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Tiny little bright green buds are peeking their heads out on the bare branches of the giant trees around me, trying to find out if it’s safe to come out for an early spring — mild temperatures are signaling the beginning of spring here in Texas. The old screen door makes a creaky sound amplified by rusty springs, the door slams behind me, and I’m finally back on the long porch that goes the distance of this old Texas farmhouse. Sadly, my neighbor moved and took his cattle, but the view is pretty terrific just the same. 

Spring in the Air

Growing up in the Midwest with cold, snowy winters, spring was always a welcome sight. Spring fever would have us out without coats on a sunny day, even though it was still 30 degrees. We simply could not wait for the arrival of spring. And, like the feeling of a first love, spring is about seeing things through fresh eyes and having something new to look forward to. And about the time we get used to it, we’re looking forward to summer, then fall, and even winter. We’re a fickle bunch, we humans.

When we lived in Florida, we could still get a sense of the seasons because some months were hotter or cooler or rainier, but for the most part we missed the seasons, and would often try to visit other places where we could experience them more deeply.

Seasons of Life

I’m amazed at the perfection of life as it compares to seasons, though we really never know if we’re going to be one of the trees that turns red early or one that stays more colorful while the other trees are bare. Each season is a blessing, and, like the seasons of nature, we need to look forward to and embrace each season of our lives, because each brings new experiences worth embracing. And just like the mud in spring thaw or early swarms of summer mosquitoes, there are parts of a season that may not be to our liking, but challenges always come with the good.

I once met a doctor at a cocktail party who specializes in severe, life-altering diseases. I’ve never forgotten what he told me. “The minute I tell a patient of their cancer, I can pretty much tell if they have a chance of survival by how they react. Though no one ever welcomes the news, if they are challenged and tell themselves they intend to beat it, they have a chance. But the ones who absorb it and look at it as if life is over — they rarely survive.” He told me people who changed their attitude after a few days of processing the bad news usually made it through.

How Do YOU See You?

From time to time someone will ask me for advice about life or business or success, and I always start the discussion with the critical importance of what we place in our minds. Science even supports it. How we see ourselves impacts how our life turns out. If we blame others, if things are always someone else’s fault, things never seem to go as well. If, however, we accept responsibility for how things go, and we align our attitude to our desires, they’ll go much better.

How you see yourself matters most. Experts tell me you need to actually see yourself in the exact role you want to be in. Instead of “I’m gonna” it should be “I am.” After a lifetime of daydreaming, the things I dreamed came true. The things I was a little unsure about did not.

Labels and Boxes

Our society hands us labels and boxes. Earlier today I read a story where the headline said “Elderly Woman” …  and when I read the story, the woman was 50. Clearly the story was written by someone very young. I for one look back on 50 and remember how young I was. And I don’t look at myself as old. In fact, I scold friends who use those terms because I believe they trigger something in your head to make your life start to wind down.

My dad, who turned 94 on Inauguration Day, sometimes scolds me for mentioning his age because to him, age is not relevant. I can remember that when he turned 70, I thought he was old, and silly for starting a new business when everyone else was retired. But alas, when I called him for his birthday, he was talking about yet another business he was going to work on for the next 20-plus years. And, mark my words, he will do it. By the way, he started something new about 10 years ago, works 15-hour days, and it’s thriving. 

Good Genes?

You may say he is lucky to have good genes, but I guess that doesn’t explain other family members with the same or similar genes who checked out early. Maybe luck plays a role, but I suspect it’s the brain that makes that luck happen. A friend told us at 55 that he was preparing for death and winding down because he was getting old. My prediction that he would be dead in five years came true. 

I’ve mentioned this before, but my acquaintance John Kluge, who was at one time the richest man in the world, told me he did not really start making his success till he was over 70. “My friends all gave up and retired. I kept pitching and became a billionaire.”

