New Survey on Dating, Courtship and Boy/Girl Relationships!!!

THANKS SO MUCH to all of you who have responded to our home schooling survey and told us what you want to hear more about. If you still haven't taken that survey, you can GO HERE NOW and share your opinions.

But now our son Blake would like your input. This is from him::

I grew up listening to James Dobson and reading Raising a Modern Day Knight, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Boy Meets Girl, Best Friends for Life, Five Love Languages, etc. 

Lately God has been really putting on my heart the study of dating/courtship, honoring of the opposite sex, conservative boundaries, etc.  During this process, the pastor of the church group I attend did a full four-week course on dating, and –even after all of those great books I read- it was the best "dating" talk I’ve ever heard.

I really respect this guy's opinions and views, and I’m going to try to convince him to sit down with me and let me ask him some of the hard-hitting questions about dating/courtship, pre-marriage, sex and other relationship questions that everybody is trying to figure out. 

So my question to you is this: If you had an opportunity to sit down with Dr. Gary Chapman, James Dobson, Joshua Harris, and anyone else whose opinions you respect about dating/courtship and boy/girl relationships, what five questions would you ask them?

Please take a few minutes and respond to my dating/courtship/relationships survey. It won't take more than a few minutes of your time and Iwould appreciate it very, very much.

And if you have a personal story about your dating/courtship or getting married as a home schooler, I'd love to hear it. You can contact me at cblakedavis@gmail.com.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY ON DATING/COURTSHIP AND BOY/GIRL RELATIONSHIPS.

Kids and the 10,000 Hour Rule

by Ellyn Davis

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I recently finished reading the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Anything Gladwell writes is well worth reading, but this book is especially so because it's an analysis of hidden factors in people's childhoods that are critical to their success as adults.

I actually read the book on a cruise ship. My son, James works for Carnival Cruise Lines and had gotten me on his ship as a family member.( It's his birthday today, by the way!) I took the book to read with me while I was onboard.

Anyway, I was carrying it with me to breakfast one morning and was in the elevator on my way to the Lido Deck for the breakfast buffet. The elevator stopped at the floor above mine and three affluent-looking business men got on. You know the type--carefully casual expensive golf shirts and shorts, designer sandals, $100 haircuts, big gold rings with crests, and a "Look at me, I'm more successful than you are" expression on their faces.

The men all glanced first at me (who looked like a typical home school mom) and then at the book, then back at me. I could tell they were puzzled and couldn't quite make the connection in their minds between me and the book. Finally, one of them spoke. "Is that book any good? Our boss told us we should read it, but we haven't yet."

I had to laugh because here they were successful, affluent business leaders whose boss, mind you, had made the very book I had in my hand required reading for all of his upper management and I was reading it before they were.

Anyway, the book asks and answers the question, "Why do some people succeed far more than others?" and makes the case that the achievements of "outliers"--those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience--are less about talent than they are about about opportunity and hard work.

Hard Work and the 10,000 Hour Rule

Anders Ericsson of Florida State University studied thousands of students at Berlin's elite Academy of Music and found that those violinists with the potential to become world-class soloists had put in roughly 10,000 hours of practice by the time they were twenty years old. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled tight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours.

Gladwell writes,

 "Ericsson and his colleagues than compared amateur pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern emerged. The amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood and by the age of twenty they had totaled two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time every year, until by the age of twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand hours."

"The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any 'naturals,' musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any 'grinds,' people who worked harder than anyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."

"The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."

Other researchers have reached the same conclusions. In study after study of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, and even master criminals, ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being "world-class" in anything. It takes the brain this long to assimilate all it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

The Ten Year Rule

Still other studies call it "The Ten Year Rule." It seems you have to put in at least a decade of focused effort to master anything and become a leader in your field. A 1985 study of 120 elite athletes, performers, artists, biochemists and mathematicians led by University of Chicago psychologist Benjamin Bloom concluded that every single person in the study took at least a decade of hard study or practice to achieve international recognition. Olympic swimmers trained for an average of 15 years before making the team; the best concert pianists took 15 years to earn international recognition. Top researchers, sculptors and mathematicians put in similar amounts of time.

In a large collection of expert reviews, the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, the conclusion is that what we commonly call "talent" or "genius" arises not from innate gifts but from the combination of adequate (but not necessarily extraordinary) natural ability, quality instruction and mentoring, and lots and lots of work.

Thomas Edison was fond of saying that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, but all of the recent research suggest that "genius" is 1 percent inspiration, 29 percent good instruction, mentoring, and encouragement, and 70 percent perspiration. In other words, geniuses are made, not born.

"It's complicated explaining how genius or expertise is created and why it's so rare," says Anders Ericsson, the professor of psychology at Florida State University who edited the handbook. "But it isn't magic, and it isn't born. It happens because some critical things line up so that a person of good intelligence can put in the sustained, focused effort it takes to achieve extraordinary mastery."

"These people don't necessarily have an especially high IQ, but they almost always have very supportive environments, and they almost always have important mentors. And the one thing they always have is this incredible investment of effort."

