When you're 16 or 17, that's not going to cut it. You're going to need a bigger reason for everything or a bigger motivation in order to break through.

So what I would recommend is that you sit down and you don't look at the personal interest only. And in fact, a non-motivated child, that's the problem. He doesn't have a real personal interest going on. So that's only one aspect you want to look at. You want to look at three other things.

You want to look at your family goals or your family identity. So what makes you strong as a family. And you want to look at your environmental advantages. And by that I mean you want to look at all the people, the network of friends, the environment that you live in if you're in a city versus living on a ranch versus living near the beach or on the mountain.

You want to look at all of that and count your assets. And you want to also look at your academic passions, your academic goals that you want for your child. And you're going to combine them together so that you're going to come up with a focus, an action focus.

In other words, you're going to do something. You're going to do something where you're going to combine your personal interest, a family goal, and something in your environment where you can draw on and your academic intellectual side to it and combine it in one directed action. So that when you're going to go out there and act on it, you're going to have success almost right away.

And that's exactly what people need when they're that unmotivated. If you listen to them, they say, "I'm not good at anything." That's what they'll say when they're not. Usually if they're unmotivated, they're also broody. They feel useless. They feel stupid. They're not good at anything that anybody cares about.

And that is correct. That is correct. They have actually philosophically perceived their problem, that what they are doing does not matter. And by telling them, "Do more of what does not matter," is not going to solve their problem. So that's what I'm saying. You need to find that focus where you're combining all of your advantages.

And this is where the family has a huge advantage over waiting to leave after high school to find it, because you can find your way after high school. But it is so much more difficult. It is. Absolutely. It is so much more difficult. If your family's identity is behind you, you're going to explode with motivation.

Explode with motivation. And families really need to look inward and say, "What is it that makes us who we are?" And let's use that strength to help our child go forward. That's a whole topic in itself, because it's not about replicating your family into your child's life. It's about using your energy and your strength so that your child can act inside that environment and start making progress.

Absolutely. Yeah, because at 16, you're already getting blocked, by the way. You're already being ... you're moving out of the cute phase. And now mothers are worried about their daughters. You're 16 or 17, but you still have room to sleep on someone's couch if you had to in order to spend the weekend learning something.

But the older you get, that window is closing. And society rightly gives you an opportunity to go out on the edge, but that window closes. Right. Yep. It does. And so you need to grab that and run with it. And that's where the family really comes into play. Your authority to clear the way for you to negotiate on your behalf is tremendous.

And that's the biggest influence, just the permission to follow something. Absolutely. You know, for me, if my mom or my dad were opposed to something, or if my mom or my dad gave me permission to explore something, in many ways, that's all I needed. And I could have gone ahead because of that confidence that we have in our parents.

I could go against any societal norm because of that confidence that I have in my parents and in their direction in my life. But down the road, once you're an adult, you have to, in many ways, your parents' approval or disapproval becomes much less important. And now you have to deal with your going against societal norms on your own, in your own strength.

And you usually don't have the reserves to do that. Right. And so, in fact, that's what came out in the talent literature. They said the one common thread is that no one ever achieved that level of greatness without investing that level of time. And so that came up. So why is it that so many talented people start when they're young?

And they are all unanimously in agreement, and this is from different perspectives, that it had nothing to do with age, per se. It had simply to do with the fact that when you're that young, the parents are usually clearing the way for that level of commitment. And they said that usually when somebody finally wakes up and says, "Hey, I can do something great with my life and focus," they're 18, 19, 21, but they might be trying to juggle.

People are not giving you breaks anymore. You have to put food on the table, and you don't have time to experiment. You say, "I've got to pay for the gas in my car, or am I going to go buy a drone and break it?" You don't have time anymore.

You can do it, but it can become very extreme. And that's another side we don't have to talk about. But people can achieve greatness in their talent, but also destroy their families at the same time. That's another dark side of it, which does not have to exist. And again, it goes back to, basically, frankly, it's the parents behind it in most cases.

