As somebody that does alpine skiing and is a great fan of the sport, I feel I should elaborate on that analogy. You see the coach was talking about practice. An

As somebody that does alpine skiing and is a great fan of the sport, I feel I should elaborate on that analogy. You see the coach was talking about practice. And yes in practice you should be pushing yourself and risking a fall. There is a tradeoff between speed and risk in slalom. The faster you go the more likely it is to fall or miss a gate. But skill goes into it too. A more skilled skier will be able to go faster without making any mistakes. And how do you get skills? Well you practice. That's why you should practice at speeds that tend to cause you to fall. Because as you keep falling your skills at that speed increase and eventually you will fall less and less until you stop falling and you are able to ski reliably at the higher speed. If you practice at comfortable speeds, you will not gain the skills to deal with higher speeds. But all of this is true because it is training and in training the cost of a fall is more or less nothing (again we are talking about slalom here, not downhill where one fall can easily kill you). Of course when you start racing things get different. One fall or missed gate usually disqualifies you from a race. Also, a single race includes two runs down the hill. Thus, one could race brilliantly for most of the day and fall in the end of the second run and become disqualified. A world cup run involves many races around the world, wherein each skiier earns points for each race and the points are added up in the end of the year to determine the gold medalist. So an elite skier can afford to ski relatively safe in order to get consistent results over the many races. What you actually see in slalom is that many of the top skiers do not ski as fast as they are capable during the year. They want to control their risk. It is the younger and less known skiers that try to ski as fast as they can, because they figure if they play it safe they will probably finish behind the experienced guys, but if they risk it all they might get first place and make a name for themselves. So the lesson of embracing risk works only during practice and not always during the race. What life or business lessons one can gain from this? I don't know I just felt like talking about skiing. But hey I have one, maybe if you are a startup founder you should be like a young and inexperienced skiier and risk it all, because if you play it safe you will always get beaten by a big company playing it safe.