Ericsson says. "It's funny, really. On one hand it's encouraging: it makes me think that even the most ordinary among us should be careful about saying we can't do great things, because people have proven again and again that most people can do something extraordinary if they're willing to put in the exercise. On the other hand, it's a bit overwhelming to look at what these people have to do. They generally invest about five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent. It's not something everyone's up for."

Next time I'll share about the other ingredients essential to success: supportive environments and important mentors.

Ellyn

Resources

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. This book deserves a spot on everyone's bookshelf and should be required reading for high school students, along with Gladwell's other two books The Tipping Point and Blink. It is a discussion of the critical but usually unacknowledged factors that contribute to success in any endeavor.

I Saw the Angel in the Marble

With over 4,000 copies sold in just a few months, I Saw the Angel in the Marble is becoming a home schooling best seller!

This book represents the best of 15 years of Elijah Company articles. Find our more HERE>>

Turning Hearts: Davis Seminar Set (8 CDs)

The Best of Chris and Ellyn Davis, this set contains seminars given by Chris and Ellyn Davis of The Elijah Company at home schooling conventions. The set contains all of the favorites that home schoolers ask for over and over. People have told us this set of CDs changed their lives. Find out more about them HERE>>


Angel in the Marble/Davis Seminars Set
Order a combination of I Saw the Angel in the Marble and the Davis Seminars CDs HERE>>

Making a Living Online within 279 Days

Several months ago I stumbled across an interesting little guide called 279 Days to Overnight Success. This book chronicles one writer's journey to becoming a full-time, self-supporting writer in 279 days through a blog and several products he created.

The report was incredibly encouraging to me because I’ve wanted for some time to revamp my website and turn it into something that was a real expression of what I believe about home schooling but that also helped others.

 So I resolved to start working on my OWN 279 day path to success. My goal: achieve full-time, self-supporting writer status in 279 days or less. Call it my personal 279 Day Challenge.

You can follow me in my journey to making a living on the internet HERE.

Creating Your Life on-line course at 1/3 off. This is an online, video-based self-study course in which Robert Fritz is your teacher and you learn to create your own life just as an artist paints a painting, a composer composes a symphony, or a poet writes a poem. In this course, Robert further develops the special insights that he introduced in his best selling book The Path of Least Resistance. The course has five lessons that will take you from 5 to 10 weeks to complete and includes a copy of Robert’s book Your Life as Art as well as the course materials and use of tools on the website. This course online is normally $299 and if you took it in person in Vermont it would be at least twice that. But with this special invitation code you can enroll for $199. I highly recommend that you take this course as a family—husband, wife, and high school age children. To enroll in this course, go to www.wisepond.com and enter this invitation code: AFF1455.

Organic Play Dough at great savings!

Our friend Susan is a home schooling Mom and she is very concerned about her children's health. Her son, Liam is allergic to almost every chemical known to man, so Susan has to be very, very careful what she allows him to play with. When he gets together with other children and they play with Play Doh, Liam can't play. The dyes and chemicals in the dough can not only make him very sick, they might kill him.

To read the story of how Susan solved Liam's problem and how you can benefit from what she did, GO HERE>>

Home School and Home Business


Let Your Mortgage Make You Rich. A friend in my internet marketing group discovered this technique for paying down your mortgage incredibly quickly without making an extra payment or refinancing. Using her method, people are cutting a 30 year mortgage down to eight or nine years. It’s true; without extra payments or refinancing – you could save tens of thousands of dollars - even hundreds of thousands - on what you pay for your home. And the best part is that the book comes with a money-back guarantee. If you don't save more on your mortgage than the book costs in the first 18 months of using the techniques, you'll get your money back.
Find out more about this money-saving book NOW!

SALE PRODUCTS!
Limited Quantities 30% Off!

We have the following WRITING IN NARRATIVE books available: The Reluctant Writer, Writing Man 1 & 2, and WIN Twin. GO HERE.

Home Schooling and Home Business Resources


Building the Home School of Your Dreams is a 6 CD set taken from the From Home School To Home Business Seminar and features sessions by Chris Davis and Mary Hood. Find out more HERE>>

From Home School to Home Business
(14 CD Set)

If you missed one of our From Home School to Home Business Conferences, you missed a great time.People who attended told us that it changed their lives—not only in the area of home schooling, but also in the area of creating their own sources of home income.This set is huge and filled with useful and encouraging information about how to be successful at home schooling and at home business! Find out more about this life-changing set of CDs HERE>>

Building the Business of Your Dreams (8 CD Set) We've had requests for just the business portion of the From Home School to Home Business Seminar, so have developed a set of the business CDs from that set. It contains 8 CDs and includes sessions on The Entrepreneurial Mind, Multiple Streams of Home Income, Discovering Your Ideal Life and Ideal Business (2 CDs) , Developing a Business Plan (2 CDs), and The Importance of Business Relationships. Plus, there is a very important and insightful interview on Redeeming the Marketplace. Find out about this life-changing set of CDs HERE>>

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View past ejournals HERE>>

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