To build passion and talent in your child’s life, you can start in any number of ways.
Here’s what most people do:
Focus on one of the current personal interests your young person is exhibiting and then build it up until he becomes outstanding in that area.
That approach works for some people.
However, this personal-interests only approach has a high failure rate for two main reasons.
Reason 1: a young person may already be locked into interests that, as far as you can tell has no future for them as an adult. Bull-whipping as a sport? Comic-book reader? Okay, I might be exaggerating, but many interests are dead ends. They enjoy it in their youth, but when they are adults, they become just sweet memories. They could have focused some of those energies toward something that would have made a long term difference to their lives.
Here’s reason #2 for the high failure rate of interest-only talent development: it quickly becomes too expensive for the family budget early on.
This is because your teen usually competes with thousands of others in the same personal-interest space. For her to make big progress, you have to drive a big distance and spend a lot of money to access the best teachers.
For example, if you focus your child on using her piano playing interest as the single skill-set for her talent, then the only way she can climb up enough to achieve lift-off by age 18 is to outperform the tens of thousands of other great piano players.
This means you’re paying for costly piano lessons, or you’re driving her great distances. Add to those piano recitals and extra practice. Families stumble over those serious economic and logistical obstacles.
And then they give up after they’ve invested so much.
Others continue despite the high costs, but the rest of the family structure might fall apart to create that one child’s future.
The personal-interests only approach is high-risk and should be avoided when a superior strategy is available.
So what is the better talent and passion building strategy?
Built a talent that combines one core personal interest and finds a way to create something unique by merging family interests and advantages.
This creates a robust talent strategy that can weather the changes in the marketplace and support your family’s emotional needs. It creates a super-charged environment in which your young person is driven not only by his immediate interests but also by the natural energy emanating from his family’s self-interests and assets.
That kind of talent strategy creates a motivation in your child that becomes almost indestructible.
For more on merging family interests with personal interests, click here.