Farriers perform a valuable service for people who care about their horses. It’s important to be trustworthy and do the job right.
Let me share a true story. A stone mason was laying very large stones for the walls of a large church building. One of the stones had a crack on the very inside of the stone. The foreman, a master mason, came by and looked at it and said, “There’s a crack in that stone.” The mason said, “I know it, but it’s on the inside. It’ll be covered up with plaster, and no one will ever see it. No one will ever know it’s there.” The master craftsman said, “Take it out. There are already three people that know it’s there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you know it, and I know it, and the Lord knows it. That’s who we‘re building this building for. Take it out.”
I’ve thought about that a lot. Sometimes when you’re working on a horse and you make a mistake, you see it and nobody else does. It still needs to be fixed.
When I was working for a man who trained some national champion Saddlebred horses, one time I received the nicest compliment, I think, I was ever given by anyone. He said he would be back in a little while, and I asked him if he didn’t want to stay and watch me to make sure I was doing it right. He said, “No, I don’t worry about you because I know you can’t do it wrong. You can’t leave here if it’s wrong because you’ll have to fix it because you won’t be satisfied with it.”
I think that was one of the nicest compliments I ever got.
If your standard is high enough, when you please yourself, you’ll please everyone else.
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Yes, I have thought about this before. We have the chance to be one of the few heroes in the world. I say this because a true hero is all character. We help people and their horses. We show up when we say we will. We can be a friend to both people and horses. We do stuff that others would rather not do or are not able to do. Then we do it well, by paying attention to the detail rather than calling a job good and running off to the next dollar. I find that many people crave this type of service if they have had to deal with less. This type of service must come from a completely honest and uncompromising heart, which in my experience only comes from Christ within. Thanks for the story.
Thank you Doctor Butler. Kevin Hatridge instilled that same belief in me. I often find myself pulling a nail because it’s not in line or one is too high, or resetting a shoe because the apex is not in line with the middle of the shoe. Thank you for all you have done for all of us and the AFA.