YouSaid · the spoken record

Maria Sharapova

lines on the record
128
first
2017-08-26
most recent
2017-08-26
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “That's a great question because I see it in two different ways. And from a positive view, I saw it and I still see it as, first of all, it's located in a place where there's nothing else to do. You're going there to be committed, to become a tennis player, or another sport that you might be practicing over there. You have no distractions. The second greatest thing about it is the amounts of kids that were there that were older than I was against whom I was able to compete. And so every afternoon, six days a week, I would play matches against them and I would play sets and it was the best learning experience because”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Some just turn into champions. And he's seen it all. So knocking at the door of Nick Volitary Academy in the dead of the night was probably one of the toughest moments in that journey. And it really began there. And they told us it was a little too late or a little too early to be knocking an academy door. So they sent us to a hotel and we ended up coming back in the morning and they put me in a group of kids with probably six or seven kids and an instructor watched me hit a few balls and called over Nick Boliteri and said, you have to see this girl play. And then Nick saw me play. And that's kind of where it took off.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “That he wasn't the one that was going to be my main coach. He wasn't the one that. And so he started doing research, and next thing I knew just before my seventh birthday, I was on a flight to Miami, Florida. And from there, we made this crazy bus journey four hours north to the Bolitary Academy in Bradenton, Florida, which, as you just mentioned, so many of the stars past and present and future at the moment. It's really a factory, this tennis factory that's grown into other sports as well. But at the time, it was very tennis specific and Nick Boliteri was someone that came with a lot of experience and coaching experience. And he, as a person, was a mentor to me more than anything with a guidance, with this experience of seeing so many people come in and out, so many people come in wanting to be champions turned into good. Some people come in, they turn into great.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So I think my father's point of view after that children's clinic that Martina Evertilova held was tennis was not a big sport at that time in Russia. We didn't have many champions coming out of the country. I believe at the time it was Yepkeni Kafelnikov and Anna Kornikova. But other than that, it was hockey. It was figure skating. It was all the Winter Olympic sports. I mean, one, it was very expensive to find the right coaches to find the right facilities, especially in the winter time. So the only real option was America. And my father started reading books and studying the game. And he knew that he wasn't a tennis coach and he knew that he wasn't a great tennis player. And the smart, I would say one of the biggest gifts that my father gave me and it started from a very young age was that he realized.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And men as well, do we get enough credit for it? I don't believe so. And when I say that that's what we have to explain, I believe that that's the feeling that I have at least. And I don't feel that we have the amount of support that we should be having.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I mean, equality has been a big subject in women's tennis for many, many years. And Venus Williams and Serena herself have done an incredible job of getting to where we are today with the helps of the pioneer Billie Jean King was the reason why we make such an incredible living from what we do. And the one thing that we as professional athletes have to realize is we're not just fighting to win a tennis match, we're also fighting to be an example. We're fighting for our voice. We're fighting to have a pedestal, to create that pedestal and to raise awareness of how incredible and how difficult and how each path is so unique and personal and how we're all able to come through it, how we are able to share our stories, how we're able to inspire other people, and not just women. It's women and”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “I get very inspired by women. I get very inspired by their brain, by their actions, by their toughness. I think in today's world and in today's working environment, and I face this a lot in my sport where, you know, I could be going into a press conference six times in a week and I'm faced with equality questions and I'm, you know, you almost have your back against the wall so many times and you have to explain yourself and you feel that you've done it so many times.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Had in my childhood, and it was not, I'm not saying it was all butterflies and rainbows, but as I look back at that experience and how they were handling that situation, how they were sacrificing so much for myself created this bond within my family that was very important. And it's priceless. And I know that those are not the people that we are able to choose in our life, but they are the people that know us the best. And that relationship can do so many wonders in your life.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “When you're young, she was a very young parent and with the help of her mother and also culturally, I would say 30 years ago or 25 years ago, it was very different. And I felt like I was in her cocoon and I was grown up in her hands, which also I think explains the bond that we have today and like the friendship that we were able to have from that. And I think that's one of the most important things in my life as I travel around the world today and I meet a lot of young girls and boys, whether they play tennis or not. And I hear their stories and so much of their experiences is a very tough and rough childhood where they want to, they almost want to escape from what they knew as their family. And so sad personally because the experience that I”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Yes, and it's the persistence that you're building, it's the will that when, I mean, I believe in any job that we do and any work that we have in front of