The horse that was fed like a horse

Han Yu opens with a claim that reads like a proverb: there have always been horses that can run a thousand li in a day. What is not always present is someone who recognises one.

A thousand-li horse needs a great deal of food. If you feed it the way you feed an ordinary horse, it never develops the strength, and then it can't run, and then everyone concludes there are no good horses.

You take the whip to it and say: there are no good horses in the world. But you were the one who didn't know how to feed it.

The essay is a complaint about being overlooked, written by a man who spent years in minor posts. The bitterness is real and it slightly narrows the reading.

What survives is the mechanism, and it's mechanical. Capability needs a specific diet. If the diet isn't provided, the capability doesn't show. When it doesn't show, the judgement made about you is not "this one wasn't fed". It's "this one can't".

Nobody is going to audit your inputs before concluding about your outputs. That's the unfair part, and it's also the practical part.

Two questions. What's the diet your particular capacity needs, specifically? And who currently holds the wrong opinion about you because nobody has seen you at full strength?

The first question is yours to answer. The second is why it's worth finding one room where you are properly fed, even if it's small.

MOJOWAY tries to be that room for a coach's understanding of their own client. Specific attention, repeatedly, is a kind of feeding.