Or in other extreme cases, the parents were taken out of the picture through tragedy or abandonment, and they were adopted by a mentor that just poured themselves into them. So there's pretty much no exception that they can think of, where these people have not invested tons of time, and most of the time, it's simply, the young age is simply because time is on their side.

And they said most of these things can still be achieved, and they are, in adulthood and later on, it's just much more difficult. Right. It is. So you just don't get that's why there's so many young people when they say, "When I was seven," and then they start, "I was at," you know, the Tiger Woods is a typical example.

The Bill Gates is another one. You know, when you read the story of Bill Gates, I read the summary, but I didn't read the alibi. Basically, you have someone who's playing hooking in school, who is theoretically in class, but really he was in the lab. And the other big one is that he and Steve Ballmer, whoever his partner was, would sneak in.

They found out that the university lab not far from their home was basically unattended, what, from three to six in the morning. So they would sneak in there and play on one of the very few computers that were available. I guess they had multitasking or multithreading at that time.

And they said, "There's no secret. These guys spent tens of thousands of hours." And then an opportunity came up at a nearby plant. They said, "Does anyone know how to program in this?" And the lab teacher said, "Yeah, I know a young so-and-so." So there's more to it than just that.

But the point is, their parents were benignly looking the other way. Right. Right. And I think Outliers makes a big deal about it, that people owe a lot to other people in the sense that had the parents not looked the other way conveniently, had the lab person not looked the other way, obviously they could have, but they saw that, "Hey, this person's taken off with it.

Let's let him go with it." And you see this repeated over and over where people have invested themselves into a child. And it doesn't mean that they are teaching the skills directly. Rather, they are creating the structure where they can blow up the lab if they have to and no one gets hurt.

One of the most valuable things we can do, I think, is protect people's safety but give people room to explore. How valuable. I was going to make a comment. I'm actually going to ask a question. Do you have any idea how much you've spent on helping your kids with some of these talent development, I guess would be the term?

I mean, financially, you mean? Yeah. Actually, money. Do you have any idea? Very, very, very little. Even all the drone equipment that my son does, he bought with his own money that he earned by working in our business. And that's actually an important part, is that I might subsidize or I might buy a couple to get him started, but I actually do want them to have a taste of what it feels like to take care of whatever tools or equipment that you're needing.

For example, just recently, Nicholas, a 13-year-old, he likes to run his own Minecraft hosting site with all the administrative stuff that goes on it, but he has to pay for it out of his own cash. I could easily pay for it. It's no big deal. But I want him to feel, "Hey, you're giving up your soda and your drinks," or whatever it is that you would normally do with that, in order to run your site.

I do this on a small level, and the higher up they go, the more they are invested in buying their tools. They are very aware of the cost trade-off. Most of my investment has been a time investment. When they are younger, I've had to drive them and sometimes sit in the back with my computer because the adults simply wouldn't tolerate having a child there with dangerous equipment.

They don't want to be responsible. I understand that. But it is a burden on me, so I will come with my work and catch up with my laptop while he's in the other room with dangerous bandsaws and whatever it is. So it's mainly a time investment more than anything else, because I use that principle.

I'm using my environment. I don't think, "Hey, my son is going to become a deep-sea diver, but we live five hours away from the ocean." Well, okay, I could force it, which means either my family would never see me on the weekend while he and I are developing that skill, or it would bankrupt me because I don't have the financial resources to pay for someone else to take him.

So I work within my environment and I go with it. Now, as they get older, they make more money, and so they can go places and do more things on their own, which is a natural progression. That's part of the talent development, is understanding it's not just the actual core skill that people see in the outward part, it's all the stuff behind the scenes that needs to get done.

So with my son, we didn't talk about that, but a lot of it had to do with learning how to pitch to grown-up people. So my son actually enjoys that. He actually likes going to complete strangers, like at a real estate presentation, and show how it works and tell them what he can do.

He got those tips from other people. So a lot of the skills are working in the background to make the visible one happen. You sparked another idea. Have you done anything in addition to working with your children to run their businesses, have you done anything specific with teaching them personal finance that you think has been helpful?

