The world disappeared overnight.

I stepped outside before sunrise into air so cold and wet it tasted like metal, and the lake was simply gone. Not hidden. Gone. The far shore, the treeline, the sky, all of it swallowed by a white so complete it felt less like weather and more like the world had been unfinished, erased back down to the canvas before the painter had a chance to lay in the background. I could smell wet pine and cold water and the faint sweetness of woodsmoke drifting from somewhere I couldn’t see. A loon called out, echoing across the water, and the fog swallowed the sound halfway, the way a held breath swallows a word.

I had forgotten something in the car at the landing, which meant a lake crossing. Fine on a normal morning. Not this one.

I eased the boat off the dock and idled out into the white, and within 20 feet the island behind me vanished as though it had never existed. The water was black glass, rippling out from the bow in slow rings that dissolved into nothing. Pine tops floated in and out of view like ghosts of trees, rootless, hovering, there and then not. Somewhere off to my right a cabin light glowed like a candle behind a bedsheet, a warm orange smudge with no house attached to it. It was a Thomas Kinkade Christmas card, if Kinkade had painted the version where you can’t find your way home.

Ten feet of visibility. Maybe less. My eyes strained at nothing and found nothing, and my ears took over the way they do when sight quits, listening past my own motor for the sound of another one. I told myself no one in their right mind would be out in this.

And that is exactly when a little red boat came out of the wall of white.

Two fishermen, hunting for a spot to drop a line, close enough that I could see the surprise on their faces, which was surely a mirror of the surprise on mine. They were moving faster than I was. A half second of nothing at all happened, and then it was over. A quick wave, two boats, two directions, back into the white.

My heart was still racing when I reached the next visible landmark. I set my compass, kept my hands steady, and felt my way across on faith and the compass needle until the dock appeared out of the murk. By the time I came back, the sun had burned every last thread of fog off the water, and it was a clear, blue, ordinary, beautiful morning. You’d never have known.

Life does that. You’re cruising along in the routine of your own life, and something comes out of the white at you, fast and close, and you never saw it coming.

What You Get

I try to live as transparently as I know how. What you see is what you get. The good, the bad, and once in a while the ugly, but it’s all out in the open where anyone can find it.

What troubles me is the opposite. The people where what you see is not what you get. The ones who play games, who talk behind your back, who gossip, who spread rumors, who say things about you in one room they’d never say to your face in another.

I used to be one of them.

Then one day I got my head handed to me. I said something unflattering about a man to a friend. The friend went straight to him and repeated it word for word. The man I had talked about called me. He confronted me directly, and he had every right to.

I could have denied it. I could have softened it, spun it, explained the context, done any of the thousand things we do to wriggle off a hook. Instead I took it like a man. I admitted it, I thanked him for telling me to my face what I hadn’t had the courage to say to his, and I apologized. Then I told him he’d taught me something I intended to keep.

There’s an old adage that’s proved true every time I’ve watched it play out: whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. The friend who brings you news about someone else is, at that very moment, showing you exactly what he does with news about you.

Why We Talk

The psychology of it is more interesting than you’d think, and less flattering.

Most negative gossip is a shortcut. Psychologists call it downward social comparison, which is a clinical way of saying that tearing someone down is the cheapest, fastest way to feel bigger without doing the work of growing. It costs nothing. It requires no change. And it feels wonderful, for about 90 seconds.

Often it’s envy wearing a costume. It’s far easier to whisper about someone’s success, someone’s marriage, or someone’s good fortune than to sit still with the ache of wanting it yourself.

C.S. Lewis got at the root of it in Mere Christianity. “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something,” he wrote, “only out of having more of it than the next man.” And then the line that lands: “It is the comparison that makes you proud, the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.”

That’s the whole engine. Gossip isn’t really about the person being discussed. It’s a small ceremony we perform to place ourselves one rung higher.

There’s another old line, usually credited to Eleanor Roosevelt but actually traceable to a 19th-century historian named Henry Thomas Buckle: great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. I’ve never once been proud of a conversation that fell into the third category.

Since the day I got caught, I’ve been careful. If I don’t have something good to say, I don’t say it. But I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes I still want to. Sometimes the words are right there behind my teeth and it takes real effort to keep them in.

It Came Back

Not long ago, word got back to me that someone I considered a friend had said something ugly about me behind my back.

It knocked the wind out of me. Not the criticism. The friendship. I sat with it and felt genuinely hurt, and underneath the hurt was a question that wouldn’t leave me alone. What did I do to deserve this? Did I anger him? Did I wound him somewhere along the way without ever noticing?

