Founders - #141 Arnold Schwarzenegger (My Unbelievably True Life Story)

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

What I learned from reading Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger.----Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best on October 19th in New York City. Get your tickets here! ----Subscribe to listen to Founders Premium — Subscribers can listen to Ask Me Anything (AMA) episodes and every bonus episode. ---I decided that the best course for independence was to mind my own business and make my own money.I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been crippled by his demands, but instead, the discipline rubbed off on me. I turned it into drive.I became absolutely convinced that I was special and meant for bigger things. I knew I would be the best at something - although I didn’t know what - and that it would make me famous. I never went to a competition to compete. I went to win. Even though I didn’t win every time, that was my mindset. I became a total animal. If you tuned into my thoughts before a competition, you would hear something like: “I deserve that pedestal, I own it, and the sea ought to part for me. Just get out of the fucking way, I’m on a mission. So just step aside and gimme the trophy.” I pictured myself high up on the pedestal, trophy in hand. Everyone else would be standing below. And I would look down.When you grow up in that kind of harsh environment, you never forget how to withstand physical punishment, even long after the hard times end. I find joy in the gym because every rep and every set is getting me one step closer to my goal. It gave Reg Park’s whole life story, from growing up poor in Leeds, England, to becoming Mr. Universe, getting invited to America as a champion bodybuilder, getting sent to Rome to star as Hercules, and marrying a beauty from South Africa. This story crystallized a new vision for me. I could become another Reg Park. All my dreams suddenly came together and made sense. I refined this vision until it was very specific. I was going to go for the Mr. Universe title; I was going to break records in powerlifting; I was going to Hollywood; I was going to be like Reg Park. The vision became so clear in my mind that I felt like it had to happen. There was no alternative; it was this or nothing.Lucille Ball gave me advice about Hollywood. “Just remember, when they say, ‘No,’ you hear ‘Yes,’ and act accordingly. Someone says to you, ‘We can’t do this movie,’ you hug him and say, ‘Thank you for believing in me.’ There was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence was like Kryptonite to me.It was the fact that I had failed—not my body, but my vision and my drive. I hadn’t done everything in my power to prepare. Thinking this made me furious. “You are still a fucking amateur,” I told myself. I decided I wouldn’t be an amateur ever again. That night, despair came crashing in. I was in a foreign country, away from my family, away from my friends, surrounded by strange people in a place where I didn’t speak the language. I ended up crying quietly in the dark for hours. I always wrote down my goals. I had to make it very specific so that all those fine intentions were not just floating around. It might seem like I was handcuffing myself by setting such specific goals, but it was the opposite: I found it liberating. Knowing exactly where I wanted to end up freed me totally to improvise how to get there. I came away fascinated that a man could be both smart and powerful. Going to school, training five hours a day at the gym, working in the construction and mail-order businesses, making appearances, and going to exhibitions—all of it was happening at the same time. Some days stretched from six in the morning until midnight.Nothing was going to distract me from my goal. No offer, no relationship, nothing. People were always talking about how few performers there are at the top of the ladder, but I was convinced there was room for one more. I felt that, because there was so little room, people got intimidated and felt more comfortable staying on the bottom of the ladder. But, in fact, the more people that think that, the more crowded the bottom of the ladder becomes! Don’t go where it’s crowded. Go where it’s empty. Even though it’s harder to get there, that’s where you belong and where there’s less competition.Very few actors like to sell. I’d seen the same thing with authors in the book business. The typical attitude seemed to be, “I don’t want to be a whore. I create; I don’t want to shill.” It was a real change when I showed up saying, “Let’s go everywhere because this is good not only for me financially but also good for the public; they get to see a good movie!”Whenever I finished filming a movie, I felt my job was only half done. Every film had to be nurtured in the marketplace. You can have the greatest movie in the world, but if you don’t get it out there, if people don’t know about it, you have nothing. It’s the same with poetry, with painting, with writing, with inventions. It always blew my mind that some of the greatest artists, from Michelangelo to van Gogh, never sold much because they didn’t know-how. They had to rely on some schmuck - some agent or manager or gallery owner - to do it for them.That wasn’t going to happen to my movies. Same with bodybuilding, same with politics - no matter what I did in life, I was aware that you had to sell it. They couldn’t handle working every day. Lazy bastards. I wanted to be rich very quickly. No matter what you do in life, it’s either reps or mileage. If you want to be good at skiing, you have to get out on the slopes all the time. If you play chess, you have to play tens of thousands of games. On the movie set, the only way to act together is to do the reps. If you’ve done the reps, you don’t have to worry.—“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast  ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

