A slight chill is in the humid Texas air. My eyes are squinting as the warm yellow sun pops up over the distant purple hill, turning it more pink. Light is splashing everything, and the air is starting to warm up a bit as I sit here on my old wicker couch on the back porch.

Playing Coach

One of the most fun things I get to do is coach younger people who want to become successful. I love sharing any wisdom I may have accumulated — acquired through decades of work, decades of mistakes, and decades of pain.

Instant Success

Living in a fast-paced Instagram-and-SnapChat world, all the gurus are online sharing 90-second sound bites of wisdom and selling success courses. It’s really no different than when I first craved success; only the delivery method is different. I listened to tons of cassettes, and later CDs, learning from the hot gurus at the time. Of course I’ve attended dozens, maybe hundreds, of seminars, classes, and events in my career. In fact, I was at the first, or one of the first, Tony Robbins events in Fort Lauderdale when he first launched his career, and at another event he held so small, there were only 30 of us in the room. He of course has led a charge to train millions, and his content has evolved and is better than ever. 

Every guru has something great to offer, and I always encourage young people to pick some that resonate with them and double down to buy everything their preferred experts offer, attend everything they can, and formulate their own ideas for what fits their personality. An education is a great value at any cost.

Rarely Spoken

There are some things I rarely hear success gurus talk about, yet they are just as important as anything they have to offer, if not more. If I were to try and sell or market these things, they’re not sexy enough, yet they are just as powerful when combined with the tools and ideas being taught by others.

Success Takes Many Forms

Success isn’t all about business, it’s about living a successful, exciting, and rich life. Business or financial success is only a small piece of it, and it’s overrated if it interferes with your having a rich life in other ways. If you’re miserable operating your business or job, working so hard that you don’t have a life outside it, being so obsessed that it kills your relationships, then you’re not a success. Success is about balance in all parts of your life. Business or work or finance is only a fraction. What about family success, spiritual success, marriage or relationship success, health success, mental success, hobby success? If you lost your job or took away your business, what would you have left?

Competitive Success

Someone once asked me about my competitors and why I tend to do so much better than they do. It made me pause and explore the deep crevices of my mind. After all, every time I turn around, someone is taking something we’ve developed and launching their own version with the intent of building their own business. I can’t blame them, but they are going about it all wrong. I’ll share how they can crush me. (By the way, we honor our competitors — there is room for us all, and they too do good things.)

Start Here

I once met a wise man who had spent his life in advertising, handling some giant accounts. When I’m around wise people, my curiosity takes over and I try to glean as much as possible from their decades of wisdom. He reinforced something worth repeating. “Make sure your product is the finest in the market, so good that it’s difficult for others to even come close when they copy you. So good that it solves a giant problem for the user. It has to be exceptional. And ideally, you have something no one else has, and when they copy you, you have something else ready that’s even better and more unique.” 

This is a killer business principle, often overlooked. But it really applies to success in life. What can you do to be the best friend for others, someone who steps up and is exceptional to help the people around you? What can you do that goes above and beyond? How can you be the best mom, the best son or daughter, the best brother, the best friend? How can you be more exceptional and give them what they need more than others?

But that’s only a small piece of the puzzle. Almost anyone can figure that out. But is there one most important thing..

As I ponder my successes and failures, I’ve discovered success is the opposite of what most people will tell you. A mentor of mine once said, “The key to making money is to not be emotional about what you’re selling,” yet I think the opposite is true for me. I am emotional. I’ve always told my team that we do what we love, we never pick anything we don’t love. As a young man I was passionate about radio, so I ended up founding a radio industry trade magazine (which I still own). I had a chance to add other magazines to build my business, which would have been practical,  but I resisted. I did not want to do magazines about auto parts or dentistry, because I did not care. I believe people can tell when you’re in it for the money versus being in it for passion. Plus, why spend your life doing something you don’t love? That can feel more like prostitution. Life is too short to focus only on money. 

Using Failure to Change Lives

Discovering art for myself, and moving into art, was one of the best things I ever did. Thankfully, I had horrible experiences learning. I had instructors tell me to give up, that I was not cut out for art. I persisted, but I watched friends get discouraged and drop out. But because it was hard for me and others, I have spent my life passionately solving that problem so it would never happen to anyone else. As a result I was able to help more people than ever because they could sense that I understood them. People respond when they see that you care deeply, that you’re not faking it, and when you are more about them than you are about yourself. 