My instinct was to confront him, exactly the way I was once confronted. Sometimes that’s the right call. But before I picked up the phone, I called a different friend to get some perspective.

Pride Before Love

“Why does this bother you so much?” he asked. “Welcome to the world. Have you never been betrayed before?”

Of course I had.

Then he took me to Romans 12, where Paul writes that we’re not to repay evil for evil, not to take revenge, but to leave room for God to sort it out. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he’s thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

“Understand what’s happening here,” my friend said. “The evil one wants you to react. He wants you to stir it up, to make this bigger than it is, to get you prideful and thinking, ‘After everything I poured into this friendship, this is what I get?’ Eric, your pride is standing in front of your love.”

He let that sit a second. Then he said, “Your response should be love. Not anger.”

Something in my chest let go. It’s a strange thing when an answer arrives and your body relaxes before your mind has finished agreeing with it, but that’s what happened. He was right. Meet the problem with love instead of a confrontation.

And once the anger stepped aside, other questions had room to walk in. What if I wronged him and never knew? What if he’s carrying something heavy right now? What if I failed to give him credit he’d earned, and this is what that looks like coming back around?

Ian Maclaren, a Scottish minister writing a Christmas message in 1897, put it in nine words that have outlived him by more than a century: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Everyone. Including the one who just took a shot at you.

The world’s instinct is to fire back. But what if your instinct became the same grace that was extended to you, back when you’d done nothing to earn it?

Heap It On

Then my friend told me his own story.

He’d poured years into a man. Mentored him, backed him, opened doors for him. And the man turned around and stabbed him in the back. My friend’s first impulse was the natural one: cut him loose, close the door, move on with life. Nobody would have blamed him.

Instead he chose love. He kept calling. He kept showing up. He treated the man as though nothing had happened and just kept heaping those hot coals of kindness on his head, year after year, with no apparent return on the investment.

It took years for the reason to surface. The man had survived a horrific, traumatic childhood he had never told a soul about, and it had been driving his behavior the entire time my friend knew him.

Slowly, the relationship healed. And eventually the man came to Christ through the one person who refused to quit on him.

“God put a small voice in me,” my friend told me, “and it kept saying, you can’t give up on him. I put him in your life for a reason. Be there for him no matter how badly he treats you. Just keep showing up.”

That was decades ago. They’ve been close friends ever since.

Lewis Smedes, who wrote a whole book on this, said it as well as anyone: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” My friend didn’t stay to rescue that man. He stayed and got rescued right along with him.

No Accidents Here

People get dropped into our lives on purpose.

Sometimes they’re angels sent to help us. Two showed up in my life just this year, each arriving at exactly the moment I needed them, each with a job to do that neither of them knew about. What looks random in the moment often turns out to have been architecture, and you only see the blueprint looking backward.

I carried anger for years over a man who wronged me. Looking back now, he did me a favor. He forced me into a lesson I was refusing to learn any other way. But before I could see that, I had to set my earthly pride down and ask the only question that ever helps: what am I supposed to learn here?

Bad things happen to good people. A dear friend of mine recently lost her husband. She could be shaking her fist at heaven asking why. Instead she’s rejoicing over the years she got, thanking God for every one of them, and trusting there’s something in this she’s meant to carry forward.

My prayers have changed over the years. I no longer pray for success. I pray for guidance, for lessons, for the courage to get through hard seasons, and for the ability to treat people with grace when they haven’t earned it.

Every customer I’ve ever had, every video I’ve ever sold, every person who has ever walked into an event I created, none of it came from my brilliance. It was a gift. So is every good thing in your life. And so, I’d argue, are a few of the hard things, the ones that arrive precisely because nothing else was going to get our attention.

Ask Yourself This

Human nature runs downhill toward the negative reaction. It takes no effort at all to get angry or get even.

But what if you changed the script? What if, instead of firing back, you set your pride down and looked inward first? What could I have done to cause this? How could I have been a better friend? How could I have loved this person better?

I slip up constantly. Pride gets in my way all the time. Ego walks in and tells me I built something, when the truth is that everything I have was handed to me. Whatever ability I’ve got, whatever timing worked out in my favor, it was given, and it can be taken back just as easily. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it stays on loan so I keep leaning on the giver instead of admiring myself in the mirror.

Because I’m not anything special. And neither, if we’re being truthful, is the person who hurt you.

So here’s what I’d ask you to consider this morning. 

What are you facing today where someone needs grace from you and hasn’t earned it? What lesson have you been refusing to admit you need? 

And where in your life could you afford to lean a little harder on your Maker and a little less on yourself?

The fog burns off. It always does. But you still have to steer while you’re in it.

