Ride Every Stride | Horsemanship And Personal Growth With Van Hargis

When I was much younger my sole aspiration was to become a calf roper. The absolute best one I could be. At the end of the day, I’d go practice flanking and tying calves, well, really legging them since I was so young. And one of my heroes at the time was Ernie Taylor, a full rodeo champion. I remember one day he stopped by our arena and I got the idea to go and impress him. I tried tying the calves as fast as I could. Which, of course, meant I was making plenty of mistakes. After a while, Ernie turned to me and said, “Van, I think you need to slow down to be fast.” I applied that advice to my roping and got much better. With even more time I came to realize this is one of the best lessons I ever learned in my horsemanship, or my life at large. Key takeaways I’d like to go ahead and say running around trying to impress people isn’t a great use of your time. When you look at someone and see where they are at in their journey it can make you want to perform on their level to gain their respect. But that’s j