Six Lessons From a Man on Horseback
The key element of success for a person, business, or nation is to harness power and talent.
That's not a very original thought, but I was having it in a very appropriate place – atop a horse, where "to harness" is not just a metaphor.
Horses were domesticated perhaps as early as 3,500 B.C. The horse was the first large, self-activated thing that we humans brought under our control in order to increase our strength and force.
To this day, we measure the output of most devices that produce strength and force in "horsepower." Therefore, horses should offer us some lessons about harnessing power and talent... Including our own.
After all, though horses may outweigh us by half a ton, we were the ones who domesticated them, not the other way around. (Cowboys and Indians would have been a ridiculous conflict if horses had been mounted on Comanche and cattlemen.)
The reason I was atop a horse is that I spent last weekend staying with an old friend who has a horse farm in Virginia.
The visit was mostly for the benefit of my 17-year-old daughter Lulu, who is an avid and accomplished horsewoman. But she just goes around in circles in riding rings doing something called "dressage," which I believe is a French word meaning "dressed funny."
This is no way to appreciate the power and talent of horses.
My Virginia friend plays polo. My rural New England daughter had never seen polo played. We have plenty of horses and riders where we live. What we don't have is enough flat land for a polo ground, which is 300 yards long and 160 yards wide.
A polo ground is the size of nine football fields – large enough for all the NFL teams in the American Football Conference to play each other at the same time with room left over for a high school state championship.
(You should get a polo ground, if you want to harness an oversized lawn that otherwise just lays there.)
I once thought polo was nothing more than a punch line for jokes about rich people. Then, 30 years ago, I saw my first polo match. It's an amazing sport, a combination of rodeo trick riding, mounted golf, horse soccer, rugby on four legs, and the Super Bowl played with 1,000-pound running backs.
And polo is the perfect place to see the harnessing of power and talent – watching everything a rider and a horse can do together and how fast and how masterfully they can do it.
I wasn't playing. I was just trotting around the periphery of the match, trying not to fall off. I love horses, but I'm a lousy horseback rider. I'm so bad that I've fallen off a horse when it was standing still.
This can happen if you fail to tighten the saddle girth. A smart horse – and they're all smart when they feel like it – will puff itself up while you're putting on the saddle and then, when you're mounted, suck in its gut like me at the beach. As a result, the saddle spins around the way a whirligig lawn ornament does.
Thus, the First Business and Management Lesson from Horseback Riding: Remember, when you're harnessing power and talent, whatever you're harnessing is probably more powerful and talented than you are.
Actually, that's the Second Lesson. The first lesson is to think about how many failed riding startups there must have been.
People 5,500 years ago didn't know that a horse was the right thing to leap on the back of. I'll bet they were trying to leap on the back of all sorts of animals. They were hopping on rhinos, jumping on hippos, trying to mount cave bears and saber-toothed tigers. A lot of what was invested in these entrepreneurial initiatives must have resulted in a... so to speak... dead loss.
The Third Lesson is that people can be really determined to harness power and talent (hopping on rhinos) and, at the same time, be really stupid about it. Europeans had saddles for thousands of years, but it wasn't until the Middle Ages that it occurred to anyone to hang stirrups from those saddles.
Yes, you can ride without stirrups – if you have thighs like a pair of giant, fleshy Vise-Grips. But Newton's third law of motion – "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" – suggests that when ancient Roman cavalry lances struck the shields of ancient Gauls, the Romans went backassward off their horses.
The Fourth Lesson is to give whatever you're harnessing a purpose in life. A machine without a purpose hardly qualifies as a machine. And a horse or a human without a purpose is a sad case. There's an old cowboy saying, "More people are killed by pet horses..." Meaning your horse is more likely to do something stupid or vicious if it has no purpose. (The same, I suppose, could be said about spouses.)
Sure, horses and people are motivated by greed. Polo ponies want the feed bag, and people want the string of polo ponies. But what really motivates man and beast is a goal. A horse's goal is to run like hell and dust it up with the other horses in the herd. That's polo. Polo makes horses very happy – like cavalry battles used to. (Polo riders fall off almost as often as ancient Romans with lances.)
The Fifth Lesson is that you must have the right equipment to harness power and talent. In horseback riding, oddly, "harness" is not what you call the thing you use for harnessing. You want a bridle. The most important part of a bridle is the bit. What the bit does is curb the horse's tongue.
If the above three sentences seem to apply to a certain person currently attempting to harness the power and talent of a presidential administration, that's not my fault.
This brings me to the Sixth and Last Lesson. As my daughter and my Virginia friend have been trying to tell me for years, the only secret of riding well is balance.
You must have a gut feeling for where you are on the horse. (For me, it's more like a "butt feeling," and a sore one at that.)
Overachievers, business leaders, and in particular, holders of high political office are not famous for always keeping their balance.
The phrase "man on horseback" – meaning a proud, vain politician who thinks he's the savior of his nation – was coined to describe the 19th-century French politician Gen. Georges Ernst Boulanger. He was a provocative, mouthy, reactionary nationalist with a strong appeal to working folks.
During the 1880s, Boulanger was so popular in France that French lefties were practically wetting themselves for fear that he would declare himself dictator.
Boulanger made almost all of his public appearances mounted on a horse. I suppose there were situations where this looked silly, such as inside the French Chamber of Deputies. But appearing in public on horseback does produce a more imposing effect than appearing in public on Twitter.
I'm not being partisan here. Our previous chief executive thought he was the savior of his nation, too. He was a provocative, mealy mouthed, pinko internationalist with a strong appeal to folks who have no intention of working.
That guy should have realized appearing on horseback produces a more imposing effect than appearing on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.
Of course, whether we want our presidents to be more imposing – that is, to impose upon us even more than they do already – is another question.
Maybe presidents should take their riding lessons from me.
Regards,
P.J. O'Rourke