I always wanted to be an inspiration for people, but I never set out to be a role model in everything. How could I be when I have so many contradictions in my life? I'm a European who became an American leader, a businessman who makes his living as an action hero, a tremendously disciplined super-achiever who hasn't always been disciplined enough, a fitness expert who loves cigars. An environmentalist who loves hummers. A fun-loving guy with kid-like enthusiasm who is most famous for terminating people. How would anybody know what to imitate? I do want to set an example,

of course. I want to inspire you to work out, to keep yourself fit, to create a vision, and use your will to accomplish it. In these ways, I'm very happy to take the torch and be a role model for others, because I've always had great role models myself. But it's never been my goal to set an example in everything I do. Sometimes I prefer being way out there, shocking people. Rebelliousness is part of what drove me from Austria. I didn't want to be like everyone else. I thought of myself as special and unique and not average. No one could put me in a mold. Being different was right up my alley. But life is richer when we embrace the multitudes we all contain, even if we aren't consistent and what we do doesn't always make sense, even to us. When I talk to graduating

classes, I always tell a brief version of the story of my life and try to offer lessons everybody can use. Have a vision. Trust yourself. Break some rules. Ignore the naysayers don't be afraid to fail woven through the stories in this memoir are some of the principles of success that have worked for me that was an excerpt from the book that i'm going to talk to you about today which is total recall my unbelievably true life story and it was written by arnold schwarzenegger this is a giant book it's over 600 pages and i have an obscene amount of highlights. So let's go ahead and I'm going to go right to his early life. And part of what makes Arnold's life story so unique is not only the multitude of accomplishments he has, but where he started out was. So his early life was a struggle and he's

going to tell us a little bit about that now. He says, I was born in a year of famine. It was 1947, and Austria was occupied by the Allied armies that had defeated Hitler's Third Reich. Two months before I was born, there were hunger riots in Vienna, and in the province where we lived, the food shortages were just as bad. Years later, if my mother wanted to remind me about how much she and my father sacrificed to bring me up, she'd tell me how she'd foraged across the countryside, making her way from farm to farm to collect a little butter, some sugar, and some grain. She'd be away three days sometimes. Hamstern, that's the, I think the German word, hamstern they called it like a hamster gathering

nuts scrounging for food was so common and in this next section he describes uh his house what he lived in he says my boyhood home was a very simple stone and brick building there was no plumbing no shower and no flushing toilet just a kind of chamber pot. The nearest well was almost a quarter mile away. And even when it was raining hard or snowing, one of us had to go. So in that case, when I was reading that section, it reminded me of early childhood of, say, somebody like Chung Ju-young, the founder of Hyundai, who's living no plumbing, no electricity, eating tree bark in the winter. Also Samuel Bronfman, the founder of Seagram, same thing, where they're having to all, essentially there's just a giant tub in the kitchen,

and the mom gets to bathe first, then the dad, then the older brother, and then Sam. And in this case, Arnold's experiencing the exact same thing. So not only were they poor, lack of food, but he gives us a historical context in what was taking place in Austria right after World War II. And he sees in others, in the grown men that are influencing him, traits that he wants to avoid. And he says, we were growing up among men who felt like a bunch of losers. Their generation had started World War II and lost. They were angry. They tried to suppress the rage and humiliation, but disappointment was deep in their bones. So he talks about a lot of them, they were getting drunk all the time, beating their kids,

beating their wives, essentially taking out their frustration with the way their lives, the outcome of their lives on everybody else around them. And his father is one of these men, and this is the impact his father had on him. His answer to life was discipline. We had a strict routine that nothing could change. We'd get up at six. We had to earn our breakfast by doing sit-ups. In the afternoon, we'd finish our homework and chores,

and my father would make us practice soccer no matter how bad the weather was. If we messed up on a play, we knew we'd get yelled at. My father believed just as strongly in training our brains. He'd take us on a family outing, visiting another village, or maybe seeing a play. Then in the evening, we had to write a report on our activities. They had to be 10 pages at least. He'd hand back our papers with red ink scribbled all over them. And if we had spelled a word wrong, we had to copy it 50 times over. I love my father and really wanted to be like him, but he had no patience with our problems. I never, this is such an important paragraph. If you figure, if you think about how he described himself,

was that a super disciplined super achiever or extremely disciplined, super achiever. I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been crippled by his demands, but instead the discipline rubbed off on me. It turned into drive. So even from a very young age, Arnold was determined not to be a loser, and he was determined to get out of Austria. So he says, somehow the thought took shape in my mind that America was where I belonged. Nothing more concrete than that, just America. So it's very

interesting how Arnold describes himself in the book, because you might think of him, he's a bodybuilder, he's an actor, he was the an actor he was the governor etc etc he married into the kennedy family dynasty but he considers himself and he describes himself as an american entrepreneur and a lot of people don't know this but arnold was a millionaire before he was 30 years old and it didn't come from movies he had several several different businesses which i'll tell you more about in a little bit one thing to know about arnold and that comes across in his writing the reason I would recommend going out and buying this book and hopefully I'm able to persuade you in doing so

is because not only is the story unbelievable but the way he writes, he's very human. He writes in normal language even though it's over 600 pages I found myself lost in time. I'd be reading and I'm like, oh my god I can't believe I just read 150 pages, 200 pages. Where'd the hours go? And then he also does not hide all of the mistakes.

