We all ride horses probably for very similar reasons, chief among them being that we love them. Is loving horses enough to make this crazy hobby into a full-blown career?

Frankly? No. It’s not enough.

You have to love more than the horses to make it work. You have to love the journey of not only developing and training the horse, but also of developing and training yourself. You have to find solace in the quiet hours when you’re doing some menial  but necessary task like cleaning stalls at 11 p.m. night check, or polishing bit rings at 5 a.m. when you need a short break from braiding horses for the day’s classes. I think when people get into this business, they don’t always enjoy those sorts of things, but they do them because they’re necessary. The ones who stick with it end up loving those tasks and obsessing over them. They want every detail perfect at the barn, even though their bedroom at home is nothing short of a catastrophe. Priorities, right?

(flickr.com/Rick Bisio)

(flickr.com/Rick Bisio)

I think the beauty of my career choice is that there is tangible progress almost every day if you pay attention. It’s easy to get swept up in only seeing the big leaps forward, but whether it’s a young horse picking up the correct lead more consistently from one day to the next, or a sensitive horse not losing its cool when you try to fly spray it, there’s always small steps forward.

I’ve seen a lot of people come and go in this business and I’ve only been in it for about five years. So many people come into barns to be working students or grooms with stars in their eyes and all these ideas of what it’s going to be like. Let’s face it, there’s nothing really glamorous about shoveling poop every day and feeding 1,200-pound toddlers expensive food, only to watch them throw it on the floor. It’s not really exciting to tack up horses day after day or to unload 250 bales of hay off a truck and re-stack them, or scrub out huge water troughs encrusted with slimy algae when it’s 100 degrees outside. No, we get maybe five minutes of glamour, standing beside the ring watching a horse we’ve cared for perform its best, or when we, ourselves, get to ride into the show ring and accomplish a long sought after goal. If we only liked that part of the job, none of us would stick around because those moments are so few and far between sometimes. If we only liked the horses and not the journey of caring for and training them, we wouldn’t last very long either.

No, I don’t think just loving horses is enough, nor is just loving the destination. Maybe I can’t phrase it correctly, but there are plenty of quotes from more eloquent people regarding this very thing. Here’s one I particularly like:

“Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.”

-Greg Anderson

I also like this one as well:

“I’m an ambitious person. I never consider myself in competition with anyone, and I’m not saying that from an arrogant standpoint, it’s just that my journey started so, so long ago, and I’m still on it and I won’t stand still. “

-Idris Elba

©Alex Carlton

©Alex Carlton

Ultimately, when the going gets tough, it’s so important to look at the small things every day that are getting better, because without being able to find that little motivation every day, we’ll never get anywhere we want to be. The key to never giving up is to never stop looking for those little pieces of progress, no matter how small.


About the Author

Kate Severson is a young professional working at a training and sales barn in Texas. She currently shows some young dressage horses as well as jumper sales horses, and her blog Working Equestrian is her way of providing in-depth insight into what it’s really like to work in the horse industry.