Eric Rhoads

When something is taken away, you have a new appreciation when it returns. This morning is no exception. After having to leave paradise for a few days on business, it’s wonderful to be home.

I value my time here in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, sitting on the octagon-shaped screen porch — the same one pictured in an old torn sepia photograph from 1899, when this house was built on the lake. In those days everything was formal, unlike lake life today. It was women in long white dresses, big hats, and parasols, the men in straw hats and suits, stepping into a wooden boat, ready to row to the other lake for a lakeside church service. I feel the privilege of carrying on the tradition of morning tea on this porch, where they sat 127 years before me.

History Relived

The people in the 1890s came here for the same reasons I do: a break from the city, cooler air, and time with family and the lake friends they reconnected with each summer. Their gatherings, usually cocktail parties, required a tux or a coat and tie. Ours are usually just a casual shirt and shorts.

Less formality has made room for something better: actually seeing people, instead of their costumes. Sometimes I think people hide behind their designer clothes and high-end watches to send signals that “I’m better.”

Mr. Social

Though I started out shy and quiet, I believe I was born to be a social animal. And summer brings lots of opportunities to listen. I love meeting new people and hearing what they’ve done with their lives. 

In my younger, more eager and insecure days, I was more interested in telling my own story. These days I feel less need to feed my ego. Most people love talking about themselves, and I love giving them the chance. I always learn things. This past week, for instance, I learned nearly everything there is to know about the challenges of raising cattle, something I’d never otherwise understand.

Don’t Do This!

“In polite society, you never ask someone what they do for a living,” I was told once. “The challenge is learning as much as you can about someone, and getting them to tell you about themselves without ever asking what they do.” Though I care less about the rules of polite society these days, I still treat it as a personal challenge: how much can I learn without asking the “What do you do for a living?” question.

Someone once told me that people ask “What do you do?” to assess whether you’re worth talking to. I hear that a lot. They ask, I answer, they say something nice and find a quick excuse to move on, as if they’re screening for new clients or people who fit their mold. If someone’s sizing me up for my usefulness to them, I’d rather not waste my breath. After all, I’m useful to everyone 🙂

The Gift of Gab

My dad had a tremendous gift for getting to know people. He could talk to anybody, at any level, and make them feel heard and special, not because he wanted something, but because he was genuinely interested. Around our small lake town, I still run into people who tell me he made them feel special. That’s rare. I wish I had those skills.

What I loved about him is that he never judged anyone. No one was below him. He held his own with people some would perceive as “more important” as well as with those who might feel they are at the bottom of the food chain. He treated everyone the same.

Dressing Down

Sometimes people judge you not only by what you do, but by how you look. My dad taught me to always be dressed at least as well as the average at any event I was attending. “Always have at least a sport coat,” he’d tell me, though he was mortified when I wore one with jeans, since he’d grown up on a farm, where jeans were for work, not for dressing up.

An art dealer in New York once told me about a man in flip-flops and a T-shirt he’d snubbed as a time-waster. He was used to people wandering into his gallery and treating it like a museum, a place to look at paintings and ask questions, with no intention, or ability, to buy. He’d wrongly assumed the T-shirt guy was one of them, until the man came back two weeks later and spent half a million dollars on paintings.

Hidden Gems

Then there’s the guy I met recently working in a car repair shop, looking and acting like a regular grease monkey. I struck up a conversation, starting with old cars, which led to what he’d done before: he told me he was the retired CEO of a big company, and he worked at the shop simply because he loved working on cars. His co-workers have no idea he once had hundreds of people reporting to him, and he probably prefers it that way.

Leveling Out

I grew up around modest, God-fearing people who lived this out. They weren’t just tolerant, they were something better: levelers, people who saw everyone (the banker and the woman cleaning the floors) as equally worth their time. Judge not, or you’ll be judged. No matter who we are, or our station in life, we are all equal and deserve to be treated as such.

Farming New Crops

These days, the instinct to judge people we haven’t bothered to know is only getting more pronounced. Social media has built an entire business model on it. There are click farms where hundreds of people are paid to manufacture judgment at scale: hateful content, tailored to an agenda, rewarded with cash for every view. I once met a man who described visiting a click farm with 200 people sitting at computers doing nothing but pumping out political propaganda. If you repeat something enough times, across enough accounts — some of which might be the same people wearing different masks — people start to believe it, especially once they see others agreeing. He told me these people even comment on their own posts pretending to be someone else, just to make people who see it feel like they’re not alone.