We hear his inner monologue, the way he talks to himself later on in life. He owns up to destroying his family. It's just very, it just feels very authentic. Before I get there, though, Arnold had an unwavering belief in himself. And we see a little bit of that in early age. I became absolutely convinced that I was special and meant for bigger things. I knew I would be the best at something, although I didn't know what, and that it would make me famous. America was the most powerful country, so I would go there. The thought of going to America

hit me like a revelation, and I really took it seriously. I would talk about it. So he's talking about in grade school. He just wouldn't shut up about this. The kids got used to me hearing me talk about it and thought I was weird, but that didn't stop me from sharing my plans with everyone. And when he's describing how much of his early life was full of difficulty and struggle, he's not doing it to complain. He talks about, yeah, you know, I don't want this for my kids, but I also benefited because it made me stronger. He says, when you grow up in that kind of harsh environment,

you never forget how to withstand physical punishment, even long after the hard times end. And right around this time in his life, we see this idea. He's like, I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I'm going to be rich. And what motivated him was not just to buy a bunch of crazy stuff, but he really wanted to be rich so he could buy his independence. He says, I decided that the best course for independence was to mind my own business and make my own money. And so while he's in grade school, they're having to write reports on what they read in the newspaper. And this is where he starts to find the blueprint

that he wants to follow in the lives of others. And he does this several times with several different people. This is the first one. It says on it was a photo of Mr. Austria, this guy named Kurt Marnel, setting the record in the bench press. I felt inspired by this guy's achievement, but what really struck me was that he was wearing glasses. I kept staring at the picture. How could someone who looked like a professor from the neck up be bench pressing 190 kilos? I came away fascinated that a man could be both smart and powerful. And so he starts working out the number of people working out in this tiny area in austria is very small so they all get to know each other he winds up meeting

this guy kurt and he also becomes friends with kurt's dad and kurt's dad has a huge influence on how arnold's going to approach both developing his mind and his body and i really liked what his dad was teaching all these young guys he says the idea of balancing the body and the mind was like a religion for him. Now, this quote from, I don't know how to pronounce his name, so I'm not going to try, but this is Kurt's dad. You have to build the ultimate physical machine, but also the ultimate mind, he would say. Read Plato. The Greeks started the Olympics, but they also gave us the great philosophers. And you've got to take care of both.

So he starts studying it was like well how did i want everything kurt has i want that body that he has he's getting girls he's making money he's being covered in the newspaper arnold's like i want all this so he says as i got to know him i studied his whole routine his day job was as the foreman of a road construction crew he started work early in the morning and was finished by three Then he would put in three hours of the gym training hard He'd let us visit him so we could get the idea You work you make the money and then you could afford this car you train and then you win championships There was no shortcut you had to earn it

and so for the first time in his life, he's around people that are Achieving what they set out to achieve in life. When he would work out at home, his dad would ridicule him. He's like, go do something useful. Go chop wood. What are you doing? And now he's around this group of guys. They're extremely disciplined.

They're working really hard, but they're seeing the results of their work. And again, Arnold at this time, he's around 15 years old and is really, really important of the effect that this time in his life had on him. And he talks about that finding this new love, this new passion, bodybuilding, made him feel alive. And I really liked his description of that, so I'm going to read it to you. That summer had a miraculous effect on me. Instead of existing, I started to live. I was catapulted out of the dull routine, meaning the dull routine of his house. Now all of a sudden there was joy.

There was struggle. There was pain. There was happiness. There were pleasures. There were women. There was drama. Everything made it feel like now we were really living. This is really terrific.

All of a sudden, I had a whole new life and it was mine. Soon, life at the gym totally consumed me. Training was all I could think about. I couldn't articulate what drove me, but training seemed something I was born for and I sensed that it would become my ticket out, meaning out of Austria. This thought made the hours of lifting tons of steel and iron actually a joy. This is a really important, he's got a bunch of lessons that he repeats in different ways throughout the book. But this idea that later in his life, when they're filming the documentary Pumping Iron, they notice that everybody else is lifting weights, but they have like a frown on

their face, they're struggling, and you're sitting over there with a big smile. And he's going to later in the documentary echoes what he says here when he's just a young boy. He says every painful set, every extra rep was a step closer toward my goal of winning Mr. Austria. And I think that's that's a fantastic way to flip the mindset. So, yes, it's really difficult struggling, but I should be happy about that because I'm getting closer to where I want to go. He picks up a magazine and then we see that he finds that this is his second blueprint. Essentially, he patterns his entire life after this guy that's on the cover of the magazine. It says on the cover was Mr. Universe, Reg Park. It gave Reg's whole life story from growing up poor in England to becoming Mr. Universe, getting invited to America as a champion bodybuilder, getting sent to Rome to star in the movie Hercules and marrying a

beautiful woman from South Africa. This is what he took away from it. The story crystallized a new vision for me. I could become another Reg Park. All my dreams suddenly came together and made sense. I refined this vision until it was very specific. I was going to go for the Mr. Universe title. I was going to break records in powerlifting. I was going to Hollywood. I was going to be like Reg Park. The vision became so clear in my mind that I felt that it had to happen. There was no alternative. It was this or nothing. So it was this discovery of Reg Park. He's like, wait a minute, Mr. Austria is not my goal. Now I was motivated by Mr. Austria, but I'm going to skip over that. And he comes up with this idea and he uses this in every different domain. So the idea, let me not run over the punchline

here, seek out the toughest competition. So he's going to seek out the comfort toughest competition he's like i'm mr austria is not good enough i'm going to go for mr universe but he also does the same and it's really crazy that he even wanted to do this but he also does the same thing when he switches from bodybuilding to being an actor he's like he would turn down even though he uh they would offer him a bunch of roles which i'll talk to you more about in a little bit. He's like, no, no, that's not a leading man role. I was born to be a leading man. I'm going to be one of the highest paid actors in America.

