The Perfect is the Enemy of The Good
I was looking up some info on Kathleen Lindley (see www.kathleenlindley.com for articles, clinic info and more) and ran across a news story write-up about a clinic Kathleen had done where she had quoted Voltaire. This quote resonates with me on so many levels it felt like a jolt when I first read it. "In his writings, the wise Italian says that the best is the enemy of the good". It is commonly quoted as "the perfect is the enemy of the good". So a person can have adequate competency and yet be stuck in the extremism of perfectionism. One can effectively ignore one's own progress (and that of his/her horse's) because of this vision of perfect. We can miss the try, miss the improvement, miss it all. Consider along with this concept, the levels of learning: unconscious incompetency (you don't know how to do it and probably don't know you don't know) conscious incompetency (you know you don't know but are learning) ...