I try to help my kids see that what they’re clicking on might not be true, and that the more they click, the more of that same content gets placed in their feed, reinforcing what they already believe. In this age, when even “facts” seem distorted, it’s important to intentionally seek out other points of view. 

Rich Rewards

We wouldn’t judge the man in flip-flops, the grease monkey, or the woman cleaning the floors if we actually sat down and learned about them. But that’s exactly what a click farm is built to prevent us from doing with people we’ll never meet: whole groups reduced to a stereotype, repeated until it feels true. It’s the same shortcut, the same failure of imagination, just multiplied by a couple of hundred people at computers.

That’s the discipline this porch keeps teaching me, 127 years running. Whoever sat here in these old wicker chairs in 1899 couldn’t have imagined a click farm, but they’d have recognized the temptation it feeds: deciding someone’s worth before you’ve actually met them, and making it all about you.

Digging for Gold

Keep in mind that everyone you meet has a story worth hearing. Everyone has the same hurts and some of the same challenges, the same insecurities, and we’re all just a wounded child on the inside. If you dig, you’ll find a fascinating story in everyone you meet. 

Eric Rhoads

The sun came up this morning with a pink so loud it practically needed its own soundtrack. I’m not exaggerating … we get skies up here in the Adirondacks that look like somebody spilled a watercolor set across the whole sky and then apologized by making it even prettier.

Myth or Truth

There’s an old story about the Hudson River School painters getting raked over the coals by critics who said their Adirondack skies were too vivid to be real … that no sky on earth looked like that. The painters swore up and down they were just painting what they saw. Sitting on this porch with my coffee this morning, I’m inclined to take their side. Something about a million protected acres, no smokestacks, and enough altitude to get you a little lightheaded apparently makes for a sky that looks like it’s showing off. I don’t know the science. I just know I believe the painters now — and I never believed anybody who said their fish was “this big.”

Close Neighbors

Speaking of the porch … it’s a good one. Screened in, looking out over the lake, and this morning the houses that were dead quiet a week ago are suddenly full of racket. Good racket. Laughter carrying clean across the water like the people are sitting in the chair next to you instead of a quarter mile away. Somebody’s having breakfast. Somebody’s easing a canoe out before the water skiers show up and turn the lake into a washing machine. It’s the sound of a holiday waking up.

Three Generations

My own Fourth of July memories start on Lake Wahbasee in Indiana, where we were third-generation lake people before “lake people” became a personality trait you see on T-shirts. My father and his grandfather used to sit for hours in an old metal rowboat, fishing and presumably solving none of the world’s problems but enjoying the attempt. My grandparents eventually parked their Airstream on a lot across from the lake, and years later traded it in for a little cottage. My folks followed suit and bought our first family place when I was 16.

Family Gathering

Everybody came for the Fourth. Both sets of grandparents, cousins by the carload, my brothers, friends who just showed up because word got around. We ate hot dogs, baked beans, and my grandmother’s secret potato salad … a recipe nobody has ever successfully duplicated, though I will go to my grave insisting it had a full cup of sugar in it and she just never admitted it.

Scattered Family

I cherish that memory every single Fourth of July, and I have never once managed to recreate it, because everybody’s scattered now and getting a crowd like that together has gotten a lot harder. Yesterday we had just one of our three kids here, who pulled off a small miracle escaping work for a couple of days. The other two couldn’t make it. That’s just how it goes now.

Freedom Recognized

Here’s the thing about freedom … I never really appreciated it. It was just there. Teachers talked about it in school. It got mentioned in speeches. TV pundits always talked about it. But when something is always there, it stops registering as remarkable..

A Fresh Viewpoint

Turns out, freedom is remarkable … I just needed to see its absence to recognize it.

That started for me on a trip to Czechoslovakia, visiting my wife’s family during the height of communism. It was an eye-opener in the worst way. Life was hard, everyone struggling, everyone afraid. Neighbors curried favor with the government by turning in neighbors. People simply vanished for the crime of pushing back on a local official. No trial. Gone forever. Our family there couldn’t trust anyone, because saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could cost you everything.

A later trip to Russia reinforced it. Even after communism officially fell, the fear hadn’t fully left the culture. Nothing like the Soviet era, but the residue was still there. And Cuba was worse than all the others combined.

A Bad Example

One artist I met told me about his father, also a painter, who refused to paint the propaganda version of Russian life he was ordered to paint. Instead he painted the truth of what he saw. After one especially pointed piece, he was arrested and executed. His crime was having an opinion the government didn’t approve of. That was the biggest eye-opener for me, meeting a contemporary who was impacted while I was alive. Not past history, but very real and in my face. 

