Equuality: Reflections on Life with Horses

The Tyranny of Perfection

About the Book

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing. -Dr. Harriet Braiker

"Practice makes perfect," has become a ubiquitous phrase in our culture. We are taught from our childhood that all we have to do to reach perfection is to try harder. If we are unsatisfied with ourselves or others are unsatisfied with us, the trouble must be that we have been lazy and not worked hard enough. If only we had applied more effort, then perfection would have been attained. Soon we are stuck in an endless cycle of applying greater energy to get unsatisfactory results, leading us back to trying even harder.

Even more dangerous is this common quote's even fiercer cousin: "Only perfect practice makes perfect." When we adopt this mantra literally, we burden ourselves under the yoke of double perfection. We must now strive to be perfect in our striving for perfection. And still we try and try and try. If we are lucky, we have brief moments of satisfaction with our progress. However, these moments fade quickly in the face of the need to continue practicing for perfection. At best, this process is greatly demoralizing. At worst, it leaves us waking up one day to realize how much time we have spent feeling empty and unfulfilled.

The perfect-or-nothing attitude is a very easy one to adopt in today's horse world. Since the industrial revolution abolished the daily need for partnerships with horses, we have learned to relate to them primarily in terms of sport. If we are in the western world we likely rope, cut, or rein. If we are of the English persuasion we jump or perform dressage patterns. These disciplines provide us with goals to achieve, standards to pursue, and competitors to best. In the face of these scenarios, we quickly turn to our conditioned behaviors of striving for perfection in order to fit in. Unfortunately, we are no longer trapping only ourselves in the damaging spiral of perfection seeking; we are taking the horses we love with us.

The above quote from Dr. Braiker shines light on another route that we can follow: the path of excellence. Unlike perfection, which compares us to an impossible standard, excellence is a concept that exists only within ourselves. Excellence is not The Best, it is the best we can do in any given moment.

Some days our performance in our disciplines will seem greater than others: we will jump higher fences, rope more accurately, or half-pass with greater fluidity. Some days our performance will be nothing short of dreadful. However, when we are striving for excellence rather than perfection, we give ourselves the grace of non-judgment. We can begin to understand that what we do in any given moment is in fact the very best that we can do in that moment. From this understanding we begin to see that the true goal of practice is not to achieve perfection but to allow ourselves to be excellent.

When I need my horse to do a perfect sliding stop, I have greatly limited the criteria for our success. If we cannot perform that single maneuver up to my imagined standard then I will be doomed to think the entire day a failure. If, instead, I can be open to see the beauty that exists in every effort that the horse and I make together, then I can bask in the gratitude I have for my relationship with him and every day can be a success.

When we allow ourselves to be free of the tyranny of needing perfection, we open ourselves to experience life in a much larger way. Perfection requires the meeting of very specific criteria in very specific areas. Excellence suggests that we can take whatever comes our way and use it to paint the picture of our lives.