Cole Younger, Optimism, and Keeping On

I believe that Cole Younger spent about 25 years in prison for his role in the Northfield, Minn. bank robbery before he was paroled. He hit the lecture circuit with a talk entitled "What Life Has Taught Me." Sometime the only thing that prevents failure is to accept the simple facts of what life has taught.

Without a doubt I have never entered a summer with such optimism for our program and with such an expectation of a great summer. Without a doubt this has been the most miserable disappointment of a summer that our program has ever experienced. As the corn browns it becomes clearer that hoping for an improvement over this summer is a vain hope. We have never trained fewer horses than we have this summer. We have never had such broiling weather. I have never had so many of my best teenagers age out of their love of the saddle. In short, it has been an utter bust.

However, I should have,(and will resume) considering what life has taught me. The main thing that I learned from keeping and training hounds for most of my life was that even if your current pack was a total failure, there would be more young dogs coming along for next year. That knowledge did not lead to foolish optimism but it did give the ability to put one foot in front of another and just keep on.

I have new crop of little riders that are brimming with enthusiasm. Their lives will be better for the experience and I will keep on providing the experience. I will keep my expectations to precisely that--keeping on.

Such an approach is neither a surrender, nor an example of setting the bar too low. It is an approach that recognizes the important reality that in this life, to keep on is to succeed.