I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to a lot of corners of the world, and more than a few people who’ve lived through the loss of their freedoms have quietly told me the same thing: America is showing some of the same early warning signs they saw before things went sideways where they lived. Protect it at all costs, they warn.

Experts once predicted a republic like ours couldn’t survive a hundred years. We’re 250 years in. Good job, everyone. 

Alarming Trends

It’s sobering to watch places like the United Kingdom criminalize opinions and statements of fact on social media, relabeled as “hate speech” by whoever’s holding the microphone that year. Seeing “regular people” go to prison for sharing an opinion is something I never thought I’d see, especially there. Some countries have made it illegal to quote certain Bible scriptures out loud, with imprisonment to follow. 

Where That Leaves Us

America has plenty of flaws. Our leaders have always been human and flawed. But the fact that we’re allowed to say so … loudly, publicly, without a knock on the door at 2 a.m. … is not a small thing. Freedom is not normal in most of human history, and it’s still not normal in most of the world today.

Sadly, political differences are breaking up friendships and families, because it’s become the norm to ghost anyone you disagree with rather than just disagree with them. I applaud anyone standing for what they believe … but it’s a slippery slope when we stop allowing discussion or discourse altogether. Families have disagreed over politics since the founding of this great land, for 250 years running. Losing that ability would be a tragedy.

And honestly, that’s kind of what a family reunion like July 4th is all about. Every year we seem to argue about something … politics, or that potato salad recipe. Half the family swears it’s a cup of sugar, the other half insists Grandma would never slip sugar in, and nobody has ever once produced the actual recipe card to settle it. We’ve been loudly, cheerfully wrong about that potato salad for decades, and not one person has ever been arrested for their opinion on it.

In a Nutshell

That’s the whole deal, right there. A free country is just a big, messy family reunion where everybody’s allowed to be loudly wrong about something … family recipes, politics, the neighbor’s fireworks starting too early, the color to paint the house, or the way our kids are being taught. Nobody gets hauled off for it. Nobody disappears for saying the sky looked pink and someone else insisting it looked orange.

We got 250 years out of an experiment nobody thought would last a hundred. That’s not an accident, but it’s not a guarantee. We all hold responsibility for the maintenance job, and every one of us is on the crew. So argue about everything. Just don’t let anybody convince you that arguing is the problem. Silencing other opinions is the problem. Use the freedom while you’ve got it, and don’t let it go quiet on your watch.

Eric Rhoads

The old Adirondack kitchen smells like woodsmoke and wet cedar — a wood stove that has held its ground since 1855, long before any of us arrived. The screen door slams behind me, the rain has been falling on and off for days, and I’ve walked barefoot through the soggy yard just to put on the kettle. I await its high-pitched whistle. Yes, the microwave would be more efficient, but I try to make life here more like it was a hundred years ago.

The lake outside my window is swollen and full … so brimming there’s no room for any more water without spilling over the dock. 

There is something grounding about this place, this old building that has housed generations of summers, quiet mornings, and people working things out. It steadies me. 

Storms in the Sunshine

One thing about life … it can be sunny and still raining. Some days are simply emotionally soggy without a drop of rain. The weight comes not from full clouds, but something or someone in your life who has disappointed you, let you down, or broken your trust.

When you work with as many people as I do, you have to learn to let those things roll off your back. Sometimes people say things that could be hurtful. But my dad always used to say, “Let it go in one ear and out the other.” His advice is wise, because if you allow the darts to penetrate you, you’ll get wounded. If you deflect them, it stings a little, but you’re not brought down.

No Drama

My rule in life and at my events is “no drama.” Drama is disruptive, can easily get everyone off track and in a tizzy, and is never necessary. Some people conduct most of their lives drama-free, others thrive on it as if they look for drama to wound them so they can play the victim.

I’ve owned my company for over four decades, and I’ve seen everything. One thing that comes from experience is wisdom, and you get to the point where you can accurately predict what’s next by the behavior of others. When I started my business, those things would put me into a funk for a few days or weeks, but after about 10 years of bad things happening, I stopped letting my emotions cloud my life. Now, when bad things happen — and they do all the time — personally and professionally, I’m able to compartmentalize them.

Staying Unclouded

Dealing with things like recessions and needing to lay off friends, or health issues like my son’s heart attack a few years ago, when he was near death, unable to be revived for what seemed like an eternity, I was upset, bothered, but I did not let it cloud my ability to process the difficult decisions we had to make. Watching an employee and friend slip into a coma, become brain dead, and die after a week was horrific, yet pushing the need to emote and react aside helped me process a horrible moment. That does not mean I don’t hurt, I do. But I continue to function while hurting.

