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What a Quarter Horse Taught Me about Business & Strategy
A tribute to Hershey
Anybody who’s ever played a sport knows it teaches lessons that can be applied to your work life — things like discipline, perseverance and teamwork.
Horseback riding — a relatively uncommon sport — teaches a unique set of lessons. I’ve often thought of writing on this topic but never got around to it.
Just recently, I lost my long-time equine partner, a Quarter Horse named Hershey. In tribute to him, I thought this would be an ideal time to finally write such a piece.
(For the softies out there, Hershey was 31, which is somewhere between 90 and 100 in ‘horse years,’ depending upon which horse-age-calculation method you use. So he had a good, long ride.)
1. Diplomacy
Memo from the Obvious Department: You can’t physically force a 1200-lb creature to do anything. That means you need to get creative. Think out of the box stall, as it were
One effective strategy is to simply ignore undesirable behavior. De-emphasize it. Take the energy away.
Let’s say a horse refuses to walk past a certain mailbox. (Horses are afraid of a lot of stuff). You could spend all afternoon trying to make the animal Just. Do. It. But you’ll both probably end…
