Popular Horse Racing Careers

Popular Horse Racing CareersPopular Horse Racing CareersThere are a variety of career options for those wanting to work in the horse racing industry. Here are some of the most popular options for careers at the racetrack Racehorse Trainer Racehorse trainers supervise the care and training of the horses in their racing stable. They work with veterinarians, farriers, exercise rider, and jockeys to provide comprehensive equine care and maximize each horses performance. While no specific education is required, most trainers work as assistants before striking out on their own. Trainers must obtain a professional license in each state where they plan to race a horse. In terms of compensation, trainers charge a day satz for each horses basic care plus 10 percent of purse money won. Income can vary widely based on the stables number of horses in training as well as the level of success that the stable has at the races. Jockey A jockey rides racehorses in competition and must meet st ringent weight requirements to be eligible to compete (most jockeys weigh in at 100 to 115 pounds). They may ride in as many as 8 or 9 races per day, and some jockeys also ride horses in their morning workouts to become familiar with their individual quirks and racing styles. Jockeys must first obtain an apprentice license and win the required number of races before advancing to a journeyman jockeys license. Jockeys earn a fee for each mount plus a percentage of their mounts earnings. Earnings can vary widely based on the frequency that a jockey can win races and the number of horses they ride each day. Jockey Agent A jockey agent lines up mounts for the jockey that they represent. Their job involves talking to trainers to book mounts, evaluating races to determine the most viable prospects, keeping a log of riding engagements, and performing administrative tasks such as making travel arrangements. Jockey agents must be licensed in the states where their jockeys compete. They r eceive about 25 percent of the jockeys earnings as compensation, so agents representing top riders will earn top dollar. Exercise Rider Exercise riders ride racehorses during morning workouts. They can maintain a higher weight than jockeys but still must generally tip the scales at 150 pounds or less. A license is required to ride at the racetrack. Work begins before dawn and usually ends before noon. Exercise riders are compensated for each horse that they ride daily, and they may ride 6 to 8 horses each morning. Many riders maintain a second part-time job occupy their afternoon hours. Track Veterinarian Track veterinarians administer a variety of medications, check horses for fitness to compete on race day, and take post-race samples to be tested for banned and illegal medications. They also treat injured horses and perform a variety of exams at the request of owners and trainers. A license is required to work at the track. Equine veterinarians must make a significant comm itment of time and money to earn their DVM degree, but they can earn a salary of $85,000 or more each year. Farrier A farrier is concerned with maintaining the health of the equine foot. They perform routine trims, shape and apply shoes, and consult on lamenesses or other soundness issues. Farriers may achieve professional certification from a variety of associations and training schools, or they may choose to learn through an apprenticeship with a master farrier. In 2011, the average compensation for farriers was $92,600 with the frequency of shoeing on the track, racehorse farriers can earn even higher salaries. Groom Grooms provide day-to-day care for the horses assigned to them by the trainer. Routine duties include bandaging legs, mucking out stalls, grooming, and saddling. Grooms also watch their horses carefully for signs of injury or illness. Six day work weeks are common for grooms, and a license is required to work at the track. Compensation for grooms usually rang es from $8 to $15 per hour, and they often receive bonuses when one of their charges wins a race. Bloodstock Agent Bloodstock agents represent buyers and sellers of racehorses, provide professional appraisals of value, and purchase horses at auction on behalf of clients. There is no educational requirement or licensing of bloodstock agents, but they must have an excellent knowledge of pedigrees and a good eye for evaluating equine conformation. Most agents earn 5 percent commission on sales that they broker and some agents earn a fee for being kept on retainer to provide regular advice to clients. Top agents can easily earn six-figure salaries.