I’m not sure what a therapist would tell me. They would probably say I’m squashing my feelings, but I’m OK with that if it provides me the ability to function instead of being devastated. 

Signals of Sunshine

I had a moment of clarity a few years ago, which is that no one ever told me life would have such tough moments and that when they came, I could choose to let them stop me or slow me down, or I could choose to power through. And I’ve realized that the toughest moments, the hardest things, the storms of life, tend to be a signal that things are about to clear, and that the best, sunny days are ahead.

Business guru Peter Drucker always said that storms come with change, but change is necessary, so you have to be willing to ride out the storms. It’s true in life, in business, and in anything good. 

You can spend your time causing drama, or you can batten down the hatches, do things you need to do, and survive. I choose survival every time. 

What about you? What are you facing that is hard, that is bringing you down? Is there a way to pull yourself out of it? Or will you absorb it and let it destroy you?

Fired From My Own Company

Back in the late ’90s, I had my dream job as the founder and CEO of an internet radio company, the first of its kind to put music on the internet. I raised a ton of money, hired the best people in the business, and proceeded to invent an entirely new industry. But when the towers got hit on September 11, things got hard, money dried up, and I was fired by my own board. I was deeply wounded, bitter, and angry. I carried it for a long time. 

By carrying it, I didn’t hurt the people who fired me, I hurt myself because I was taking fewer chances, fewer risks, and I lost a lot of valuable time. It was an important lesson, especially because I eventually realized they did me a big favor: I was not the CEO who had to go through the painful process of bankruptcy, and I landed on something that made me happier and more fulfilled. But at the time, it was like a knife in my gut.

What do you need to let go of? In what ways are you not moving on?
What are you holding on to with negative energy or excessive drama that is hurting no one but yourself?

Getting Even

I once had a friend who felt he got screwed over, so he went on a mission to destroy the people who screwed him, badmouthing them to everyone who would listen. But in the process he destroyed himself, because he became bitter and came across that way. He did not move on for several years, until finally he realized he hadn’t gotten screwed over at all — in fact, they did him a favor.

Old, Deep Wounds

The goal is to land well, and not fill your heart with anger. Forgiveness isn’t for the person you’re forgiving, it’s for your own heart, your own peace. A couple of decades ago I was at a Promise Keepers event, listening to speaker Greg Laurie, who asked, “Who do you need to forgive that you’ve been holding on to for years?” In that moment I realized I was still angry at a kid who bullied me in 7th grade. I prayed to let that anger go. I wonder now, how many things did I avoid because I was still angry and afraid of getting bullied?

Let go of what’s holding you back. Here’s what the Bible says about forgiveness: “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). And here are a couple of other quotes on forgiveness I like:

“Forgiveness is not an occasional act. It is a permanent attitude.” — Martin Luther King, Jr. 

“He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.” — George Herbert 

Life is short, and being stuck in the mud does you no good. Identify where you’re stuck, what you’re being dramatic about, and move on. Sometimes you don’t want to let go because you’d rather be angry. I get it. Let go anyway.

Eric Rhoads

Fog is dancing across the water, a pink light threading through the trunks of massive pines as it illuminates everything it touches. The lake is glass. Not a ripple. No boats making waves in at least 24 hours, and they’re always rare here. The silence takes getting used to. Occasionally, in the distance, a plane overhead or a chainsaw somewhere, then quiet again.

The spring greens are vibrating. I’m getting to live spring twice this year. First it was Florence, with blossoming trees and wisteria draped over stone walls. Now it’s the Adirondacks, where the lilacs are just opening and the pine-scented air feels medicinal. Loons are calling across the still water, their voices echoing off the distant shore. We are, for now, the only ones here.

The Weight of It

I come to this lake every year for peace, renewal, and the chance to slow down the machine. I take Fridays off when I can. I make frames. I paint. I breathe.

But I also carry something here with me, because I can’t put it down. The weight of running a company is not something you leave at the office, because a lot of families don’t eat if I screw up or get distracted.

I started this business almost four decades ago. Do the math if you want to feel old. The point is, I’ve been through enough now to recognize patterns most younger leaders can’t see yet, because they haven’t been through the storm enough times.

Businesses are like military obstacle courses. Just when you think you’ve got a clear path, something blows up, and you either survive it or you don’t.

What Experience Teaches

When I was a young CEO, everything bothered me. I wanted to control every detail, fix every problem, make everything perfect. Now I know that perfection is a mirage and that most problems either solve themselves, can’t be solved, or aren’t worth solving.

