You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

 

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