A fierce storm tore its way across the state, blowing sticks and branches, leaves and debris with the force of a baby hurricane. The looming dark sky provided warning before its full dramatic performance: billowing clouds, gusting winds, whitecaps on the water, and winds you could hardly stand against. Then the curtain finally came down.

The responsibility of home ownership includes cleanup after the storm. Lots of branches down, lots of leaves, and as I walked out to survey the damage at the waterfront, I spotted what looked like a good-sized log drifting against the side of my dock.

I should move that, I thought, like a responsible adult. So I kicked my shoes off and was about to wade into the water … when the log moved, and stared me down like it was ready for an oversized meal. It was an alligator pretending to be a log. I have decided he can remove himself at a time of his choosing. I will not be rushing him. I don’t need the drama. Nor will I dangle my feet in that water again.

But here’s the thing about that storm: It cleared the air. It stripped the dead branches off the trees. It reminded the yard … and me … what actually matters and what’s just deadwood waiting to fall. Storms do that. They’ve always done that. And so, apparently, do alligators.

The Storms We Hate

I’ve spent years preaching the importance of embracing storms … the metaphorical kind. And I want to be completely honest with you: I didn’t look at hard times the same way when I was young.

Hard times were bad. Difficulty was an obstacle. I wanted none of it. I wanted the straight line from here to success. No pain but all the gain.

I still don’t love a storm. Let’s not romanticize this too much. But I understand them now in a way that the younger version of me simply could not. Because almost every storm I’ve ever weathered was one I created myself. Unbridled ambition, moving too fast, not thinking about the human beings in my path, not paying close enough attention, overspending and under-listening. I bumped into people. I bruised egos. I left some wreckage in my path.

The storm was the universe handing me the invoice.

Brilliance or Arrogance?

Recently I worked with a brilliant young man. Talented. Driven. A force of nature. And watching him was like finding an old photograph of yourself that you’d prefer no one else ever sees.

All he cared about was forward momentum. Career trajectory. Results. Speed. And if you weren’t keeping up … if you didn’t respond fast enough, produce fast enough, think fast enough … you were either getting a very pointed conversation or he wanted you fired. He had the impatience of a man who had somewhere important to be, and you were on the escalator and in his way.

He thought he was impressing me, yet I recognized every single move. Because I made every single one of them myself at his age.

He didn’t bruise my ego. He couldn’t … I’ve been working on that particular vulnerability for decades. My approach now is borrowed straight from Ted Lasso: Be a goldfish. Short memory. In one ear, out the other. Don’t carry what other people are putting down.

But watching him, I felt something more interesting than irritation. I felt clarity. Because that relentless, forward-at-all-costs energy … that is the arrogance of youth. And the arrogance of youth creates storms. And those storms? That’s the classroom. That’s where the actual education happens.

Screaming Billionaires

I’ll give credit where it’s due: Some of the most driven people on the planet … the screaming, table-pounding, “sleep-is-for-the-weak” crowd … have built extraordinary things. I genuinely admire the output, even when I cringe at their methods.

But I don’t have the stomach for it. And honestly? I don’t want it.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed: The people who rule by fear or pressure may win on the scoreboard. But they lose something far more valuable: the trust of the best people around them, who are counting the days until they can work somewhere else. Quality people don’t stay where they’re not respected. And a life surrounded by people who are merely tolerating you is a lonely kind of winning.

I’ll take a slower lap with people who actually want to be in the room. And if that prevents me from being a billionaire, I’m good with that. I have to live with myself.

Gift or Trap? 

Now here’s where I turn the mirror around. Because the opposite of the arrogant young man isn’t wisdom. It’s the risk of becoming calcified.

Ancient wisdom … the kind you earn after decades of hard lessons, failed ventures, relationships tested and sometimes broken, and a few alligators you almost grabbed … is a remarkable thing. We understand human psychology now in ways we couldn’t at 30. We can accomplish through patience and insight what we used to try to brute-force. We know which fights aren’t worth having and which relationships are worth protecting.

I wish I’d known then what I know now is probably the most universal human sentiment in existence.

But. And this is a big but.

The dark side of ancient wisdom is being stuck. Closed. Certain. Done learning. Convinced that the way things used to be done is the way things should be done. Treating new ideas like threats. Treating younger thinkers like they don’t get it yet.

To me, that is the kiss of death.

The Echo Chamber Curse

What I fight against every single day, if I’m honest, is the seduction of my own certainty.

It’s comfortable to be right. It’s comfortable to surround yourself with people who agree with you, who validate your worldview, who watch the same channels and read the same social media posts and conclude the same things you do. The world becomes very small and very manageable and very … wrong.

I intentionally fill my life with people who are not like me. Different ages. Different backgrounds. Different cultures. Different starting points. Different political views. I love the energy of someone at the beginning of their career … hungry, maybe a little pushy, occasionally exhausting, always alive. I love the people in my world who are mid-career, dropping the worst habits of youth, picking up the first gifts of wisdom, and holding me accountable to keep up.

They make me better. Sometimes they make me uncomfortable. That’s how I know it’s working. Because discomfort is actually a key to all growth. When you find yourself squirming a little … embrace it.

Your Brain Is Rooting for You 

Here’s something worth knowing: Your brain, unlike most things past a certain age, actually wants to keep growing.

Without getting too technical, neuroscience has given us the concept of neuroplasticity: the brain’s remarkable ability to form new neural connections throughout life. Not just in childhood. Not just in your 30s. Throughout life. The brain retains the capacity to rewire, adapt, and strengthen well into old age … but only if you use it. Challenge it. Expose it to novelty. Make it work. The brain changes itself based on what you do and what you don’t do.

And here’s the one nobody expected: Your brain loves cholesterol. Loves it. The brain is the most cholesterol-rich organ in the body … it contains roughly 25% of all the cholesterol in your system, most of it used to make your neurons fire efficiently. We spent decades demonizing the stuff, and it turns out the organ doing the demonizing needed it to function. And statins, it turns out, are not what they were cracked up to be, only extending life for about four days and often causing memory problems or worse.

An unused brain atrophies, just like an unused muscle. Sitting still … intellectually, emotionally, experientially … is a slow erosion. The people I’ve watched become their worst selves in later life almost all had one thing in common: They stopped being curious.

What I Can’t Control

We have very little control over what happens to us. But we have enormous control over what we do with it.

We can control what we put in our bodies and what we let rot inside our heads. We can control whether we say yes to a new experience or talk ourselves out of it with excuses or fear dressed up as reasons. We can control whether we get on a plane to someplace that scares us a little,  learn a phrase in another language, try the food, and sit with the discomfort of not understanding something, and come out the other side larger than we went in.

Personally, I don’t want to sit mindlessly watching the news. I want to travel the world. I want new languages stumbling out of my mouth. I want to understand why people who seem so different from me fight so hard for what they believe, and to genuinely ask myself what I might be missing. I want to read what challenges me, not just what confirms me.

The lounge chair and the news cycle are always there. They will wait for me. The world will not.

Questions Worth Asking

I ask myself some version of these every day. What about you?

What are you treating as settled that might actually be worth reopening?

Where is the arrogance of your youth still running the show, and where has it finally started to quiet down?

What has your ancient wisdom closed off that you should still be curious about? You don’t have to be old to be set in your ways. I’m fighting like mad to get someone I know to adopt some new technology that will change his life, yet he refuses.

What are you accepting as gospel simply because you’ve believed it for a long time, or because your parents or grandparents believed it?

When did you last do something that made you feel genuinely new? Or really uncomfortable?

What is one thing you’re calling “I’m too old for that” or “I’m too young for that,” which is actually just fear with a better vocabulary?

I don’t have clean answers to any of these, but I have a commitment to keep asking.

The Bottom Line

Youth’s greatest weapon is its energy and hunger, but those are also its greatest liabilities. It’s why insurance for reckless young men is expensive. Age’s greatest gifts, perspective and patience, are also its greatest threats, if we let them calcify into certainty.

The goal is to stay in the tension. Stay curious. Stay in the room with people who make you stretch. Let the storms clear out your deadwood. And for heaven’s sake, before you reach for something at the edge of your dock … look more carefully. Some logs have teeth.

Now go do something that surprises you.

 

Eric Rhoads

The water does something at this hour that defies explanation. Thousands of shifting diamonds blink across the surface as the Florida sun finds its angle. I’m squinting from the shore at silhouettes of palm trees and lounge chairs so perfectly arranged they look airbrushed into a brochure.

A dolphin surfaces 50 yards out, indifferent to my admiration, then disappears. And overhead, an osprey circles in that slow, focused way that tells you she’s not sightseeing. Then she stops.

She announces, then dives.

The osprey calls out before she commits. It’s not a warning to the fish; the fish can’t exactly reschedule. It’s an announcement: I’m here. I see you. Here I come. Then she folds into a javelin, hits the water with the kind of commitment that makes you wince, and rises with golden talons wrapped around something that didn’t get a vote in the matter.

She didn’t circle forever. She didn’t weigh the risks or consult anyone. She didn’t overthink it. She announced. She dove. She ate.

I’ve been thinking about that all morning.

What the Osprey Knows

Here is what the osprey is not doing: She is not explaining to her osprey friends that she’s “taking some time.” She’s not posting about it. She’s already circling again.

I say this not to shame anyone whose definition of a good Tuesday involves a golf cart and a satisfying nine holes. If the green fills you the way a fish fills an osprey, then play every course on the continent with my blessing. There is no right or wrong here.

But I have a suspicion that some of you are circling without committing. That you feel the pull but have slowed the wings a little because someone or something … a decade, a culture, a well-meaning doctor … suggested you’ve earned the lounge chair. That maybe this is the phase characterized by the gradual, graceful reduction of ambition. And maybe some mornings you’re not sure you agree.

Breaking What Works

Here’s what I know about myself: I try to be like the osprey. I have insane ideas, and so I announce them, to shame myself into getting them done. Without the announcement, there is no accountability. Without action … the dive … I’d keep circling with no consequence, no skin in the game, no reason to actually leave the air.

The announcement is the commitment. It’s not bragging; it’s burning the bridges behind me. 

Most people keep their big ideas private, and that’s precisely why most big ideas die quietly, somewhere between the coffee cup and the calendar. You can circle a private idea forever. The moment you say it out loud, to someone who will remember, the dive becomes non-negotiable. Your reputation is now in the water ahead of you.

Breaking Old Habits

I didn’t build a company to produce the same widget for a thousand years. I love reinvention. Not reinvention out of crisis, but the deliberate, mildly reckless act of breaking something that isn’t broken, just to see what happens next. I like to do it personally and professionally.

The thrill isn’t in the outcome. The thrill is in the not-knowing. The moment before the dive, when anything is still possible. It’s a dopamine rush, and I’ve decided I’m not interested in giving it up just because I’m old enough to know better.

So my next stop: The Florence Academy of Art in Italy, five concentrated weeks of classical drawing and painting training, starting right after Easter, where excellence is the only acceptable standard and they will tell me with precise Italian politeness that my drawing is structurally incorrect, to erase and start over, and slow down this time.

I don’t need this to sell more paintings. I’m not building a curriculum around it. I’m doing it because the box exists and I want to know if I can check it. That’s the whole reason. And I just told you, so now I have to.

So I’ve been going to life drawing groups, practicing more than I normally would, trying to arrive less embarrassing than I currently am. That has limits, but I intend to reach them.

Business Gets the Same Treatment

And it’s not just the art. Back at my company, I’m launching new things — not out of pressure, not because the old things aren’t working, but because the best version of what I can offer my customers doesn’t exist yet, and I want to build it.

The excitement isn’t in knowing how it will go. It never is. It’s in the dive itself, the commitment before you know what you’ll come up with.

Every new thing I’ve built felt slightly insane and very scary in the early stages. I usually get resistance to every idea, rolling eyes, “Here we go again, another harebrained idea” from some of my advisors. That feeling, I’ve decided, is a good sign. Comfort is not a reliable compass. If everyone immediately agrees it’s a great idea, it’s probably not that great an idea.

It’s About the Hunt

Life, it turns out, isn’t about the fish you catch or accumulate, though those are nice perks. It’s about the hunt — the challenge, the unsettling electricity of knowing you’ve put yourself at risk, and announcing it so loudly that failure is no longer a quiet option.

The osprey doesn’t circle because she’s afraid of the water. She circles because she’s choosing her moment. But here’s the thing most people miss: At some point the circling stops being strategy and starts being avoidance. And the fish doesn’t wait.

You know which one you’re doing. We always do. Even though we tell ourselves stories about timing and finances, and convince ourselves that someday will come, most times there’s not another fish coming. 

The osprey is already circling again. The water is genuinely spectacular. And somewhere overhead, something is about to dive.

Where will you dive?

What are you in need of circling?

Eric Rhoads