One of the hardest lessons I ever learned came after a phone call from my bookkeeper decades ago. He told me we had three weeks of cash left and needed to close the doors. He saw it as the only option. I wasn’t willing to take his advice. So to survive, I laid off 50 people and kept only four, myself included.

We ran a 50-person operation with four people for two years, and even with those cuts we barely survived. We needed business badly because the recession had dried up all of our advertising. So my one remaining salesperson and I spent 14 grueling weeks on the road, staying in cheap hotels and eating fast food, making about 200 sales calls.

I recall one moment from that trip, a memory that will last forever. A top client insisted we take them to dinner and picked the most expensive restaurant in Washington, D.C. We needed them badly, so we agreed. But first we each ate a burger before we went so we wouldn’t be tempted to order something expensive. Then the client immediately ordered a bottle of expensive wine and the most expensive thing on the menu. I was turning white as a sheet when I saw the $800 bill.

After I handed the waiter my credit card, he returned to the table and said quietly, “Mr. Rhoads, you have a phone call.” This was before cell phones. I was grateful he hadn’t embarrassed me in front of the clients. When I got to the back, they told me my card wouldn’t go through. It was my only card. I had no money. So I gave them my watch, a priceless heirloom my father had given me, and told them I’d send a check and they could mail it back. I returned to the table, pretended everything was fine, and made up some excuse about the call. I’m glad no one asked me the time.

The next day my office wired money to my card so we could continue the trip. And we got the contract. It made everything worthwhile.

Hope Is Not a Strategy

When the recession ended and money started to flow, the temptation was to rebuild quickly. But necessity had taught us how to survive lean. The trouble is, when times are good we tend to get comfortable, add overhead, stop watching the numbers. And when things turn, we kick the can down the road, thinking it’s about to get better when the right move is to act fast.

My friend and mentor Keith Cunningham says it plainly: You can’t take hope to the bank. You can’t cash a check that has “hope” written on it instead of an amount.

There are times to be an optimist. And there are times to be a realist, which is different from being a pessimist. The companies that fail most spectacularly are usually run by people who chose hope over reality and waited too long. Families get into trouble the same way, because things are always “about to get better.”

I’ve been through at least four recessions as a business owner. Each one was different. Some were brutal, some were manageable. But every time, the ones who got ahead of it survived. The ones who waited, hoping it would pass, usually didn’t.

Two friends of mine, one who runs a major ad agency with over a thousand clients and another who runs more than 180 companies, have both said the same thing recently: Business is soft, and the smart ones are trimming early. The signals matter. The timing matters more. No one wants to say the “R word” for fear it will come true, but things are soft everywhere right now, though that could turn quickly with a credible peace deal somewhere in the world.

The Geeks and the Geezers

My friend Richard Saul Wurman, who founded the TED conferences, once said that every company needs geeks and geezers. He was right. The geeks bring the new ideas, the speed, and the courage to try things that seem impossible. The geezers, those of us with the scar tissue, bring the pattern recognition. We’ve seen this before.

I never wanted to be told what to do. When I was in business with my father, I wanted to be right all the time. In reality, he was right more than I was, because of deep experience. During my first recession, it was his suggestion to cut deeply and cut fast. I made every excuse why I couldn’t live without every single person I thought I needed. I couldn’t see it clearly, but he could. He saw what was coming; I didn’t. And ultimately, it was his experience that saved my business.

Time brings wisdom, if you learned your lessons. Sometimes our kids don’t want to listen to our advice, even though we’re seeing things they can’t yet see. It would do all of us a lot of good, myself included, to put our egos aside and be willing to consider what others who’ve walked the road ahead of us have to offer. It might save a lot of heartache.

Make the Call

The thing nobody tells you about hard decisions is that the hardest part is rarely the decision itself. It’s the delay. Foolish hoping that things resolve on their own. The waiting for one more data point, one more month, one more sign that things are about to turn. That might happen. But if it doesn’t, the cost of waiting is almost always higher than the cost of acting, because you’ve dug a bigger hole.

Whatever you’re navigating right now, get ahead of it. Whatever you’re dreading, get it done. Don’t cash that hope check. Don’t put off what you know you need to do. It’s pain now or more pain later. 

It won’t be easy or fun, and you’ll feel things you’d rather not feel. But you’ll discover strength you didn’t know you had, and the next hard call won’t be quite as hard. Maybe it’s a business decision you’ve been circling. Maybe it’s a conversation you keep putting off because the thought of it makes your stomach drop. Perhaps a relationship discussion that needs to be had before things deteriorate further.

Life is truly short, and you’ll look back on today and it won’t hurt as much as it once did. But it will still hurt.

Eric Rhoads

The road narrows between old brick walls draped in wisteria. Poppies crowd the edges. Olive trees, lilacs, cherry blossoms, and tall cypress sentinels line the way as the fog holds everything in its arms this morning, soft and reluctant to let go.

The sun is trying. Beams push through the mist and land in dappled patches on the tree trunks, lighting small circles of gold against the gray. I’m driving slowly, not because of the fog, but because I don’t want this to end.

As I walked to my car this morning, I took one last breath of Tuscan air, scented with gardenias and burning olive wood, a smell I’ve come to love from the farmers who were already working before I was. My bags are packed. I’m ready to go.

That Peter, Paul, and Mary song is stuck in my head. You know the one. Especially the part about “I hate to go.”

Five Weeks Gone

Five weeks ago, I arrived in Florence alone, enrolled in a classical painting and drawing foundations course at the Florence Academy of Art. A program that scared me before I ever unpacked. Not a vacation. An adventure. The kind where you don’t know if you’ll survive it until you’re on the other side.

I survived it. Barely, some days.

Somewhere between the charcoal drawings at nine in the morning and the anatomy lectures at night, something shifted. Not just in how I see a face or render a shadow. Something deeper. The kind of shift that only happens when you’re quietly alone with yourself long enough to hear what you actually think.

The Lifeboat Bond

There’s a particular bond that forms among people who are struggling together. My fellow students and I weren’t tourists. We were in a lifeboat, all of us trying to figure out how to keep our heads above water through the hours, the lessons, the frustrations. We talked each other through it. Lunches. Jokes. Random stories between sessions.

I didn’t know I missed that kind of connection so much. I live in a virtual world now. My people are on Zoom. But there’s no substitute for a hallway conversation, a shared laugh over a bad drawing, the warmth of someone who understands exactly what you’re going through because they’re going through it too.

That’s not a small thing. I’d forgotten it was a thing at all.

What Teachers Know

Here’s what surprised me most about how they teach at the Florence Academy.

Not once, in five weeks, did an instructor walk up to my easel and say, “That arm is wrong. That eye is too high.” Not once.

Instead, they asked questions.

“How are you feeling about this? What feels right? What feels off?”

They were forcing self-evaluation. Because none of it works long-term if you need someone else to solve it for you. The goal isn’t a good painting. The goal is a painter who can see.

I added private Sunday lessons because I didn’t want to waste a single day. I attended 20 optional drawing sessions with live models. Anatomy lectures. Art history. Optional everything. I took all of it.

On the last day, during the final critique, four instructors told me they weren’t used to seeing a student push that hard, do that much, refuse to coast.

I nearly teared up.

What It Actually Costs

Not because of the compliment. Because of what it cost to earn it.

There were mornings I wanted to sleep in. Afternoons I was sure I was getting worse, not better. Evenings I questioned why a person at my stage of life was putting himself through something this uncomfortable when nobody was making him.

And that last part is the key phrase: when nobody was making me.

There’s a version of pushing through that’s easy to romanticize — the athlete grinding before the championship, the musician practicing before the big show. That kind of effort has an audience, even if it’s imaginary. You’re performing the discipline as much as you’re practicing it.

What’s harder, and rarer, is the work you do when the outcome is uncertain, when no one will ever know whether you showed up or didn’t, when quitting is not just available but entirely invisible. No one to disappoint. No one to impress. Just you and the easel and the choice.

That’s where character actually lives. Not in the heroic moments. In the quiet ones.

I pushed through anyway.

The Satisfaction Surprise

Here’s what I wasn’t prepared for: the satisfaction on the other side isn’t really about the result.

I’ve seen the drawings. They’re significantly better. But that’s not the thing.

The thing is knowing you didn’t quit when quitting was easy and completely available. That knowledge becomes something you carry forward. It changes how you see the next hard thing, and the one after that. Every time you’ve done it before, you’ve gotten a reference point. Evidence. Proof you’re the kind of person who stays.

That’s what compounds. Not the skill. The self-knowledge.

And here’s what I want you to sit with: Pushing through is not a skill for artists. It’s a skill for living.

Your Fog Moment

You’ve had a version of this. A moment where the thing in front of you was hard enough to walk away from, and you didn’t. You stayed. You endured the frustration, the self-doubt, the slow and ugly progress, and you came out the other side with something you couldn’t have gotten any other way.

That feeling is available to you again. Right now. In whatever you’ve been putting off because it’s hard and because no one is forcing you. There is a certain confidence that comes from powering through when no one is watching.

The fog is burning off. The sun is winning.

The question is whether you’ll be on the other side of something difficult by the time it does.

Eric Rhoads