Kageyama Quotes

The photographer from the magazine, Masao Kageyama, would ride along in the van that accompanied me. He’d take pictures as they drove along. It wasn’t a real race, and there weren’t any water stations, so I’d occasionally stop to get water from the van. The Greek summer is truly brutal, and I knew I’d have to be careful not to get dehydrated. “Mr. Murakami,” Mr. Kageyama said, surprised as he saw me getting ready to run, “you’re not really thinking of running the whole route, are you?” “Of course I am. That’s why I came here.” “Really? But when we do these kinds of projects most people don’t go all the way. We just take some photos, and most of them don’t finish the whole route. So you really are going to run the entire thing?” Sometimes the world baffles me. I can’t believe that people would really do things like that.

If you do not feel the same tightening in your chest as when you close your eyes and picture the face of a lover, you do not love good shape enough.

Oikawa has strong work ethic and an instinctive feel for the game. Yet when you compare him to a natural prodigy like Kageyama who is only two years younger than him... It becomes clear that Oikawa, while skilled, is not a genius. However, I can say with utter certainly, of the two setters out there on this court righ now... Oikawa is better.

Even supermotivated people who’re working to exhaustion may not be doing deliberate practice. For instance, when a Japanese rowing team invited Olympic gold medalist Mads Rasmussen to come visit, he was shocked at how many hours of practice their athletes were logging. It’s not hours of brute-force exhaustion you’re after, he told them. It’s high-quality, thoughtful training goals pursued, just as Ericsson’s research has shown, for just a few hours a day, tops. Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music, says he’s been playing the violin since he was two but didn’t really start practicing deliberately until he was twenty-two. Why not? There was no lack of motivation—at one point, young Noa was taking lessons with four different teachers and, literally, commuting to three different cities to work with them all. Really, the problem was just that Noa didn’t know better. Once he discovered there was an actual science of practice—an approach that would improve his skills more efficiently—both the quality of his practice and his satisfaction with his progress skyrocketed. He’s now devoted himself to sharing that knowledge with other musicians.

Tobio-chan, you should have at least learned by now that volleyballi s not a sport where just one gifted person on a team makes a difference when it comes to winning a game." Kageyama scowls. "What the hell does that have to do with anything?" Oikawa pats his head. "Still as useless as ever; I'm telling you a universal truth about volleyball. Something I'm willing to bet every player in Japan believes." "What does that mean?" Oikawa rolls his eyes. "It means we have a lot of phone calls to make. And by 'we' I mean me, since God knows you're not going to be any help.