And that's the only thing I'll accept. So he's got this really great idea about seeking out the tough competition. And this will explain why that's so important. I was training flat out because in less than two months, I knew I'd be going up against some of the best bodybuilders alive. So it keeps them motivated, right? I signed up for Europe's biggest bodybuilding event, Mr. Universe. This was held in London. This was a brash thing to do. Ordinarily, a relative novice like me wouldn't have dreamed of taking on London. I would have competed for Mr. Austria first. And then if I won, I'd aim for Mr. Europe. And then you go up the ladder like that.

He skips the ladder in every domain. But at that rate, being ready, quote unquote, for London would have taken years. I was too impatient for that. I wanted the toughest competition I could get. And this was the most aggressive career move I could make. And a main theme throughout Arnold's life is the value and the necessity to have discipline, to impose self-discipline. And we fast forward in the timeline a little bit. He's discovering the nightlife. He's living in Munich right now at this point in the story,

trying to help a gym build up its membership. He's going out at night. He's being interested in women, obviously. But he says something that was really interesting because he's a very wild, crazy person. I mean, the stuff he says in this book is unbelievable. I mean, graphic detail in areas of people's lives that you would not normally share, Arnold shares. But he says, I was wild only when I was wild. When it was time to train, I never missed a session.

So I'm fast forwarding a little bit. He winds up winning his first Mr. Universe at the age of 21. It gets the attention of this guy named Joe Weider. I don't know how to pronounce his last name. And he's probably the most important fitness entrepreneur in the United States at the time. And he invites Arnold to come compete at one of his competitions in Miami. And when he competes in Miami, he doesn't do as well because he didn't work as hard. He kind of like rested on his laurels and thought the momentum from winning Mr. Universe means, oh, I'm going to win my next competition easily.

And so really the reason I'm reading this section is because I really feel biographies are the antidote to social media because you see the ugly, depressing side of people's lives. Think about last week, Bill Gates was lying. Think about Bill Gates, right? One of the most successful, financially successful people that's ever lived. But when you read his biography, you realize there was times in his life where he's lying in bed depressed, not sure what to do with his life. And I think a lot of people feel that way at some point in their lives, and they think, oh, look, this person has it all figured out.

Not really, they didn't always have it figured out. And so we see this with Arnold. He loses the competition, and listen to this. That night, despair came crashing in. My cheerfulness almost never deserts me, but it did then. I was in a foreign country, away from my family, away from my friends, surrounded by strange people in a place where I didn't speak the language. How had I even made it this far? I was way out of my depth. All my belongings were in one little gym bag. My job was probably gone.

I had no money. I don't know how I'd get home. Worst of all, I had lost. The great Joe Weider had brought me across the Atlantic to give me this opportunity. But instead of rising to the occasion, I'd embarrassed myself and failed to perform. I ended up crying quietly in the dark for hours. And so he gives us this insight into this inner monologue. Like I just went through this experience. I'm so close to, I made it to America. I was so close to reaching a goal, being the youngest person to ever do this and I failed so he says now that I stopped feeling sorry for myself I came to a harsher conclusions

than those I reached the night before so it says it was the fact that I have failed not my body but my vision of my drive uh losing London in 1966 talking about uh when he jumped to try to go to Miss Universe the first time hadn't felt bad because I'd done everything I could to prepare. But something different had happened here. I could have dieted the week before and not eaten so much fish and chips. I could have found a way to train more even without access to equipment. I hadn't done everything in my power to prepare.

Instead, I thought my momentum from winning in London would carry me. I told myself I'd just won Mr. Universe, that I could let go. That was nonsense. Thinking this made me furious. You're still a fucking amateur, I told myself. What happened here never should have happened. It only happens to an amateur. You're an amateur, Arnold. Staying in America, I decided, had to mean that I wouldn't be an amateur ever again. I had to start being a professional. From now on, if I lost,

I would be able to walk away with a big smile because I knew I had done everything I could to prepare. So when he references Joe Weider at the time, he invited Arnold to come compete. And the day after he lost, he says, hey, why don't you come back to L.A. with me? And I'll give you a year. He pays Arnold like $65 a week. And you enter competitions. He owns a mail order business, owns a bunch of magazines, owns a gym, that kind of stuff, sells fitness equipment. And you can help with that.

