(“It’s different than the way he’d just quit on his own .”)

Some riders can’t bear to make mistakes. Here is a news flash: If you think that you’re not making mistakes when you ride, you’re really just not self-aware enough to notice them.

Years ago when I was studying at ADI, I met a guy—a visiting observer—who astounded me by claiming he never needed to get on a horse to know how it felt.

“Never?” I responded doubtfully.

And when he did ride, he went on to say, he never made a mistake on a horse. Practically stupefied at this bold pronouncement, I recounted it to Lockie Richards with whom I was riding to test his reaction. Lockie smiled in his impish sort of way and replied that HE hadn’t made a mistake on a horse since the last time he rode one. All this brings us to the nature of mistakes which vary not just in magnitude but in the legacy they leave behind.

I am thinking of a particular student’s horse—a cheerful little guy of no particular breeding who is traversing the bumpy road from Intro to Training Level with his novice owner. Lately, she has had trouble keeping him in the canter. (Because he has not been sufficiently on the aids), he tends to casually drop out of it with nearly no notice whenever he feels he’s done enough. This can occur after even only half a 20-meter circle—his version of “enough” by anyone else’s standards isn’t very much!

As I explained to his rider, she can’t expect to fix his canter if he won’t agree to do it long enough for her to work on solving the problem. Some activities involve coordinated movements which occur in a very brief span of time. They are best practiced and perfected through many repetitions. Examples: a golf swing, returning a tennis serve, or riding a flying change. Other activities also require timing and coordination but they take place in a more flowing, continuous manner—for instance: improving your backstroke, rowing a boat, or tuning a half pass, a trot lengthening, or a balanced canter. In this situation letting him break at his pleasure is a big mistake that she cannot afford to permit. Even if it lacks beauty, elegance, and balance, he has to canter–PERIOD.

This week she achieved that goal. And now, as long as she was ABLE to keep him cantering, we could start tinkering with it. In this new context, mistakes are acceptable, even expected. Now the goal has become to teach him a modified, more organized, controlled canter: “You’re going forward. Now wait for the leg, hold yourself up, engage.” Now if he makes a mistake and breaks, it’s different than the way he’d just quit on his own in the past. When you’re trying to “move the line in the sand,” there will be acceptable trial and error mistakes from which both horse and rider learn. In this case if you don’t stretch the envelope, nothing ever changes.

It’s so rewarding when the light finally goes on in your horse’s mind. He discovers that canter is an entirely different thing then he thought it was. He relaxes, he flows, he enjoys it, and it becomes easy to sit to. Mistakes occur in the process of him making this discovery, but these are “mistakes” that lead to a greater good.

If you have a spare moment to exercise your Google machine, you’ll find that the Gain through Error paradigm is evident in other realms of our culture too. Henry Petroski, a civil engineering professor at Duke University makes his living studying this process. His books: Success through Failure– The Paradox of Design, and its recent companion, To Forgive Design– Understanding Failure, demonstrate how this same principle plays out in solving real-world problems (bridge building, satellite launching, and similar forays into uncharted waters) that are far weightier than how to keep your horse off his forehand.