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Motivation Quote by Edwin Moses

"I always had to keep improving my skills in order to remain competitive and keep winning"

About this Quote

Winning is treated here less as a finish line than a moving treadmill. Edwin Moses is talking like an athlete, but also like a systems thinker: competition is an environment that adapts, and any edge you have is already on a countdown. The intent is practical, almost unemotional. He isn’t romanticizing talent or “grit” for its own sake; he’s describing maintenance. If you stop upgrading, you don’t merely plateau-you get passed.

The subtext is sharper than the plain phrasing suggests. Moses dominated the 400m hurdles in an era when his event was being professionalized, studied, and optimized. His legendary win streak didn’t happen because he found a perfect form once and preserved it in amber; it happened because he treated excellence as iterative engineering. “Keep improving my skills” implies video analysis, training refinements, technical tinkering, and the humility to assume that today’s winning method will be obsolete tomorrow.

Context matters: track and field is a sport of measurable margins, where progress shows up in hundredths of a second and where rivals can reverse-engineer whatever works. Moses’ line pushes back against the lazy myth of the “natural.” It’s also a quiet warning about dominance: sustained success is not evidence that you’re effortlessly superior; it’s evidence that you were willing to be relentlessly unsatisfied. The sentence reads like advice, but it’s really a description of the psychological cost of staying on top-you’re never allowed to be done.

Quote Details

TopicTraining & Practice
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Moses, Edwin. (2026, January 17). I always had to keep improving my skills in order to remain competitive and keep winning. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-always-had-to-keep-improving-my-skills-in-order-58695/

Chicago Style
Moses, Edwin. "I always had to keep improving my skills in order to remain competitive and keep winning." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-always-had-to-keep-improving-my-skills-in-order-58695/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I always had to keep improving my skills in order to remain competitive and keep winning." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-always-had-to-keep-improving-my-skills-in-order-58695/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

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Edwin Moses: relentless improvement and dominance
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About the Author

Edwin Moses

Edwin Moses (born August 31, 1955) is a Athlete from USA.

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