Is Mastery Cuckoo?

One sunrise this week, a sound yanked me out of a dead sleep.

I bolted upright, heart pounding, convinced something was wrong. Then it registered. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Not one bird. Dozens of them, calling from every direction across the Florentine hills, overlapping and echoing off the stone like a clock shop at noon. 

I sat there in the dark and laughed.

Four weeks in Italy, and the place is still finding ways to surprise me. That’s the thing about going somewhere that has been beautiful for a thousand years and more. It doesn’t try. It just is.

Beauty Just Is

The other night I scrambled up the narrow, curving road to the summit of the hills above the city, just barely in time to watch the sun go down over Florence. Pink and orange soaking into the villas, the cypress trees standing like sentinels against the fading light, the mountains rolling away in every direction. I won’t pretend I didn’t tear up. I did. 

Standing there alone, watching it, I thought about all the painters and sculptors and architects who looked at this same view and decided the world was not yet as beautiful as it could be, then went and did something about it.

They had help, of course. The Medici family funded the whole thing. Commissioned the best artists they could find, gave them resources and time and a reason to show up. Which is its own lesson. But that’s not the one on my mind this morning.

The one on my mind is mastery.

Mastery Takes Time

I’ve been studying here at the Florence Academy for a month, putting in 12-hour days, doing every optional session, taking private instruction on top of the coursework, squeezing everything I can out of every hour. And I’ve grown more in these four weeks than I expected to grow in a year. 

But here’s what got under my skin: I’ve watched other students arrive late, skip assignments, argue with instructors, and do the minimum required to technically be present. Same school. Same teachers. Same city full of cuckoo birds and impossible sunsets. Completely different trajectories.

That gap is not about talent. It’s about something harder to name.

Malcolm Gladwell made famous the idea of “10,000 hours.”  Practice long enough, and you arrive somewhere. But I’ve been painting for 30 years, and I walked into this school and had to unlearn almost everything in order to relearn it differently. 

Time alone isn’t the answer. I’ve known people who have done the same thing badly for decades and called it experience. That’s not mastery. That’s just a long time.

Real mastery, the kind that quietly fills a room when someone who has it walks in, is something else entirely. It’s time applied with intention. It’s the willingness to be a beginner again, even when your ego would rather not. It’s doing the extra work when no one is watching and no one would notice if you didn’t.

I complimented one of the instructors here, a woman who is genuinely a legend in her field. Her response was that it was only the wrinkles that made people perceive her that way. She was being humble, but she was also pointing at something true. Mastery doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates quietly, over years of reaching for something just beyond what you could do yesterday.

What’s Your Story?

Here’s what I keep thinking about, though, and this has nothing to do with painting.

You are the hero of a story you are writing right now, whether you’re conscious of it or not. And the question in front of you isn’t whether you’ll eventually arrive somewhere. You will. Time moves in only one direction. The question is what you’ll have in your hands when you get there.

The opposite of mastery isn’t failure. Failure is actually part of mastery, the necessary, uncomfortable, humbling part. The opposite of mastery is going through the motions. Showing up in body but not in spirit. Doing just enough. Settling for the version of yourself that requires the least effort to maintain.

And the saddest part is that it doesn’t feel like a decision when you’re in it. It just feels like Tuesday.

My dad used to say, “If you’re going to do something, become the world’s best.” I’ve never been the world’s best at anything. Not even close. But I’ve never stopped believing that the attempt itself changes you, that the reaching matters more than the arriving, that the person you become in the pursuit of something excellent is the whole point.

So: What’s Required?

It takes guidance. Striving without direction is just wandering with ambition attached. Find the people who are where you want to be, and pay close attention to what they do when no one is watching.

It takes the willingness to be wrong. The students here who argue with their instructors aren’t learning. They’re protecting an image of themselves that isn’t serving them. Being wrong isn’t a threat. It’s the door.

It takes doing the extra thing. Not always, not forever, but in the seasons when it matters, the people who make the most progress are almost always the ones who stayed a little longer, tried one more time, did the assignment nobody else bothered to do.

Copper Teaches Everything

This month one of my extra things was learning the ancient art of copper plate making and etching, a craft so old and so slow that almost nobody does it anymore. Before you ever put a mark on the plate, you spend two hours preparing it by hand, sanding and grinding the copper smooth, working it in long careful strokes, cleaning, buffing it, grinding it, until the surface is ready to receive what you’re about to give it. 

You could use machines. There are faster ways. But the point isn’t speed. The point is that the hand knows something the machine doesn’t, and the time you spend in that preparation is part of what goes into the work. The craft lives in the doing of it, not just in the result.

I thought about that for a long time while my arms ached and the copper slowly came to life under my hands.

I also thought about my kids.

Why Bother Working?

One of them told me recently that he doesn’t want to work. Not that he’s lazy, exactly, just that he’s asking the question out loud that a lot of people ask quietly: Why go through life just to work? What’s the point?

I didn’t have a clean answer for him, and I’m not sure I do now. For me, the work was always the point. Yes, part of it was about wanting to eat and have a few nice things; I won’t pretend otherwise. But that’s not what got me out of bed at five in the morning or kept me up thinking long after I should have been asleep. It was the making of something. The solving of a problem. The feeling of reaching for something just beyond my grasp and occasionally, briefly, touching it.

What I wanted to say to him, and maybe still will, is this: A life without challenge isn’t rest. It’s just emptiness with better lighting. The heartbreaks matter. The striving matters. Not because someone told you it should, but because the alternative, a smooth, frictionless passage through your years with nothing asked of you and nothing given, would leave you at the end of it with nothing to hold. No copper plates. No aching arms. No tears on a hilltop at sunset because you actually showed up for something.

I don’t know if that landed. I hope some version of it does, someday.

The Pursuit Continues

And here’s the other thing I keep coming back to, something nobody told me clearly enough when I was young: The pursuit never stops. It’s not supposed to. Curiosity isn’t a phase you graduate out of. Finding new things that excite the senses isn’t a young person’s luxury. And anyone who tries to set a standard about being “too young” or “too old” for something worth doing is selling you a story that serves them, not you.

I’m in Florence, while others are retiring and relaxing, grinding copper by hand and being humbled daily by instructors less than half my age, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the finest seasons of my life.

The mastery you build in any area —  a relationship, a craft, a business, a habit of mind — pays dividends that don’t show up in any ledger. Not wealth exactly, though sometimes that follows. Something richer than that. A life full of real experience. The kind you can feel in your chest when you’re standing on a hilltop at sunset and you realize you actually showed up for your own life.

That’s worth waking up for.

Even if the birds won’t let you sleep in.

Go ahead and make this week the one where you decide to stop going through the motions on the thing that matters most to you. Nobody’s grading you. That’s the whole point.

Eric Rhoads