Outsmart your own decision biases

Outsmart your own decision biasesOutsmart your own decision biasesWelcome to menschengerecht nature. We are all, to varying degrees, prejudiced.We are influenced by different unconscious biases.Theodore Roosevelt once said, In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.You make thousands of rational decisions every day?- ?or so you thinkPrejudice impact our thinking every day, but few of us even know they exist, saysNorma Montague, assistant hochschulprof of accounting at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.The word bias has a negative connotation, but its fruchtwein often unintentional and a result of heuristicsmental shortcuts that allow people to make quick, efficient decisions, she says.Good decisions are often the result, but not always.We see ourselves as possessing the truth. Yet we all fall prey to human egocentricity (an inability to understand or assume any perspective other than our own)?- ?although not to the same degree.None of us will ever be a perfect thinker, but we can all be better thinkers.Deep and critical thinking is hard. Learning how to think is even harder. Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it, said Henry Ford.Thinking means sifting through information, filtering the most important piece, and connecting it to a framework that you can use.The ability to think and process multiple pieces of information quickly and effectively is a vital skill to have.No matter what your circumstance or goals, no matter where you are or what harte nusss you face, you are better off if you are in control of your thinking, and apply better-thinking models in both short-term and long-term decisions.Dont confuse IQ with thinking, fast or slow.Those with high IQ are not necessarily life smart.IQ tests are very good at measuring certain mental faculties, including logic, abstract re asoning, learning ability and working-memory capacity?- ?how much information you can hold in mind.But when it comes to abilities crucial to making good judgements in real-life situations, you need more than a test score.Whether youre answering hard questions, making impromptu remarks, analyzing a situation, or synthesizing data, critical thinking on your feet is crucial.A high IQ is like height in a basketball player, saysDavid Perkins, who studies thinking and reasoning skills at Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is very important, all other things being equal. But all other things arent equal. Theres a lot more to being a good basketball player than being tall, and theres a lot more to being a good thinker than having a high IQ.In our fast-paced and fluid world, youve got to be able to pull out the right piece of knowledge at the right time.The good news is that everyone can improve their rational thinking and decision-making skills.Think about yourthinkingMetacognition, as this is known, is a crucial skill.Thinking about thinking is the ability to know what we know and what we dont know.It is the ability to plan a strategy for producing the information that is needed, to be conscious of your own steps and strategies during the act of problem-solving, and to reflect on and evaluate the productiveness of your own thinking.How many times do you stop yourself and think about your thought processes and the heuristics you apply in making judgements in life or business?InThe Art of Thinking Clearly, authorRolf Dobelliwrites, Whether we like it or not, we are puppets of our emotions. We make complex decisions by consulting our feelings, not our thoughts. Against our best intentions, we substitute the question, What do I think about this? with How do I feel about this?Unless you actively think about which mental shortcuts is best suited for the task at hand, you could end up making schwimmbad judgements when it matters most.Many s cientists argue that the best predictor of good judgment isnt intelligence or experience its the willingness to engage in introspection.Dont over-persevereYour decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it.Do you think you make smart, rational decisions most of the time?Chances are good that even if you pride yourself on being rational most of the time, you still occasionally fall for the sunk-cost fallacy.The sunk-cost fallacy sees us continue to invest in an established project rather than cutting loose when something is over budget.Put another way, dont over-persevere.Quit early when it mattersIn psychologistDaniel Kahnemansbook,Thinking Fast and Slow, he writes about how he and his colleague Amos Tversky through their work in the 1970s and 80s uncovered the imbalance between losses and gains in your mind.Kahneman explains that since all decisions involve uncertainty about the future, th e human brain you use to make decisions has evolved an automatic and unconscious system for judging how to proceed when a potential for loss arises.We often dont quit early enough, says Kahneman.Behavioral economistDan Arielyadds a fascinating twist to lose aversion in his book,Predictably Irrational.He writes that when factoring the costs of any exchange, you tend to focus more on what you may lose in the bargain than on what you stand to gain.The pain of paying, as he puts it, arises whenever you must give up anything you own. The precise amount doesnt matter at first.Youll feel the pain no matter what price you must pay, and it will influence your decisions and behaviours.Stay in the present, and cut your losses.Plan for theworstDenis Waitleyonce said, Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.As paradoxical as it sounds?- ?The best way to shield yourself from nasty surprises is to anticipate them.We tend to make plans which are unrealistically close to bes t-case scenarios.We prefer to ignore statistics suggesting things may go wrong, and ignore the probability of whatDonald Rumsfeldfamously called unknown unknowns.Pessimists might already be great at planning for worst case scenarios.Persevere and by all means pursue your life goals, but you need to get some plan in place for when the unexpected happens.Some events, no matter how much you plan, will still be a major blow.The loss of a job, the diagnosis of a serious disease, or the loss of a home would be a major negative shock in anyones life, but proper planning ahead will make the difficult news easier to bear.Take a moment (and give your brain some time to think) before making your nextdecisionHeres the problem in our rapidly changing, high-pressured, distracting world, our working memory gets taxed.Your brains capacity is constantly overburdened and thus diminished in function over time.It pays to let your mind wander.Give it a break. This promotes the creative incubation proces s, giving you moments of foresight every now and then.According to astudypublished in the Psychological Science, the brains capacity for original and creative thinking is enhanced by stray thoughts, obsessive ruminations and other forms of mental load.The findings suggest that innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default cognitive mode when our minds are clear.Honing an ability to unburden the load on your mind, be it through meditation or some other practice, can bring with it a wonderfully magnified experience of the world?- ?and, as the study suggests, of your own mind.Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets, essayistTim Kreiderwrote in The New York Times.Everyone could use more white space during the week.Make a decision to make time. You wont create time for thinking if you dont actively make the time for it.Co mmit to spending a few hours every week on thinking and reflection.At some point in the week, stop, sit down and just think.The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates observed.You can quickly make life more pleasant, more fulfilling if you slow down.When you enter a space outside the flow of targets and deadlines, you can start to focus on what is happening in your life right now.Fine-tune your routine to make rational thinking and metacognition a regular feature of your day.Taking just a fraction of a second more to make a decision could help improve your decision-making accuracy, according to a recent PLoS ONE study.Postponing the onset of the decision process by as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds enables the brain to focus attention on the most relevant information and block out irrelevant distractors, saidJack Grinband, PhD, associate research scientist in the Taub Institute and assistant professor of clinical radiology at Columbia University Medical Center.Even the smar test people exhibit biases in their judgments and choices. But with practice, you can anticipate and outsmart them by nudging yourself in the right direction when its time to make a life-changing decision.Before yougoIf you enjoyed this post, you will lovePostanly Weekly(my free digest of the best productivity, psychology, and neuroscience posts).Subscribeand get a free copy of my new book, The Power of One Percent Better Small Gains, Maximum Results.Join over 36,000 people on a mission to build a better life.Thisarticlefirst appeared onMedium.