A Year to Live

Clearly there are circumstances beyond our control. There can be bad luck, but how you play the cards you are dealt matters. My friend Glen tells me his wife was given a year to live and he was determined to help her beat that, so he quit his job, became a student of healing, and she is alive and healthy 16 years later. He refused to accept the status quo. He refused to accept what they were told. He sought and found alternatives.

You can be young and in spring and tell yourself you’re too old to do something, or you can be in winter and tell yourself you’ve got decades left. And, if you manage your thinking, accentuate the positives and eliminate the negatives, you can make it happen.

Remember, whatever you think … you’re right.

Where is your head?

What lies are you buying that don’t have to be true?

What are you telling yourself is about to happen?

What are you telling yourself that will happen?

If we were taught how to push out the negatives, focus on the positives, and see ourselves in the places we want to be, our world would be a different place.

You and I can’t change the minds of others, we can only change our own minds. And perhaps, when others see what’s possible, they too will change. 

It starts with you.

Eric Rhoads

Fog covers the windows as I glance out at the porch. Condensation from the frigid air conditioning trying to keep up against oppressive heat has replaced the fog and cool mornings on the Adirondack lake.

Slamming my face as I walk out to the porch, the heat is like the blast of getting too close to a pizza oven, bearable for only a brief moment before my roasting occurs. Yet I make my way to the wicker couch to look out over the vast rough weeds, now brown as toast, and the twisting cedar trees, which thrive on the heat.

Briefly, I can feel the heat against my bare legs as I sit on the red cushions. It’s soothing in a way, like a heating pad on my sore muscles from being cramped inside an airplane.

A Fresh Start

Being back in Austin is comforting because it’s home, yet I always pine for my lakefront summers and wish they would never end. “Be careful what you wish for,” people would say, and today, the return home is followed by a week of driving our triplets off to three different colleges to plug them into a new life on campus, and the start of their independence from their caregivers. This is, after all, the week we’ve dreaded for 18 years, first seeming like it would never come, and then seeing it speed by too fast. 

Dread is a strong word. I’ve dreaded the empty house, the lack of chaos, the activities, the friends in and out, the birthday parties (how can we deal with birthdays at three colleges in three cities this February?), and the laugher, the lessons, the hurts, and the challenges of parenting.

The Goodness

Yet looking forward is the opposite of dread. Knowing I won’t have to wake up at 6 a.m. to make breakfast, won’t have to wait up for 11 p.m. curfews, won’t be needing to put up with as much testosterone-driven drama, and won’t have to find someone to take care of the kids if we want to slip away on an impromptu trip. 

Though I’m predicting tears, I’m also predicting celebration that we’ve accomplished our goal of raising three very fine humans and hopefully given them enough lessons to ground them for the rest of their lives. 

Looking back, I realize I’ve wasted far too much energy on dreading things in my future when I should have found a way to look forward to them, or at least be prepared to process them.

Dreading Death

As a child, and through much of my life, I dreaded the moment I’d lose my parents. I was always afraid I would lose my mom or my dad. It started when I was a child, then into my teens, young adulthood, and now even into the beginnings of my years of wisdom. (I don’t use the words “getting old” because I refuse to train my subconscious mind to respond.) I knew it would devastate me. Yet when my mom passed, it was enormously painful, but I was not disabled by my grief. Maybe it is because we had some time knowing her heart disease would eventually take her, or maybe because she lived to 93 and was not cheated out of life early, and did not suffer through years of treatments or the pain so many experience. And of course my belief in Heaven. My outlook allowed me to step back, look at the experience, and separate myself from my grief. Maybe being stoic, or toughing it out, was my way of dealing with it.

I can remember asking my dad about this years ago, when his mother or father passed, and seeing that he did not appear disabled with grief. And I can recall him telling me he had deep grief, but he was not going to let it destroy him. It’s when I realized we can have command over our emotions if we prepare ourselves.

