Before your baby clocks 5 ... (Part 2)

Last week we discussed how to discover your baby's unique marketable package (UMP) and I hope you have begun to journalize your baby's unique traits. This week, we conclude with how to develop and deploy the UMP. Enjoy reading! And remember, the proof that you appreciate what is shared on this post is that you share it on your facebook and twitter accounts too.

Steps to growing your baby's UMP

If discovering your baby’s UMP is hard work, its development is drudgery, until you start reaping the dividends! It’s like the case of weeds and edible plants; you don’t have to do a thing for a vice to grow worse, but developing a virtue requires time and effort. A baby’s UMP is a virtue but it has to be cultivated. The essence of developing the UMP is because no one will pay your daughter for watching Food Channel or your son for drumming on everyone’s head. But if you help her to find her comfortable expression for food/cooking you are on the way to unveiling her uniqueness to the world.

The next step after discovery is to expose your baby to his domain or the world of his UMP. This is due to the fact that there are a million and one ways to express ones UMP. Take for instance, a child who stares at paintings, reads about them and tries to collect them might not be able to paint, but if her parents expose her to the world of her UMP which in this case is the art world, she might be set on the path to becoming the world’s most renowned curator. That is her most comfortable expression of the UMP, which is totally different from some other child who stares at paintings but goes on to sketch with pencils and begins to use the painting brush she is exposed to in the art world. While the first child is set to be the next Hyatt Mayor, the latter might be a Picasso in the making!

Summer camps, school clubs and societies and other extra-curricular activities that our children attend are wonderful places to get exposed because they find various ways to express their UMPs.

No matter how talented we think Pele, the footballer is, if he wasn’t born in a country where football was appreciated or if his parents never allowed him to play the game, the lack of exposure would have probably robbed the world of one of the best footballers to have walked this Earth. Malcolm Gladwell makes an exhaustive case for exposure in his book Outliers (Read pages 50-54)

Exposure is a delicate dance between pushing the child in the direction of his natural inclination and reining him in from the distractions abundant in his UMP world. Caution and prudence dictate that we don’t foist on him what his most comfortable expression should be, even if we feel that one expression is more lucrative than the other. Also be patient to let him try his hands at various expressions; just think of how easy it was for you to find your unique marketable package (hopefully, you have) and extend something of the same understanding to your baby.

After finding your baby’s UMP expression, get him the tools and training to hone his skills. And ensure that you make it all fun; remember how fulfilling learning is when there is hope of a reward!

Tapping UMPs

Thank goodness, you have discovered your baby’s UMP! It is music and her most comfortable expression for it is singing. She has also trained for years and featured in several music shows to develop her UMP. Your friends even say that you have done wonders and

your baby can sing that Toni Braxton has got nothing on her! But you and I know that if she releases an album today, her best sales will pale beside Braxton’s most dismal sales figure. Why? Talent is not the most important ingredient for career success; business savvy is more like it. Talent is what you need to win competitions and shows but when it comes to careers and business ventures you need what we call business intelligence.

Developing your baby’s UMP without giving him business intelligence is like providing him with the ability to fish in an area without ponds; business intelligence is what helps him to build ponds and hire those who will fish. I suggest gaining this intelligence by experience. We have examined this in an earlier post and I don’t want to repeat it here; you can click here to read more. Let it just suffice to say that gaining experience on the business side from someone in her UMP world will go a long way to impart business intelligence.

Thanks for reading, see you next week, same time, same url