I know your oldest is still only 17, but have you employed any tactics or strategies that you think have... We are big podcast junkies in our household. My wife is probably the biggest consumer of it because as part of our business, there's a lot of manual work that needs to get done.

And so we have lots of MP3 players, iPods, iPhones, and we listen to financial podcasts. My oldest likes to listen to some of those too. So we'll get some of it that way, but most of it happens as conversations around the table. And they'll be like, "Why are we so busy?" And we'll do special treats like we'll have some food brought in or something because we've got a sales campaign going on.

We've got to work around the clock pretty much. And so we'll talk about that to say, "When does the campaign end?" And the younger ones will say, "Why can't we just give it to them?" We'll say, "Well, we could, but then you'd only want to give it to people who might be qualified." So we have these ongoing business discussions as a part of our life and we encourage it.

And the older they get, the more we let them in on the actual finances of what's going on. When they're younger, they don't need to know everything. But as they get older, our oldest is very well aware of the money flowing in and out of our business, which is what we personally allow him to see because we can have those conversations.

So a lot of that stuff we learn, my wife and I. In fact, we're going through the whole issue of whether or not to incorporate him. And so we're having this discussion, the pros and cons. I go and see some financial consultants and they give me their advice. Another one gives me a different opinion and we'll talk it over with him and I'll ask him, "Can you afford it?" And then we have this session, but I also want to make sure that no one's going to come back and sue me if you accidentally crash your drone into a portion and now I've got to pay for the paint job.

So we have these discussions. So he's learning in a very conversational way. Right. Prior to the other question was simply one of the things that I was, why I asked about how much you've invested is I look at investing in kids and having done a good bit of formal financial planning, I oftentimes am working with a client and they're working on their estate plan and I'm looking at them and they're saying, "Joshua, how do I transfer along this million dollars that I want to leave behind to my kids?" Or we're working on, again, college is a common thing.

And I've often looked at that and I've thought to myself, "A million dollars is nice, but if you've done a good job," and what I mean by good job is if your child is financially effective, by the time the parent dies at, what, 18 years old and the child is 50, is an extra million dollars going to make that big of a difference in the 50-year-old's life?

Sometimes it is, especially if you haven't done a good job and your child is financially irresponsible. Right. And I think for people who's financially irresponsible, they probably pretty much have things set. They're not going to change. The average 50-year-old, at least that I've worked with, that's all of a sudden inherited a half a million bucks from their parents, they don't really change anything.

I mean, maybe they buy a fancy red car because they know it would have made their parents happy to buy a fancy red car. But inheriting a half a million or a million bucks doesn't really make any difference to their life. And I think, did you invest in your child when they were young?

And so, as some people's virtual financial advisor, I guess, here on the show, I hereby give you permission to not worry so much about the financial estate that you leave behind at your death and to invest in your children when they're young. And if that investment means switching from a job where you're working out of the house to where you're working in the house, so you can take your computer with you to the local maker's shop to help where your child needs to spend time, they're building a wooden knife handle, or whether it means taking a year off and not saving for retirement so that you can expose your children to traveling to 15 countries all around the world in 15 months, or whatever the cost is, if it's the cost of time for one parent to stay home so that you can educate your kids at home, so instead of spending eight hours a day in a formal thing, you can spend four hours a day taking care of academic stuff and six hours a day of working on talent development.

I hereby give you permission to spend the money now while your kids are young, because that's going to make a much bigger difference to where your 50-year-old child is, rather than them inheriting a million bucks because you worked in slaves so that you could save the million dollars in your 401(k).

Money is only good to buy the thing, money is utterly pointless except for the things that it can buy. And when your child is young, you have a small window of time over that, I don't know, 12 to 20 years, I guess, you have a small window of time to make a dramatic difference in where they wind up long-term.

Spend the money there, and chances are you won't need to leave the million dollars behind at the end, and if you do, it's not going to wreck their life. So I give you permission to put that very high on your financial plan of spending the money now while it actually does some good, and then while you're alive and you can enjoy watching it do the good instead of wondering if it did any good after you were dead and gone.