Controlled Chaos

And, though I was deeply emotional when Brady, my son, had his heart attack last January 20, I remember thinking that I could not let that fear destroy my ability to think and make decisions, because I needed to be composed enough to help the family get through such a difficult patch. Maybe I was stoic, appearing unemotional, though I cried as well. Yet once I looked at myself, I was able to flick a switch to get through it without being disabled emotionally.

Maybe a therapist would tell me I was in denial or I was not in touch with my emotions, but I would say I was very much in touch with them and chose to not allow them to prevent me from making adult decisions. And though I was clearly under a dark cloud, I did not allow the rain.

What do you dread? 
How will you choose to deal with that dread?

I’ve had a lot of time to process what’s about to happen, and I would not miss it for the world. Passing the baton to our kids, giving them a new education and independence, is something I cherish. Though we will be sad with their absence, and will miss their being with us in person, they are a text away and in good hands. We have to turn this over to God because we can no longer control their every move.

Train the Brain

Though our minds control our physiology, we control our minds by training ourselves to look at things through a different lens and, when possible, reprocessing our thoughts to work for us rather than against us. Now the key, at least for me, is to ask myself WHY I dread something, and is there a way I can instead find a way to filter things to look forward to them?

My friend Stewart Slocknick did this with the news of his terminal cancer. Though he dreaded the idea of treatments, he told me he looked forward to getting beyond them and did not want to delay. He taught me how one dies with dignity and hope.

We cannot get back the hours we’ve lost to fretting, worry, and dread. All we can do is make adjustments to our filters for future events. It takes some getting used to, but now that I understand it, it sure makes tough patches a lot easier.

Fear not.
Dread not.

Eric Rhoads

PS: This week on my noon ET daily “broadcast” on YouTube and Facebook, I got into a discussion with an artist about the idea of natural talent versus learned skill. Our conclusion was that natural talent is more a result of tenacity and perseverance (working harder) than others, which makes us accomplish difficult tasks earlier than most, which is then perceived as natural talent. 

I find it fascinating that we think brain surgeons, lawyers, professionals of all kinds, need years of training — yet for some reason, we think artists are born with talent. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

If you happen to be one of those people who has stared at a painting or a drawing and always told yourself that you don’t have it in you, you’re telling yourself a lie. You have it in you, but you have to develop it and put in the time and instruction to bring it out. Painting as a hobby will bring a lifetime of joy and loads of emotional benefits. All you need to do is take action and apply yourself, just as you do in every other area of your life where you gain traction.

I’ve got a rare opportunity, worth taking some time off for … or at least allocating time to watch replays nights or weekends. It’s called Realism Live, and I’ve been gathering the top, cream-of-the-crop artists to teach for four days online. Plus there is a day for beginners with absolutely no knowledge or skill where we’ll hold your hand and teach you enough that you’ll feel like you made enough progress to continue your journey.

I can’t make you take action. Only you can do that. But I can point out that your mind is playing tricks on you if you think you can’t draw a stick figure. It’s true, you can’t — until we show you how. And keep showing you simple exercises to make the impossible possible to you.

You can come up with more excuses, but when are you going to have a chance like this? Plus you’ll be part of a community, you’ll have support and encouragement, and we’ll expose you to concepts that will change your life forever … because you’ll be taking the first steps to being an artist. Don’t tell yourself it’s not possible. Instead, be curious, and tell yourself it’s worth a try. You have nothing to lose … especially because if you attend Realism Live and, after the end of day one, you don’t think it brings you enough value, let us know. We’ll refund your money and disconnect you from the rest of the event. 

I encourage you to take this rare opportunity to join the world for this first online realism conference. Realism … teaching you how to paint real subjects (not abstract) like landscapes, people, faces, still life, flowers, and more. 

Sign up for only the Beginner’s Day for just $97, or the whole week for a little more. It’s still cheaper than getting on an airplane, buying a ticket to an event, and spending on meals and hotels. 

Early bird savings of $100 expires August 30. The price then increases $100 more. Sign up today at RealismLive.com.

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