And what I took away from this section is that deadlines really have a way of focusing you because he's got a year. And if he performs well in the year, he could stay in America forever. That was his goal. But if he doesn't, this contract with Joe is going to expire and then he's got to figure out a different path. So he says, my mission in America was clear. I was on a path. I needed to train like hell, diet like hell, eat well, and win more major titles the following fall. Weider had promised me a year, and I knew if I did those things, I'd be on a roll. And something smart, something that Arnold does that's smart during this time is he starts studying with Joe. Every time Joe, Joe has a bunch of other bodybuilders. He calls them lazy bastards because he'd offer them

opportunities. Hey, come to Japan with me. Hey, come to this meeting with me. And nobody but Arnold, they all, you know, everybody was doing the same. They're building their bodies, they're training, they're trying to perfect their craft, but they would stop there. For Arnold, he's like, this is just a means to an end. Yes, I want to be the world's best bodybuilder, but I also want to be just like Reg Park. I want to make money at this. And to make money at this, I need to study the business. And so he winds up going to Japan with Joe, going to New York, sitting in on meetings, basically taking anything that he could learn from Joe to apply to his own business, which he does. But during this time,

I really feel that Arnold's mindset, and you could say this in many different situations in Arnold's life, he just has a really great mindset. And one of them is that he's full of gratitude. And this is Arnold at 21 years old. He winds up getting Joe to sponsor his best friend, Franco Colombo, that he knew back in in germany to come over and he says but in munich uh i lived in a closet in the gym so this was pure luxury to me so we're talking about is they didn't have a lot of money at the time so they're they're living there two of them are living in a one-bedroom apartment and you know some people like oh this is this sucks arnold's like no no this is i was living in a gym in a closet this is way better uh so this was pure luxury to me franco felt that way too we had a living room and he emphasized and a bedroom and there were curtains our bathroom

had a sink and a toilet and a bathtub with a shower far better than what we had in europe no matter how small the place was, we felt like we'd really arrived. So he's competing. He's winning a bunch of different titles in America. And this is where he uses the fame, the small amount of fame that he has to transition into becoming an American entrepreneur. And he says, I also launched a mail order business out of my apartment. It grew out of the fan mail I was getting. People wanted to know how I trained my arms, my chest, and they asked how they could get fit themselves. That gave me the idea of selling a series of booklets. So he's selling essentially a workout routine.

Imagine if Arnold had Instagram. What he could have done with that. In America, unlike Europe, there weren't a million obstacles to starting a business. All I had to do was go down to City Hall and pay $3.75 for a permit and then rent a post office box to receive the orders. And we see his early resourcefulness. He goes to Joe and he's like, hey, you're taking pictures of me,

you're putting me in these magazines, but I'm not getting paid for any of this stuff. So he says, I talked him into giving me free advertising space in his magazines. He says, you can always start paying me for using me in your ads, I said, but I'd like it if you just give me an opportunity. I figured Joe would go for this because he always hated to part with cash.

So he starts putting these ads in Joe's magazines and the money starts rolling in. And so Arnold says, I loved being an American entrepreneur. With mail order, I was doing what Charles Atlas had done. So that's another blueprint. Somebody else, a bodybuilder that came. He was born probably like 60 years before arnold and he got relatively world famous and he would sell workout equipment uh fitness programs through the mail and he was very financially successful so arnold's like i'm doing this now

but he's doing it at way younger age soon i started another business this time this is just hilarious and really really smart you're gonna see Arnold, he's just a really intelligent person. Soon I started another, what I mean is like very common sense, understands people intelligence, and it was a very good sales person. That's what, another surprising thing in the book is that that's what he considered himself first. He's like, I sell everything. I sell bodybuilding. I sell my movies. I sell my products. I sell my real estate. I'm in sales. And he preaches the reader to do the same thing. So he says, soon I started another business, this time with Franco. His idea is that we should work in construction. We put an ad in the newspaper that said, European bricklayers, experts in marble and stone. We got our first job right away. Franco and I had noticed that Americans love foreign names, Swedish massage, Italian design, Chinese herbs, German ingenuity. We decided that we should highlight being European. I also noticed that Americans like to bargain a little bit and feel like they're getting a deal.

Another part in the book that you'll love if you read it, and I have to admit from the podcast, is all the different, he points out how different it was like America was at this time than growing up in Europe. And he's got all these great little stories in here. So he says, they feel like they're getting a deal. So Franco and I had a whole routine. I would come up with an estimate and then I'd show it to Franco and we would start arguing in German in front of the client. Then the guy would ask, what's going on? Well, I don't have to tell you about Italians, I'd say, rolling my eyes. I don't get it why he thinks this patio will cost $8,000. He wants to order X number of bricks, which is way more than we're going to need. I mean, between me and you, I think we could build it for 7,000. So on the next page, Arnold talks about this builds up trust

between him and the client. The guy would start to trust me right away. That's really nice that you're trying to give me the best price. Franco and I hadn't, then also an element of, you know, being in the right place at the right time. We've talked about over and over again. Franco and I hadn't even been in business a year when a big earthquake hit the San Fernando Valley in 1971. Franco and I ran our advertisement in the Los Angeles Times right away,

and we were busy around the clock. For extra hands, we recruited bodybuilders off the beach. At one point, we had 15 of them mixing cement and carrying bricks. It was a very funny sight, but we couldn't depend on the bodybuilders. They couldn't handle working every day. Some of those guys were lazy bastards. But I wanted to be rich very quickly. And so we already see something that Arnold preaches his whole life. He's like, you got 24

hours in the day and you just need to organize your time better. And this is something he repeats in different scenarios that I'll talk about later on as well. But in this case, think about it. He's running a construction business. He's running his mail order business. He's training five hours a day. He's going to college to learn English have to figure out, I have to do, in these bodybuilding competitions, you have to transition from pose to pose. And they compare it to like ballet. You can't have like an awkward pose. And so you have to figure out how to do your transitions and make them really smooth and effortless. But really what I took away from this is that Arnold has relentless optimism combined with Terminator-like focus on improving his weaknesses. And again, sometimes you see his inner monologue, he's not the nicest to himself because he's really focused on improving

