Success Quote by Alberto Salazar

Risk is the unglamorous ingredient Salazar insists we stop pretending we can optimize away. “High goal” isn’t a vague aspiration here; it’s a demand for altitude, the kind that makes ordinary plans insufficient. The line works because it treats safety as a luxury for smaller dreams. You can want certainty, or you can want exceptional outcomes, but trying to keep both is just another way of choosing the comfortable middle.

Coming from an elite runner, “take some chances” carries a double edge. In sport, chances are tangible: upping mileage, changing a stride, switching coaches, committing to a race strategy that could implode on national television. The subtext is psychological as much as physical: the willingness to look foolish, to fail publicly, to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing if the experiment will pay off. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the modern cult of metrics, the idea that enough data will guarantee success. At the top end, everyone has the data; advantage often goes to the person willing to gamble.

Salazar’s broader context complicates the sentence, too. His career as a coach has been entangled with controversy around the boundaries of legal and ethical performance enhancement. That doesn’t invalidate the insight, but it sharpens its stakes: “chances” can mean innovation and courage, or it can mean rationalizing risk until it becomes recklessness. The quote’s power lies in that tension. It’s both a pep talk and a warning label.