So that would be my encouragement. Any last words that you have? Tell us about your website, 10k2talent, and then you have a book, the book is for sale there, right? So tell us about that and who it would be a good fit for and who it wouldn't be a good fit for.

Yeah, my website is 10k2talent, so one zero K like kilo, that's short for 10,000, so it's 10K and then 2TALENT, T-A-L-E-N-T dot com, go there, and I have lots of blog posts, tips on how to get started, and I actually explain the basic principle out there. I also have the e-guide that I sell, I have a coaching course that can help parents go through that.

I have another course that teaches people how to use a blog to showcase their child's talent, like a living portfolio that you build over time. And actually if your listeners are interested, for the next 30 days, if they just want to email me, I'll send them the free guide.

I'd be glad to do that. They email me at talentcoach@10k2talent.com and just tell me, you heard me on Joshua's interview, and I'll send you the guide, it's a PDF guide, and you can work through it. It's basically a worksheet that you can go through and it's easy to understand.

Emotionally it might be challenging as you work through it, especially when you look through your family goals, but it's very easy to do. I think if people come away with just one idea from it, it'll be worth reading. That's great. Man, I appreciate you doing that. That'll be an awesome resource for people.

So you can email Jonathan at talentcoach@10k2talent.com and then also I'll put links to your site and then to your son's site, it's actually in the show notes. I did want to correct, because I think you misspelled it earlier, it's scarabcoder.com. Oh, thank you. You said scarabcoder.com. Thank you. It's scarabcoder.com.

Thank you. So that's for your younger son. So what an awesome resource. So if you want this in the 30 days, you'll see the date, whatever the date is that this goes live, 30 days out from that, there'll be an option. If not, just go by the site. If you're listening to this after 30 days, just go by 10k2talent and you can buy the guide if you're interested.

I've got a copy of it here and it looks like a really cool resource. Not quite there with my one-year-old son. He's not quite working on his bladesmithing skills yet, but I'll give him two years. Yeah, don't give him a blade yet. Jonathan, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show.

I really, really appreciate it. This has been great. Thank you. I enjoyed this. Isn't that awesome? Do you have some ideas of some things that you can do with your children, even in your own life? I think about this for myself. What are the talents that I can identify and develop?

I hope you really enjoyed that and I hope you learned a lot. Make sure to take Jonathan up on his generous offer to take a look at his course. I've taken a look at it myself. My child is a little bit young at this point, but it's in my resource file for organizing my thinking.

I found it to be really useful. I know Jonathan is semi-obsessed with the topic of learning and developing and improving it. He's a talent coach at 10k2talent.com. Mention that you heard it on Joshua's show on Radical Personal Finance and he will hook you up with a copy of that course.

That's it for today's show. If you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe. Subscribe on iTunes or on Stitcher. If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can email me joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com or on Twitter @radicalpf, Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. If you'd like to support the show, I would be thrilled if you would consider becoming a member of the Irregulars program.

That's the membership program that I have designed to allow you to support the show but get a ton of value in exchange for your support even beyond just the value that you receive listening to the show. Details can be found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/membership. I'm getting ready to launch a members only podcast that's going to have some of the back story on the show.

I'm going to share with you a lot of what I'm learning as I create the show and many of you would like to do something similar to what I'm doing and I haven't been able to find the kind of resource that I would like to find so I'm going to create it.

Check that out. Thank you to those of you who are leaving reviews on iTunes or Stitcher. I've got the last one here in the iTunes reviews, the most recent that I haven't read on the show. So today's review comes from Dee and Dee says, "Practical road to financial freedom.

Joshua's passionate and excellent in-depth discussion, fascinating and inspiring interviews. I consider myself fairly well versed in financial topics and I am still learning something daily from Joshua's podcast." Thank you, Dee. I appreciate it. That's the last review on iTunes. I'm going to switch to Stitcher reviews now. If you wouldn't mind, if you haven't done it already, I'd be thrilled if you would leave a review for the show on iTunes or on Stitcher.

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Thanks so much for listening. Be back with you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. This show is not, and is not intended to be any form of financial advice.

Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions. Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes.

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