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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

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

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

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

I have been waking up to this for three weeks.

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

I did not come here for the view.

I came here to be a student again.

Just a Painter

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

That was all.

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

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

For five weeks, I wanted to carry nothing.

I wanted to see who I was underneath.

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

The Third Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something Began Turning

Then, slowly, something began to turn.

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

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

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

A Painting Everywhere

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

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

The Accidental Sabbatical

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

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

And yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take The Coat Off

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

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

Take the coat off for a little while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you will come home asking better questions.

And your life will thank you for it.

Yours from a hillside above Florence,

Eric Rhoads

The smell hits you first.

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

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

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

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

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

Finished Week Two

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

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

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

What Shook Me

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

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

Those are not the same thing.

This is going to change how I do everything.

Having No Idea You Don’t Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Personal

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

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

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

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

A Solid System

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

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

Universal Application

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

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

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

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

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

A Badge of Courage

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

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

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

Drawing Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Rhoads