"You just have to go as far as you can go. Everyone works his way up"
About this Quote
The second sentence, “Everyone works his way up,” carries the cultural ballast. Coming from a Dominican star who became “Big Papi” in Boston only after being discarded elsewhere, it’s an argument against the romantic shortcut story we love to tell about talent. The subtext is corrective: you don’t get to skip steps just because you feel special, and you don’t get to dismiss someone’s success as luck without insulting the years of anonymous work behind it.
There’s also a quiet democratizing move here. Ortiz isn’t pretending the system is perfectly fair, but he’s insisting on a shared reality: nobody arrives fully formed. In an era when athletes are branded as prodigies at 16 and criticized as finished products at 22, he’s reframing growth as incremental and continuous. It’s motivational without being sentimental, a working-class ethic dressed in sports talk: show up, take your cuts, accept your limits, then push them again tomorrow.
Quote Details
| Topic | Perseverance |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Ortiz, David. (2026, January 15). You just have to go as far as you can go. Everyone works his way up. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-just-have-to-go-as-far-as-you-can-go-everyone-170015/
Chicago Style
Ortiz, David. "You just have to go as far as you can go. Everyone works his way up." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-just-have-to-go-as-far-as-you-can-go-everyone-170015/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"You just have to go as far as you can go. Everyone works his way up." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/you-just-have-to-go-as-far-as-you-can-go-everyone-170015/. Accessed 7 Feb. 2026.