his weak spots. So he says, you practice every pose and every transition because that extra step is the very thing that can make you lose in front of the judges. They'll think, and he's talking about if he doesn't do this, they'll think that's unprofessional. You're not ready for the big time. You are a fucking idiot. Get off the stage. You can't even stand still in the pose. You haven't even practiced the simplest things. I just mentioned this theme where he says, listen, there's a lot of time in the day. You just have to organize your day better. We get an insight into what his schedule is like at this time. He says, I threw myself into my Los Angeles life, going to school, training five hours a day at the gym, working in the construction and mail order businesses, making appearances, and going to exhibitions.

I forgot. Another business he had was giving seminars. All of it was happening at the same time. Some days stretched from 6 in the morning until midnight. Arnold is really big into writing down your goals to visualize where you want to be in your life. He talks about it over and over again. This is something we see even at this time in Los Angeles, you know, early 20s, and he's doing this. He says, I always wrote down my goals. I had to make it very specific so that all those fine intentions were not just floating around. So this is a list of goals he had at this time in his life.

Get 12 more credits in college. Earn enough money to save $5,000. Work out five hours a day. Gain seven pounds of muscle. Find an apartment building to buy and move into. It might seem like I was handcuffing myself by setting such specific goals. This is really smart too. But I was actually just the opposite. I found it liberating. Knowing exactly where I wanted to end up freed me totally to improvise how to get there.

And something I think people would find surprising is how frugal Arnold was. His girlfriend at the time, they were living together together he said that she was really supportive because he wanted to save every penny he wanted to save as much of his income as possible one it was a small amount of income but not only that he realized that every dollar that he could save and reinvest in the business is going to produce

two, three or four dollars in the future and something I also admired about his life story is the fact that people would keep trying to distract him and uh with offers other offers and sometimes very lucrative offers but they were outside of what his goals were which he had written down and he would have none of it so remember he's making well joe's paying him 65 a week he's probably making a couple thousand dollars a year in each of his businesses but nothing close to what they're about to offer him. And they want him to manage a string of gyms. He says, but that was

not my goal. The same with the offer I received in the early 70s to manage a leading gym chain for $200,000 a year. It's a lot of money back then. It's still a good living today. It was a lot of money, but it turned it down because it would not take me to where I wanted to go. Managing a chain would not make me a bodybuilding champion or get me into movies. Nothing was going to distract me from my goal. No offer, no relationship, nothing. And so around this time, he's like, okay, a lot of people, they work and then they go spend some of that money on rent and they live in an apartment. He's like, well, I don't want to do that. I want to own the building so I can live for free by renting out the other units. And so

he winds up doing that. And in this story, it's fantastic. And the main sentence I want you to remember from this is he's describing a good friend of his who is extremely risk averse. And he says problems were all he could see. OK, so his name is Artie Zeller. And he's he's Arnold put the financing together, save some money and is buying a two hundred fifteen thousand for spending two hundred fifteen thousand dollars on this apartment building. He says, how can you stand the pressure? You have the responsibility of renting out the other five units. You have to collect the rent. What if something goes wrong? Proms were all you could see. It could be terrible. Tenants would make

noise. What if somebody came home drunk? What if somebody slipped and you got sued? You know how America is with all the lawsuits. And this is Arnold's response. Blah, blah, blah. I caught myself listening. Artie, you almost scared me just now. I laughed. Don't tell me any more of this information. I like to always wander in like a puppy.

I want to walk into a problem and then figure out what the problem really is. Don't tell me ahead of time. Often, it's easier to make a decision when you don't know as much because then you can't overthink. If you know too much, it can freeze you. I noticed the same thing at school. Our economics professor was a two-time PhD, but he pulled up in a Volkswagen Beetle. I had better cars for years by that time. I said to myself, knowing it all is not really the answer because this guy is not making the money to have a bigger car. He should be driving a Mercedes. So I got to the part I've already told you about, but I think it's important to repeat it. I don't know if myself on

this page is what a great way to think about hard things. So the, one of the producers of the documentary pumping iron is talking to a group of other people about what he noticed about Arnold. He says, here's another fascinating thing. Arnold never ever had an angry look while he was training. He was lifting huge amounts of weights and he's always smiling. I mean, just think about that. What must be going on inside his head? What must he know about his future that he's always smiling? All I would say is that I found joy in the gym because every rep and every set is getting me one step closer to my goal. Again, that's just a great way to think about the hard things that you have to do in life. So he's getting a lot of publicity, excuse me, for promoting the Pumping

Iron documentary. And he goes on the Merv Griffin show. And he gets one of his first acting gigs on a TV show from Lucille Ball, who I'm actually looking for a documentary on her because Arnold goes into detail about what's made her so special. She's one of the first females to break away from the Hollywood system. She starts her own production company so she can actually own the shows and winds up making her fabulously wealthy. You know, she made a ton of shows. love lucy's probably the the most popular one but she gave him a piece of advice first of all it made me laugh and it's great advice and i've also heard arnold and other

interviews and speeches talk about this advice i didn't know it came from lucille ball though um but this part made me chuckle at the end i I wasn't expecting it. So it says, Lucy gave me advice about Hollywood. Just remember when they say no, you hear yes and act accordingly. Someone says to you, we can't do this movie and you Mr. Olympia, I don't know, five different times. He's won almost everything you could win. He's by far the most famous bodybuilder in the world. And he starts to realize, hey, do you want to do movies or do you want to continue to be a bodybuilding champion? And so he's trying to figure that out. And he says, I couldn't have it both ways. So I was forced to make the decision I'd been leaning toward anyway, to retire from competition. I'd been bodybuilding for 12 years

already. And I liked the idea of staying hungry in life and never staying in one place. When I was 10, I wanted to be good enough at something to be recognized in the world. Now I wanted to be good enough at something else to be recognized again, and even bigger than before. So this is when he starts pursuing his movie career. But he's also still got his real estate business. He's still got the mail order business. He's still doing seminars and doing all these things. And he lets us into the fact that physically he could withstand the challenges.

But he realized, hey, I'm not taking care of my mind. And I didn't know this. But he got one thing. He's like, listen, you can do therapy. You can do meditation. Do whatever you're doing he got into trans transcendental meditation and really the takeaway from the section section is like i was over optimizing my body and forgetting the mind um and you can't do that he also talks about the reverse issue you can't just take care of your mind not your body um so he says hearing them talk about the need to disconnect and refresh uh the mind was like a revelation and this goes back to here's more of

his inner monologue which is very surprising arnold you're an idiot i told myself you spend all your time on your body but you never think about your mind how to make it sharper and relieve the stress when you have a muscle when you have muscle cramps. You have to do more stretching. Go to the jacuzzi. Put on ice packs. Take more minerals. So why aren't you thinking the mind can also have a problem. It's overstressed.

Or it's tired. Or it's bored. Or it's fatigued. It's about to blow up. Learn the tools for that also. And so during this time he's pushing himself to the limit. He's using every hour of the day. And it causes the disintegr for that also. And so during this time, he's pushing himself to the limit. He's using every hour of the day. And it causes the disintegration of a multiple year relationship. And it had to be that way because Arnold had no desire to be normal.

He doesn't feel normal. And so he talks a little bit about that as well but she was a normal person who wanted normal things and there was nothing normal about me my drive was not normal my vision of where i wanted to go in my life was not normal the whole idea of a conventional existence was like kryptonite to me so ar Arnold's around 28 years old at the time. He's trying to break into movies. And he talks about this over and over again, the naysayers.

And this is what he hears a lot of. They both said the same thing. There are too many obstacles. You have an accent that scares people. You have a body that's too big for movies. You have a name that won't even fit on a movie poster. Everything about you is too strange. Why don't

you stay in the gym business or why or we can help you lining up some seminars and speaking engagements or with a book or something like that and the reason i bring up this part is because what he takes away from this is fantastic why should i give up my goal because a couple of hollywood agents turn me down so eventually i offering me parts, but then he's like, no, this is not my goal. So something else I learned from the life story of Arnold Schwarzenegger is he never took his eyes off this goal. Somebody asked me to play a bouncer. They wanted me to play a Nazi officer, a wrestler, a football player, a prisoner. I never took jobs like that because I would say to myself, this isn't going to convince anybody that you're here to be a star. And it was really important why he could.

He had his again. Again, another smart thing he did. He had the financial independence because he already had a little bit of money before movies to not have to take these roles. I was very glad I could afford to say no with the income from my businesses. I didn't need money from acting. I never wanted to be in a financially vulnerable position. I felt that I was born to be a leading man. I had to be on the posters. I had to be the one carrying the movie. I realized that this sounded crazy to everybody but me. But I believe that the only way you become a leading man is by treating yourself like a leading man and and working your ass off if you don't believe in yourself then how will anyone else believe in you and so eventually this

belief and this persistence pays off they really uh there there was a like a sci-fi hero called conan um and they they recruit arnold they're like you're perfect for it and he says we agreed on a deal this is his first big break in hollywood for it. And he says, we agreed on a deal. This is his first big break in Hollywood. This is what I'm telling you. We agreed on a deal for me to star in Conan. They had a bunch of Conan and four sequels, actually. The money was laid out. I'd make $250,000 for the first movie,

$1 million for the next, and $2 million for the next, and so on, plus 5% of the profits all five movies would be worth 10 million dollars over 10 years now what's interesting is they just say hey we're gonna give you five percent of the profits the producer wind up not liking arnold and arnold had he didn't understand the language and he tried to crack a joke and this guy i guess was really really short and arnold goes into his office one day he's like why does a little guy like you need a big desk and this is a guy that's used to be treated being treated with respect he's very

powerful he's produced I think over 100 movies and so he started to seek out revenge uh they weren't gonna cast anybody else in the lead role but he says you know what you're not I'm gonna take those points back and again Arnold does smart. I feel like I'm repeating that over and over again, because he just does something. He just understands people. And that producer, his name is Dino, says the lawyer announced, Dino doesn't want to give you five points, like it says in the contract. He wants to give you no points. I said, take the points. I'm in no position to negotiate. He gassed. All five? It astounded him to hear me simply say that because he'd expected a fight. All the points, I repeated. Take it. I was thinking, you can take it

and shove it because that's not what I'm doing the movie for. I understood the reality. The situation was lopsided. Dino had the money and I needed the role of Conan more than the points. Because the role of Conan will establish me as a movie star, and then I'll get other movie roles, and there'll be more movies in the future, and I'll make up the money in the back end. But if I fight this guy here and I lose the role of conan i may have lost my one opportunity so conan is a very physical um movie and i i want to read this section to you but it's let me actually let me read it to you first and then i'll tell you my interpretation of it um he started sending experts to train with me masters masters in martial arts, stunt people who

were horse riding specialists. For three months, I was tutored in sword combat two hours a day. The training was intense and time-consuming, and I took to it completely. I felt like my movie career had suddenly come into sharp focus. So everything with Arnold is like this. Reps, reps, reps, reps. He talks about it over and over again. There's no magic formula. You just have to put in the time. Later on, anytime he's given an opportunity,

if he's got to learn how to ride a horse, he'll ride a horse every day for hours and hours. He gets invited to how he meets his wife. The Kennedys put on like this tennis tournament or something for charity. And initially he turns it down. He's like, I don't know how to know how to play tennis and they're like no this is a good opportunity to go so what is what does he do he plays tennis for two hours every day for three weeks until the to the the charity he does this over and over again um he talks about it constantly he's like i'm not good at anything i wasn't good at lifting weights i just did more i did thousands hundreds of thousands of reps i wasn't good at anything. I wasn't good at lifting weights. I just did more. I did thousands, hundreds of thousands of reps. I wasn't good at speaking English. He winds up, there's a line because he had such a thick accent and he talks about there's like certain sounds in German that don't exist. Like they call, they don't call wine. There's no W. It's like vine or something like that. So he says like the wine grows on the vine. He wind up having to say that sentence in these classes he's doing to try to learn English and to get rid of his accent a little bit.

10,000 times. Just everything he does over and over again. He's just like, it's just time consuming. And it's just me putting in the effort on a daily basis. Has to learn how to dance the tango for the movie True Lies. Does that for hours and hours and hours. Another one of his main themes is sell. That you need to work like hell and then advertise.

I've actually been saying that was a quote from Arnold this whole time because I've heard him say it so much. And in the book, he learned it from Ted Turner. But in any case, this is an example of that. Very few actors like to sell. I'd seen the same thing with authors in the book business. He wrote two best-selling books on his career's bodybuilding as well. It sold very well.

The typical attitude seemed to be, I don't want to be a whore. I create. I don't want to shill. It was a real change when I showed up saying, let's go everywhere. Because this is such a, I love his mindset here. If you think about it like this. So he says, this is the mindset he has. Let's go everywhere because this is good not only for me financially, meaning he's going to benefit the more he sells, right?

But also good for the public. They get to see a good movie. So assuming the author wrote a great book or the actor performed well in the movie, why wouldn't like, what's the point if no one knows about it? And I love that mindset. It's like, listen, yes, this is going to be good for me. So I'm going to put an effort, right? But it's going to be good for the studio. It's going to be good for all the people that work on the movie, but it's going to be good for the end user. If you wrote a great book, that book could change somebody's life.

So why wouldn't you go out there and try to make as many people aware of it as possible? Because then that's more lives that you can improve. You can entertain them for a few hours. Maybe they learn something, they take away from it for the rest of their life, whatever it is. I think it's a great idea. He says, I saw myself as a businessman first. Too many actors, writers, and artists think that marketing is beneath them. But no matter what you do in life, selling is a part of it. You can't make movies without money. Even if I had no publicity obligation in my contract, it was still in my interest to promote the movie and make sure it made as much money as possible.

I wanted to be involved in the meetings. I wanted everyone to see that I was working very hard to create a return on the studio's investments i felt it was my responsibility to pump up the grosses so he's always comparing and contrasting him himself to other people other peers right he did some bodybuilding when they when they uh wouldn't take joe up on the offers to learn business he does this in the movies he's like a lot of actors. They're like, okay, that's the end. The movie's over. They're going to edit it and it's going to release. They think their job is done. And Arnold's like, no, no, half my job is done. Now the other half, arguably the

more important half is making people aware of what the hell I just did. Work like hell and advertise. And so that's going to lead me right into my next point, which is this is Arnold's mindset on work. To me, the work didn't feel intense at all. Just normal. You do a movie or a book and you promote the hell out of it. And in the meantime, you work out and you take care of business and explore even more. It was all a joyride. This is, again, his positive mindset that I think is so important, which is why I never thought, oh, my God, look how much work there is.

It's just too much pressure. When I had to work a night, it might mean going to a meeting to talk about movies. How bad was that? I was talking about movies. So for me, work just meant discovery and fun. If I heard somebody complaining, oh, I work so hard, I put in 10 and 12 hour days, I would crucify him. What the fuck are you talking about? When the day is 24 hours, what else did you do? I love the variety in my life. One day I'd be in a meeting about developing an office building or a shopping center. The next day I'd be talking to the publisher of my latest book. