There is a particular smell to a Florence morning in springtime.

Damp stone, warmed by the first sun after an early shower. Jasmine on the garden wall scenting the air. A thread of olive woodsmoke drifting up from a house down the hill, soothing in a way I can’t quite explain. Espresso from a cafe two blocks away in the village, carried on air so clean it feels like it’s been rinsed. Cypress. Wild rosemary. The faint, sweet rot of old wisteria petals on the cobblestones.

The bells start at seven. First one church — an ancient stone tower in the village — then another, then a third answering from across the valley, until the whole hillside is talking to itself in bronze.

I have been waking up to this for three weeks.

I live, for now, in an old stone farmhouse in the hills above the city. The windows are tall and the shutters are green, and when I push them open in the morning, the valley spreads out below me like a painting someone began 400 years ago and simply never finished. Olive groves. Terracotta roofs. Yellow villas. A ribbon of road disappearing into a stand of umbrella pines. Light the color of honey.

I did not come here for the view.

I came here to be a student again.

Just a Painter

The first day at the Florence Academy of Art, they put us in a circle and asked us to introduce ourselves. When my turn came, I said my first name. I said I was from Austin. I said I had triplets. I said I had been painting for a couple of decades.

That was all.

No magazine. No company. No convention. No show. No movement. Just a guy from Texas who holds a brush.

I know how that sounds. Let me say it plainly, because I do not want to dress it up: I did not leave those things out because I thought anyone would recognize me. Most people in that room had never heard of any of it, and that was exactly the point. I left them out because I have worn those roles for so long that I had forgotten what it felt like to stand in a room without them. To not be the host, or the publisher, or the person someone was waiting to ask a question of. To just be another painter at another easel, trying to get one more value right.

For five weeks, I wanted to carry nothing.

I wanted to see who I was underneath.

Men like me carry our work as our identity. I came here hoping to find a different one — that of an artist, quietly confident he knows what he’s doing.

The Third Day

By the third day, I was asking myself what on earth I had done.

The work was relentless. Early mornings. Full days at the easel. Lectures on Mondays and Fridays. Museum trips on weekends.

People warned me I would get fatigued from standing at an easel eight hours a day. What they didn’t tell me is that my shoulders would ache from constant use. My hand ached. My feet ached. My pride ached, because I was surrounded by 20- and 30-year-olds drawing circles around me, and I had arrived with some quiet assumption that the years would count for more than they did.

There were evenings the room grew small around me. Not sad, exactly. Not homesick. Just small. The kind of quiet that settles in when you are alone in a country where you can’t speak the language, and the body you have been asking a great deal of for a great many years decides, politely, that it has had enough.

I had planned to film my YouTube show five days a week on top of all of this.

I cut it to Mondays and Fridays. I am not Superman. I never was, really; I just had not admitted that out loud in a while.

There was a morning, in the middle of an especially challenging exercise, when I genuinely wondered if I had made a serious mistake coming here. I was stuck. I didn’t feel like I could pull myself out of it. And for the first time in a long time, I lost some of my confidence.

Something Began Turning

Then, slowly, something began to turn.

The students became friends. Not because of anything I had done before I arrived, but because we were sharing the same struggle, the same charcoal dust, the same humbling in front of the same plaster cast. A few sharp-eyed painters eventually pieced together who I was and quietly asked for marketing advice, which I gave between classes the way a plumber might help a neighbor on a Saturday.

But the gift of the month was the blending in. The anonymity. The stripping away. And the discovery that I could do things I really didn’t think I could do … drawing the human figure in exact proportion, rendering a plaster cast in charcoal, painting the best still life I’ve ever done.

I discovered etching. Copper plates, acid, ink, the smell of the press room, a whole medium I had never touched, and somewhere in the second week I fell for it the way a teenager falls for a song on the radio. I have a new love. I did not come looking for one.

A Painting Everywhere

I discovered that the Tuscan countryside, from the road that winds out of the hills, is a painting around every corner. I have driven with a camera in my hand and taken hundreds of photographs of cypresses, stone villas, and impossible light. I have never felt more connected to a piece of land in my life. Not to the people, because I cannot speak to them. To the land itself. To the light falling across it at six in the evening.

Florence inside the walls has been loved to death. The Uffizi moves you through like cattle in a chute now. But 15 minutes up the hill, the cypresses stand the way they have stood for 400 years, and nobody is in a hurry.

The Accidental Sabbatical

Here is the strange part, and the part I want to sit with for a moment.

This was not supposed to be a sabbatical. I have been on company calls most nights from 9:30 until midnight. Decisions have been made. Fires have been put out. The business has not paused for a second.

And yet.

Somehow, for the first time in years, I have had time. Time to walk. Time to sit. Time to stare out a window at a valley and let a thought finish itself before another one interrupts. Time to ask questions I have been too busy to ask.

What do I want the rest of my life to look like?

What am I doing out of love, and what am I doing out of habit?

Is this hillside whispering something I ought to be listening to, or is it just a beautiful rental?

If my wife said, “Let’s sell the house and spend spring and fall here,” would I say yes? (I think I would say yes in a heartbeat. That surprises me.)

I have not come to any conclusions. I want to be honest about that. I am not writing to you from the other side of an epiphany. I am writing from the middle of a long, useful, unfinished question.

But I have come to believe that the questions themselves are the point. That a life without them gets narrower without telling you it’s getting narrower. That somewhere between 20 and 60, most of us stop asking and start managing, and the managing feels so much like living that we do not notice the difference.

I needed this. I did not know how badly until I got here. And I already know it’s not going to last long enough.

Two weeks from now I will be on a plane. PACE begins the moment I land. The routine will close over me like a warm bath, and I will be glad for it, because I love what I do.

But I will not be the same man who got on the plane going over.

Take The Coat Off

So here is what I want to leave you with, while your coffee is still warm.

You have built something. A career. A family. A reputation in a small pond or a large one. Whatever it is, the thing you built has quietly become the thing you are. You wear it like a coat so comfortable you have forgotten you are wearing it.

Take the coat off for a little while.

Go somewhere nobody is waiting on you. Try something you’re bad at. Sit in a room with people half your age and let them be better than you, because they are. Leave your title in a drawer at home. See who you are without it.

You do not need five weeks in Tuscany. You need three days in a cabin, or a Saturday in a class across town, or a morning on a bench with a sketchbook and no phone. Something. Anything that makes the armor come off.

And when it does, ask yourself the questions I am asking myself.

What do I want the rest of this to look like?

What am I no longer willing to do in my life?

What am I doing out of love, and what am I doing out of habit?

What is whispering to me that I have been too loud to hear?

You may not come home with answers. I haven’t.

But you will come home asking better questions.

And your life will thank you for it.

Yours from a hillside above Florence,

Eric Rhoads

The smell hits you first.

Espresso and diesel and something ancient, stone warmed by 10,000 summers, the scent of bread baking somewhere in a 200-year-old wood-fired brick pizza oven behind a door you’ll never find. Florence in the morning smells like civilization itself decided to stop trying to improve and just … be. The light is gold and pink, splashing at intense angles on terracotta rooftops the color of dried blood, and the pigeons don’t flinch when the motorcycles scream past because the pigeons have been here longer than anyone and they know the motorcycles always miss.

I know this because I have been nearly missed several times.

Driving in Italy is a game of Mortal Kombat, except nobody told you the rules before the match started and everyone else has been playing since birth. Motorcycles materialize in your peripheral vision, dozens at a time, a high-speed swarm of chrome and leather, buzzing in and out of lanes that exist only in the riders’ imagination. Cars dart around you with two horn blasts and a gesture. I drive like what I am: a tourist, apologetic and cautious, waving politely at everyone who honks. They are not waving back the same way.

But I am learning, slowly. By watching the people who actually know what they’re doing. They are all in, committed, and unapologetic, driving fast to get somewhere they want to be.

And that, it turns out, is the whole story.

Finished Week Two

I’ve just finished week two here at the Florence Academy of Art. Two weeks is normally the outer edge of a long vacation — the first week is to unwind, the second to actually enjoy being unwound. But this is not a cushy workshop with “Italian hours” and espresso breaks. There is no unwinding in this intensive five-week program. The schedule runs morning to night, the instruction is kind and understanding and relentless, and something strange is happening that I didn’t expect.

As I’ve said before, I came here with modest expectations. Five weeks is not a transformation. Three years is what transformation takes. I knew that going in. My goal was simple: get a little better at drawing, a little better at painting, and come home with something useful.

What I didn’t expect was to have my entire framework for teaching art quietly dismantled and rebuilt around me while I was busy meticulously making cast drawings.

What Shook Me

Over at least two decades, I’ve produced hundreds of art instruction courses. I’ve run online and in-person teaching events and reached millions of people on YouTube. I have spent years, real years, trying to figure out what artists need and how to give it to them. And sitting in this academy, watching complete novices catch up to experienced painters inside of two weeks, I realized something uncomfortable.

I’ve been solving for what people say they need. Not for what they actually need.

Those are not the same thing.

This is going to change how I do everything.

Having No Idea You Don’t Know

There’s a concept in psychology that explains why this gap exists. It’s called the “four stages of conscious competence,” and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Stage one is unconscious incompetence. You don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t even see the gap because you don’t know the gap is there. You’re not frustrated yet. You’re just … unaware. This is actually a kind of bliss, right up until the moment it isn’t.

Stage two is conscious incompetence. Something cracks the surface. You see someone who can do what you can’t, or you try something and fail at it visibly, and the gap is suddenly enormous and obvious. You know what you don’t know. This is the most uncomfortable stage. Most people quit here. The ones who don’t quit start climbing.

Stage three is conscious competence. You can now do the thing, but it requires your full attention. You’re thinking through every step. A beginning driver gripping the wheel with both hands, checking every mirror, narrating the process internally. A painter thinking: angle of the shadow, temperature of the light, edge quality here, lost edge there. When I first started flying, the instrument panel was overwhelming before it became second nature. You’re competent, but you’re not free yet. It takes everything you’ve got.

Stage four is unconscious competence. The skill has been absorbed so deeply that you no longer think about it. The expert driver changes lanes and carries on a conversation without realizing they changed lanes. The master painter makes a mark and it’s simply right, without a committee meeting happening in their head first. The knowledge has gone underground, into the body, into the instincts. You know what you know, but you can no longer fully explain how.

Here is the brutal irony of stage four: It often makes experts terrible at teaching beginners.

The master has forgotten what it feels like not to know. What feels effortless to them looks impossible to you, but when you ask for help, they often can’t articulate the steps because the steps dissolved into reflex decades ago. They give you the destination without the map. 

That’s why some people cannot teach well — but others are extraordinary at it. A great teacher never forgets what it felt like to not yet know, and knows how to keep students’ attention while remaining patient.

Getting Personal

Now here’s where it gets personal … for me, and probably for you.

When you look at your own passion, whatever it is, and decide what you need next, you are making that assessment from inside your own stage. If you’re in stage one, you don’t even know the right questions to ask. If you’re in stage two, your diagnosis is colored by your most recent frustration, which may or may not be the actual root problem. 

I constantly hear, “I need to learn color mixing,” or, “I have to find my own style.” And sometimes those things are true. But more often, the color problems are downstream of a drawing problem, and the drawing problem is downstream of a seeing problem, and no amount of color mixing instruction will fix what is actually broken. Artists can be guilty of saying, “I just need some tips or pointers because I don’t want to lose my creative flair,” not realizing that it is solid foundations that allow creativity.

This is where most of us go wrong. We pick the things we think will help, without understanding what will actually help. We treat the symptom we can name and ignore the disease we haven’t yet learned to recognize. So we randomly sign up for things, and wonder weeks or months later why our progress isn’t what we were hoping for.

A Solid System

The academy here doesn’t ask you what you need. They don’t even evaluate where you are. Instead, they insert you into a proven system developed over centuries and give you what the system says you need. The results are stunning. Novices catching experienced painters in two weeks. Not because the novices are unusually gifted, but because they had nothing to unlearn. They walked in with empty hands and the system filled them.

The rest of us walked in carrying all our old assumptions, and the system had to work around the furniture we’d already installed. One of my biggest frustrations this week is that I keep trying to lean into what I already know rather than letting go of it and surrendering to the new system. I keep trying to solve the problem with tools that are themselves part of the problem.

Universal Application

I’m telling you this because it applies to almost everything you’re trying to grow — your painting, your business, your relationships, your health. All of it is filtered through our own bias, and the bias of our upbringing and experience.

The gap between where you are and where you want to be is real. But your map of that gap, drawn from inside your own experience, is almost certainly incomplete. Not because you’re not smart. You are. But because you are measuring the unknown with the tools of the known, and the tools of the known have limits.

The person who has already crossed the territory you’re trying to cross doesn’t just have more skill. They have a different map, one drawn from the other side. And that map shows things yours doesn’t show yet.

Trying to cross alone is admirable. Nobody is going to argue with your courage.

But finding someone who has already crossed, who can hold their map next to yours and point to the places where they diverge … that’s not weakness. That’s the fastest route through.

A Badge of Courage

Many artists I know proudly claim they are self-taught, as if it’s a badge of honor. And in many ways it is, because they have endured incredible hardship and invested years to figure things out on their own. That perseverance deserves respect.

But here is the hard truth: Others often surpass them, not because they’re more talented, but because a skilled mentor saved them years of wrong turns, pointing them toward what actually works instead of letting them discover it by process of elimination. Hardship is an important part of growth — it forges character, and nothing can take that away from you. But the hardship doesn’t have to come entirely from figuring it out alone.

We don’t enter medical school to become self-taught surgeons. We learn from the best. We study under the best. We practice under a system that provides constant feedback. Then we go out and spend a lifetime in practice, growing and adjusting. The path is structured the way it is because the people who designed it already know where the pitfalls are. Yet there is still some mistaken belief that we are born into our ability to do art. 

Drawing Conclusions

Being here has made me addicted to learning at the highest possible level. It’s made me addicted to discomfort, and I feel more alive as a result.

The first days were an adjustment. My confidence took hits. There were moments where I genuinely wondered if I could continue at this intensity, if I belonged here at all. But I powered through those doubts, and the other side of them is something I wasn’t expecting: noticeable, visible, undeniable growth. In ability and in confidence. I am reinvigorated in a way I haven’t felt in years. And just as I get comfortable, they throw something new into the mix and we get uncomfortable again.

Instead of trying to manage my own learning process, I am happier, and growing faster, in the hands of well-trained guides who are showing me what I didn’t know I needed.

For me, right now, that’s art school. What is it for you? 

What have you always wanted to do, to learn, to become? It’s never too early. It’s never too late. The only thing that actually costs you is waiting.

The motorcycles here still terrify me. But I’ve started to understand the logic underneath the chaos. There are rules. They’re just not the rules I arrived with.

I think I’m starting to learn the right ones.

Eric Rhoads

Roosters crow before dawn here. Not as an annoyance … as a reminder.

Instead of sleeping in one of the tourist-filled hotels in the Renaissance city of Florence, I chose to spend my five weeks here living on a quaint old olive farm, 20 minutes outside of Florence, high in the hills overlooking this magical city. 

Crazy Drivers

My drive involves 50 hairpin turns, on roads barely wide enough for one car, threading between ancient stone walls. Meeting another car head-on means someone backs up. As I wind through the Tuscan hills, I pass ancient villas with giant manicured trees meant for royalty, gates buried under cascading wisteria, and farms with rows of purple cherry blossoms. Springtime here is magical.

Distinct Purpose

But here’s what I keep thinking about: I chose this.

I could have done this differently. Found something more convenient, more economical, more practical. There are a few strong art academies in America. But I could not resist the lure of living here for five weeks, fully immersed, in the place where Michelangelo and Da Vinci lived and worked, surrounded by the things I love … great art and great artists.

Most people never make that choice, and settle for what is.

Nobody Had a Reason

Twelve students are completing the program alongside me, mostly a mixture of professionals checking off a bucket list dream and most between their early 30s and late 70s. Almost no one came with an economic argument, an end game, or a career plan. Just a bucket list box to check.

Except one.

A young oil engineer from Dubai. Tired of spending her life doing something she does not love, she is trading it in for something she does … and hoping a living will follow. She may be the wisest person in the room.

The question she’s wrestling with, the one that brought her all the way here, doing three five-week stints in a row: What if the thing I love is actually the thing I’m supposed to do?

Consistency Produces Magic

Here’s what has genuinely surprised me.

Every instructor this week has been completely consistent, teaching the same methodology, none of them trying to insert their own system or shortcuts. What’s mind-blowing is what that consistency produces. 

Students with zero drawing experience. Students like me, who need significant improvement and are trying to unlearn bad habits. Yet on the very first day, after just a few intense hours, the exercises produced significant, visible growth in every person here, including complete novices. 

Each day has built on those lessons. We are fully immersed from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, with optional evening drawing sessions added on top. I have attended every session and have watched my own progress improve significantly in three days by forcing myself to stay focused, immersed, and practicing,

Three days.

I cannot imagine how it will feel after five weeks. Which, though I love my work and my career, I already know will end too soon.

Your Olive Farm

Which brings me to you.

What is the thing you have been putting off, the skill you have been meaning to deepen, the place you have been meaning to go, the version of yourself you have been meaning to become? 

What is the equivalent of your olive farm in the hills — your desire to check off a lifelong dream?

The roosters don’t crow forever. At some point, you stop waking up.

While some might say, “I had my time, I had my career,” one man here, a world-famous photojournalist with multiple Pulitzer Prizes, is here because life “shouldn’t stop with retirement. That’s when life begins.” 

The surprising truth I’m learning here: The reason most people never improve at the thing they love is not lack of talent. It’s not even lack of time. It’s the absence of full immersion in an environment built specifically for that growth, surrounded by others doing the same thing, under the guidance of people who have walked the road ahead of you.

You don’t need five weeks in Tuscany. But you might need something.

What would your something be?

Eric Rhoads

Two stories compete for my attention this Easter morning as the Texas heat starts pretending it’s summer and it’s 95 already. 

One involves pastel eggs hidden in dewy grass, chocolate rabbits, and very docile bunnies.

The other involves a brutal public execution, a borrowed tomb, and the most shocking reversal in human history.

Both are true. Both matter. But only one changes everything.

Red Blazer Days

Easter morning in our house went off like a starter pistol.

My brothers and I would tear through the rooms hunting eggs and baskets, then commence the serious business of consuming as much chocolate as humanly possible before anyone noticed. Then came the transformation: Sunday best.

The 6-year-old version of me had firm opinions about fashion. My favorite red blazer was non-negotiable. But no blazer was complete without my 007 gun and holster strapped underneath, two Hot Wheels cars wedged into my pockets, and the general confidence of a man who had already solved breakfast.

Mom, meanwhile, was an act of art. She made her own hat for every Easter, always elegant, always a surprise. She covered her shoes in matching fabric, pinned on the corsage Dad had brought her, and led us out to the big blue Oldsmobile like a parade marshal who also happened to be the most beautiful woman in town.

The sermon, I will confess, was not always riveting for a 6-year-old. I had a system: Hot Wheels tucked inside a hymnal. Or Mom would quietly hand me a pen and paper so I could draw airplanes. The Lord, I suspect, was amused.

After church came the real prize: cousins, grandparents, Easter dinner, the beautiful noise of a large family filling every room.

What We Miss

I think about those gatherings more as I get older, not less.

Earlier this year my friend Joe in Boston described holiday chaos with 25 people at every dinner, and I felt something I can only describe as a mild, loving envy. Living far from family is a choice, and like all choices, it carries a price. The big gatherings happen less now. The cousins scatter. The grandparents are gone. The Oldsmobile is a memory.

But the feeling of it, that specific warmth of belonging to something larger than yourself, never quite leaves. It just changes shape.

A Personal Resurrection

Last fall I visited friends in Florence, Italy, and something happened that I can only describe as a calling.

I toured the Florence Academy of Art, one of the finest classical art schools in the world. Standing in those studios, where students draw from live models in the same quality of light, in the same neighborhoods where Da Vinci and Michelangelo once worked, something in me shifted. The romance of it. The weight of it. The terrifying excitement of it.

I signed up. Five weeks. Starting Tuesday.

There is no grand plan behind this. I am not quitting my job. I am not expecting to emerge a master. A solid three- or four-year program would really move the needle; five weeks is a beginning, not a conclusion. But I will work 10-hour days in class, come home to homework, and push limits I have grown too comfortable ignoring. That is enough of a reason.

Later today I board a flight for London, then I fly to Florence, pick up a rental car, and drive to a tiny apartment on the outskirts of town, arriving on Easter Monday.

I will be alone. Really alone. Perhaps for the first time since before I was married.

I will admit: The silence intimidates me more than the drawing does. I am not someone who has spent much time with no agenda, no family, no one needing anything. 

I hope to fill the off hours with new friendships, long walks through Tuscan hills, and the particular joy of being beautifully lost.

But I am stepping into this without a map. Which, I suppose, is exactly the point.

Serving No Purpose

Dreams do not require justification.

This trip is impractical. Finding five weeks in a schedule like mine requires real rescheduling, real faith, and a sustained effort to ignore the voice cataloguing all the reasons it was a bad idea.

But here is what I have come to believe: Dreams that require no sacrifice are not really dreams. They are preferences. Real dreams cost something, frighten you a little, and make the people around you raise an eyebrow.

Which brings me to you.

Light the Fuse

What just popped into your head?

Not the responsible answer. The first one, the one you immediately started explaining away.

Was it a place you have always meant to go? A skill you quietly abandoned somewhere in your 20s? A version of yourself you set aside when life got loud and practical?

That dream did not disappear. It just went quiet. It has been waiting.

You do not need a reason. You do not need perfect timing, because the timing will never be perfect. You do not need permission.

What you need is to light the fuse, throw the bomb, hold your ears, and be ready for an explosion that enriches your life beyond what you can currently imagine.

The question is not whether you can afford to pursue it. The question is whether you can afford not to.

What is one bold, impractical, slightly irrational step you could take today, not someday, today, to make it real?

Dreams are meant to be lived. Not remembered. Not mourned. Lived.

Happy Easter.

Eric Rhoads