10 Phrases to Drop From Your Vocabulary

10 Phrases to Drop From Your Vocabulary 10 Phrases to Drop From Your Vocabulary Researchers believe that the earliest spoken language was Mayan, which arose  around 7,000 years ago. Imagine, in 70 centuries, weve progressed to, and I was like,  really? Whether you are leading a team meeting, presenting to a prospective client, or delivering a keynote speech to a global audience, verbal mistakes will undermine  your credibility  and distract from your message. If you want to have  integrity  and  influence, consider dropping these phrases from your vocabulary: 1. Im Confused or I Dont  Get It Instead of putting all the responsibility on the other person, take co-ownership. Say, Help me understand your position, and remain open. 2. You Know What I Mean? and Does That Make Sense? Asking for constant validation chips away at your command. 3. I was like  or She was like The word like is an unsophisticated setup that gets in the way of your clarity and credibility. 4. Um, Ah, Uh, You Know Watch out for overuse of filler words. Practice pausing to counteract the clutter. 5. Ive Been Too Busy or I Started Writing an Email and Forgot to Send It Excuses are unattractive. Say, “ apologize for the inconvenience. You will have it by tomorrow. 6. Out-of-the-Box Thinking This phrase  should be retired. We cant escape all the buzzwords and buzzphrases, but ones like this have become boring through overuse. 7. You always Sweeping generalizations lack insight and get in the way of healthy dialogue. Be specific and avoid using vague blame tactics. 8. I Think We Should Kind of Do It This Way Tentative language waters down your presence as a  confident communicator. Make a solid recommendation and own it. 9. I Hate to Say This, but or  John Is a Good Person, but Dont try to disguise criticism with a layer of caring or say things that offer zero value. 10. Really? Its an all-purpose complaint that sounds like whining. Try making an interesting observation instead. If you want to have more credibility and influence, be, uh, like, you know, more intentional in your communication. Replace negative tones and lackluster words with positive tones and authentic,  appreciative words. Each new day is an opportunity to inspire greatness, so say something real. â€" A version of this article originally appeared on SUCCESS.com Lou Solomon  is the founder and CEO of Interact, a leadership communication consultancy that helps Fortune 500 companies (like Goodrich, Wells Fargo, and Duke Energy), CEOs, managers, entrepreneurs, and their teams be true to their authentic selves and advance in leadership.