The Infinite Chase: The Never-Ending (and Always Worthwhile) Pursuit of Perfection

A full military career is full of different assignments, different locations, and different

experiences. Even when you spend an entire career inside a single specialty (armor,

infantry, aviation, logistics, intelligence) the range of units, leaders, missions, and cultures you encounter is wide. The uniforms look the same. The doctrine is the same.

The standards are supposed to be the same.

But the reality is not.

If you talk to almost any career Soldier long enough, you will eventually hear the same

quiet confession: there was one unit that set the standard for everything that came after.

For me, that unit was 1st Squadron, 4th United States Cavalry: the Quarterhorse.

There are several reasons that unit still stands out so clearly, even decades later. First,

it was not a unit you were simply assigned to as an officer. You had to express interest.

You had to be vetted. And you needed leaders who were willing to advocate for you to

get in the door. That alone told you something about the expectations before you ever

arrived. This was not a place built around convenience. It was built around fit.

Second, it was the unit where I served my first combat deployment. Anyone who has

worn a uniform understands how formative those early operational experiences are.

They change how you think about responsibility. They change how you think about

teammates. They change how you think about leadership. And they stay with you long

after the deployments, awards, and positions fade into background noise.

Third, it was the unit where I formed relationships that still exist more than twenty years

later, not because we were forced together by an organizational chart, but because we

were shaped together by shared standards, shared hardship, and shared accountability.

Above all else, however, Quarterhorse stood apart for one simple reason. It had a

culture of high standards, real leadership, and real accountability. We helped each other

up. We told each other—directly—when something wasn’t good enough. We trained

harder than anyone else around us, and we were proud of the demanding environment

we created. Not because we enjoyed suffering, but because we understood the weight

of the responsibility we carried. There were real consequences attached to our

performance, not hypothetical ones, not administrative ones, but real ones.

That culture didn’t just become my favorite assignment. It became the mold. It quietly

shaped how I evaluate every team I’ve belonged to since, inside and outside the

military, and it shaped how I now think about leadership, culture, and performance.

Here is what I learned much later.

What made that unit special was not that we were perfect. We weren’t. We made

mistakes. We missed standards. We had bad days. We had moments where execution

slipped. We had leaders who were still learning their craft. We had people who

struggled. We had friction and conflict, just like every real team does.

What made that unit different was how it responded when performance fell short.

The environment never softened the standard, but it also never reduced people to their

mistakes. That tension, the refusal to lower expectations while refusing to abandon

people, is what I now call The Infinite Chase.

The Infinite Chase is a commitment to pursue excellence without lowering standards

when execution falls short of perfection. It is not a motivational slogan or a cultural

poster. It is not a feel-good leadership concept or a leadership posture.

At the heart of The Infinite Chase is a distinction that sounds subtle, but changes how

leaders actually lead. What are you actually chasing?

You chase perfection.

You practice mastery.

More precisely, perfection defines the direction, and mastery defines the behavior.

Perfection is the target we aim at, even though we know we will never reach it. It gives

us an uncompromising reference point. It establishes what “great” actually means. It

prevents us from shrinking our expectations to match our comfort.

Mastery, however, is how the work gets done. Mastery shows up in preparation,

discipline, coaching, feedback, and ownership. It shows up in how quickly mistakes are

recognized and corrected, how consistently standards are reinforced, and how seriously

people take their responsibility to one another.

You can be deeply committed to mastery without being perfect. In fact, mastery only

exists because imperfection exists. A master is not someone who never misses. A

master is someone who does not waste misses.

The Quarterhorse did not chase comfort. It chased perfection. But what it practiced

every single day was mastery. That is why mistakes were never ignored, never hidden,

and never punished into silence. They were coached, directly and personally, toward

the standard.

This is where many teams misunderstand the relationship between high standards and

psychological safety. Safety is often treated as protection from accountability. In The

Infinite Chase, safety exists so accountability can happen. Grace is not the absence of

correction. Grace is the presence of leadership.

When people believe they will not be humiliated for honest mistakes, they stop hiding

problems. When they believe they will be supported through correction, they stop

defending mediocrity. When they believe standards are real and fairly enforced, they

stop negotiating expectations. That is not softness.

One of the most dangerous leadership failures I have seen in organizations, athletic

programs, and corporate teams is not low standards. It is silent drift. It is the slow

lowering of expectations, the quiet tolerance of “almost,” and the gradual redefinition of

what good looks like.

It rarely happens all at once. It happens when leaders become uncomfortable having

hard conversations. It happens when feedback gets delayed, when exceptions quietly

become norms, when leaders protect feelings instead of standards, and when

accountability becomes selective. Over time, discipline erodes not because people are

careless, but because leaders become cautious.

The Infinite Chase exists specifically to prevent that drift. It reminds leaders and teams

that the standard is not flexible simply because execution is human. Human

performance will always be imperfect. Leadership standards cannot be.

The Infinite Chase is also honest about something most organizations avoid saying out

loud. This pursuit never ends, not because people are failing, but because the standard

keeps pulling forward. The moment a team believes it has “figured it out,” it begins to

lose the habits that created success in the first place. Discipline becomes routine.

Preparation becomes assumed. Feedback softens. Correction becomes rarer.

Standards turn into slogans instead of behaviors.

By contrast, The Infinite Chase keeps leaders oriented toward growth instead of

comfort. It keeps teams oriented toward improvement instead of protection. It keeps

culture anchored to responsibility rather than mood.

That is why the Quarterhorse stayed with me. There was always another after-action

review, another drill, another rehearsal, and another difficult conversation. Very often, it

was a peer who pulled you aside and told you that what you had done was not yet good

enough. And just as often, there was someone ready to help you close the gap.

That is not an environment of fear. It is an environment of respect; respect for the

mission, respect for the people beside you, and respect for the standard.

The Infinite Chase is not permission to be average. It is permission to stay in the work. It

allows people to struggle without losing dignity, but it never allows teams to struggle

without learning. It allows leaders to care deeply about their people, but it never allows

leaders to protect people from growth.

Leadership and performance are deeply human endeavors. They are filled with

emotion, doubt, confidence, frustration, pride, and pressure. The Infinite Chase does not

ignore that humanity. It simply refuses to confuse humanity with lowered expectations.

When I look back on my career, the Quarterhorse became my reference point. It

became the culture I compare everything else to, and it became the lens through which

I now coach leaders and teams.

Chase perfection. Let it define your direction. But practice mastery every day through

discipline, feedback, ownership, and leadership. That is The Infinite Chase. And if you

build your culture around it, you will never have to fear becoming satisfied with “good

enough.”