Convincing Commitment

When the pandemic started, I created a show and hosted it daily, seven days a week for seven months, and five days a week since then. The show has had almost 17 million views since we started. Yet when the pandemic was over, people told me, “You should cut back to one day a week,” to which I responded, “Anybody can do one day a week, but doing five days a week shows commitment.” This is where sacrifice and commitment comes in. To be a success, you have to make personal sacrifices. People are always reading you and your intentions, and unless you’re showing up for them in a big way, they can feel your lack of commitment. People often say, “I don’t know anybody busier. I don’t know how you manage to do so much for us, thank you.” How could I possibly back off or do less when people are gaining benefit? When you’re helping others is no time to get comfortable.

Big Isn’t Always Better

Big corporations have come into my space to compete, and they make a lot of money, but audiences can tell the difference between commitment and product. I don’t want to be some big, faceless corporation where people don’t know me and my team. I don’t want to cut costs just to make more money, if it means making a product that’s less than amazing. Though sometimes cost cuts are the harsh reality of business when times are tough, I try to never cut what matters to my family of followers and my team. They are both our family; they are the reason for our success. Big companies don’t think that way, yet they can never figure out why they are not as deeply embraced.

Your Heart Revealed

People can tell your commitment. They can read your heart. The reason I push so hard on things is because I know these things can change people’s lives, and sometimes you have to jump up and down a lot to help them see what they need.

Success isn’t about tactics alone. If you want a rich life, make everything about your heart and how you can reach the hearts of others. If the intent is all financial, people can see it and feel it, just like people can sense whether someone is genuine with them or lying. The intention to solve problems and help others needs to rule all decisions. 

People tell me I’m naive. Probably. I’m sure I’d be a lot wealthier if I cut costs, treated my team badly, and looked for ways to squeeze people and lie to customers. But I could not look at myself in the mirror.

Take This Test

The true test of success … am I truly passionate? 

Am I working hard to help others have a better life? 

Am I changing the world in some way? 

Am I striving to always get better, and give people something new and better? 

Can I sleep at night or look myself in the mirror? 

Am I being honest and sincere with my customers?

Is my family happy with the time they are getting?

Success is an art. It’s the art of designing a well-balanced life, the art of serving others, the art of caring deeply. True success is never about the money alone.

Eric Rhoads

PS1: On Friday I wrapped up a four-day online art training event called Realism Live. It was life-changing for people in 14 countries and 50 states. I’ve been flooded with stories from people about how these events changed their lives, how they did not think they could ever paint but took a leap of faith and discovered how to do it, learning from the best of the best. 

 

Doing this is a tremendous amount of work for about 30 people. I spend hundreds of hours a year working on it, and I put everything else aside for long days for four weeks a year to make it happen. When it was over, I was invigorated and feeling as if I served people well, giving them more than they expected. I could never charge enough to pay for all the time my team and I devote to this effort. Yet people can tell we’re there for them. It makes it all worthwhile. Ultimately success is about service and sacrifice. 

My next online event is about watercolor, coming this January. It’s called Watercolor Live. 

PS 2: One of my favorite things to do is host painting retreats. I do three of them a year, which takes three weeks of my time and lots of prep work, and I love doing them because I get a week of one-on-one time with new friends, painting together and hanging out together. There is no substitute for one-on-one time with the people you serve. 

I have a new retreat designed to help people escape cold winter weather in February to paint in the sunshine. I’m holding a WINTER ESCAPE in St. Augustine Florida, America’s oldest city (and one of its most beautiful). We will paint the area for an entire week. 

Reward yourself with a Christmas or Hanukkah present, or suggest it to your family. It’s a week of painting, fun, painting at night too, and it’s going to be a blast. But it’s already half sold out after just 30 days since it was announced. 

www.WinterArtEscape.Com

PS 3: The Plein Air Convention also allows me to connect and serve. It’s a big event of about a thousand painters, and is happening in Reno and Lake Tahoe this year. Because it’s returning to the West, it will probably sell out fast. As it stands, we have only 268 seats left. If you wanna go, don’t take a chance of missing it.