us, there's a lot of moments that we look forward to. There are projects that we love and that we want to be a part of. But then there's the tedious work, there's the things that the repetition as a tennis player where you have to just where it's all numbers and where it's just a feeling that you get to a certain number and you just feel it and you let go and you don't think. And that's time you could say, I don't want to do it. I want to stop. I don't want you feeding me any more balls. But that mental persistence, I do think you can develop earlier. I certainly was able to with the help of my mother and also, I mean, I”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “I mean, I would spend an hour in the evening just memorizing these poems by Pushkin and thinking to myself, when am I ever going to use this? And little do you know with years and especially now that I'm older, you know, discipline doesn't always come so easy and you have to build its foundations and you have to build the trust with the people that help you with it. I think her influence and her ability to acknowledge that as a young mom was so inspirational and that discipline really comes into play as a tennis player because you have to have so much of it. I mean, there's sacrifice and there's they're the long days, but the discipline that you have to carry on with, whether it's a good day or a bad day, just beats everything else.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Love to play with dolls. I love to play doctor. I love to read. My mother was very much into education and she didn't want anything to do with tennis. She didn't want anything to do with sport. She danced ballet a little bit and she brought a lot of the cultural, the educational, the learning and the growing in your mind experiences to me. I mean, she would read passages and novels that I was way too young to understand but She made me memorize a lot of those passages. And something about that, that repetitiveness, I never liked to do it, but it was a sense of discipline that she taught me in a way that had nothing to do with sport. And I think that really”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “It happened so fast, and because I had only started picking up the tennis rack when I was four years old, at the age of six and a half I was already on an IRA flot to America.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “She was studying communications and business, and I had a very interesting childhood because my parents were both, they were very young and they had no knowledge of what to do. I was the first child. I'm still the only child. But they were very careful of what the decisions that they made and where I was going to go and if I was going to go to kindergarten or how long they wanted me to be there. I spent so many hours in the library with my mother while she was doing her homework where she was studying for an exam. And then I'd go with my father when he would leisurely play tennis. My father worked in construction. A fairly normal job, I would say we were an average family getting support from both of our grandparents, from my moms and my dad's side. And we lived a very basic and at that time a very normal life.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And so it's just this really funny scene of me trying to figure out how to, because when you're just given a ball and a racket and like, well, what do I do with this now? So I just picture myself there just trying to find a way to get the ball over the net. And I had this determination of doing it better and better every day. And I stuck to it. It was never, I don't remember one day where I didn't want to go down the steps of our apartment and walk the 20 minutes uphill to get to the bus station and then have to change buses at the next station. There's never a day where I said, you know what, I don't want to do it. And I think there's Know that's not something that just that you can really teach or that you could develop it. But I think I just really loved it and I carry that passion.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “The consistency in your mind is very limited. At least that's what when I observe kids, which is completely normal. But I had this fascination with being able to hit the ball and seeing somebody else hit it back at me and trying to find a way. And the racket that I first had was actually we had to cut the grip by like four or five inches because it was so much bigger than I was and I could barely hold it and it was so heavy.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “I haven't spoken to Martina about it too much, but the first coach that I had in Sochi when I just started playing, he unfortunately passed away a few years ago. But I definitely had this tenacity and I had this will of focus at a young age. And tennis is a very repetitive sport. So it's grinding, it's just hitting the ball. And when you're that young, your concentration and focus is just all over the place. You play with With the ball for a few minutes, and then you want to play with a truck or you want to play with a doll.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “After hitting a few balls, I noticed that she had come up But between the two, and after she left, I spoke to my father and he said, well, this legend, Martina Navratilova just came up to me and said that you're talented. And this was only after her watching me just hit a couple of balls in the midst of so many other kids. And that's, you know, I look back at that. And I, because I see so many kids now, I practice at a country club and there's all these just today I was practicing next to two little girls are probably seven or eight years old just enjoying the game by themselves and kind of trying to hit the ball over the net and it's hard to envision that talent. It's hard to see it. So for her to be able to see that when I was only five and a half years old, it was pretty incredible.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “All the kids were hitting the ball against. I remember a coach, there was one coach there and he, all the locals were, all the children were going to see him on the parents, wanted him to tell him that they're going to be future stars. They're going to be the next Pete Sampras or the next Andre Agassi. And he noticed me. And only after a couple of weeks when I was playing and he pulled my father aside and said that this girl can play tennis. And after that I started taking lessons with him. And a couple of years after that, there was an exhibition that Martina Navritilova was a part of. And I was about five and a half years old at that time. And the exhibition was being held in Moscow. So my father and I went to Moscow and I was probably one out of 200 kids in that clinic that she was holding for these kids.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “I think from my perspective when you're that young and when you don't know anything about that particular activity or that sport and it was tennis in that moment, it was really this question of can I do that? I see all these kids doing it. Do I have the ability to be better than them? And after observing so much of what my father was doing just not on any professional level at all, it just came to my mind that I wanted to do it and I wanted to do it better. I think there is times in life where things come instinctually and you just grasp it and you notice it. And I think my father definitely noticed I could have kept sitting on that bench and I just could have kept watching my father, but there's something in me that was that said, no, I want to be out there. I want to be playing and I want to be competing and I want to be learning. And when I got myself out to that, the wall world.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “And then I'd see all these little kids playing on the side and they were just hitting balls against the wall. And I didn't have, I mean, I didn't have a racket of my own. And the one that I was able to get was so much bigger than myself. So that didn't really work out. But I immediately drew me to it, something drew me to this like repetitiveness of seeing these kids try to hit the ball against the strings of the racket and see it come back from the wall. And it was very fascinating. It was like I had this immediate feeling of I want to be in front of those kids and I want to show them how it's done. Yeah, it was a very, even though I had no idea what I was doing. So I think that competitiveness kind of developed then where I was just sitting and bored and watching my father play. I just wanted to be out there.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Yeah, so Sochi in the summer it was very much a happening place. It was a scene and it was a lot of people were coming there on vacation. So we had a lot of little parks and outdoor tennis courts and ferris wheels and all these types of attractions. And my father who was not a great athlete, but he played hockey in school. He enjoyed playing tennis. He was not very good at all, did it for fun. And when I was old enough to go with him, my mother had me when she was very young. She was only 20 years old. So she was still studying at the time. So on weekdays when my father didn't have to work, you would take me with him to the local park and I would just follow along and we take the public bus to the courts and I'd just sit there and I'd watch him grind it out with a competitor of his.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “It's because of my schedule. It's so, I mean, I compete 10 months out of the year and it is, I pretty much go to the same cities every year because the tournaments are all situated in those same cities. When I have a holiday break, which usually consists of a couple of weeks only in November, I go somewhere warm. I just escape. You know, I put my phone away. just everything on hold a little bit and just let my body and my mind recover and it just never has been never has come into yeah into my schedule”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “When people ask me what I think about the country, as much as I want to have an opinion, it is so large and it is so vast. And there's so many opinions you can have about it. And I really just want to let people experience it on their own and come to their own conclusions because I think that's one of the greatest things of travel is to not have expectations and to get there and to experience a new place. But St. Petersburg is on my list and that's definitely a city that comes highly recommended.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Right, I would say skip Siberia. And there's definitely not much to see or do over there. But I think from a cultural standpoint, I would definitely visit St. Petersburg. And it is still a place that I've never been to, if you can believe it or not, as much as I've traveled around the world, but my mom goes almost every year. A lot of my relatives are there and I just have this enormous respect for the culture and just the city and the people and the way they live. It's very different. And people always ask me as I was born in Russia and I spent the first seven years of my life there and I lived in the United States ever since. And, you know, I've never really looked back into living in Russia, but so much of my heart still remains there. And obviously all of my grandparents and my cousins all still live there. And so it's a very big part of my life.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “My parents were from Gomel. It was a very small town very close to where the Chernobyl reactor blew up. And during that time, just before my mother was pregnant with me in 1986, and they fled. There was not a lot of information about what happened during Chernobyl. My grandparents were living in Siberia at the time from my mom's side. They said, you need to get out of there. They were able to get more information about the disaster itself than my parents were able to get to being so close to the area. And they left. And that's why I was born in Siberia.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “No, I actually put it in my tea and I still do that and people look at me very strangely and suspiciously. I get it. Memories of my childhood, and yeah, I do that instead of sugar, which is pretty much the same thing.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “So I grew up in Russia where tea, it's a big part of our culture is drinking tea in the afternoons with your grandparents. drank black tea, a darjling type of tea that was made in the mountains in Siberia. And I would have it with raspberry jam that my grandmother would make.”

    2017-08-26 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #261: Mental Performance, Work-Life Balance, and the Rise to the Top - Maria Sharapova · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT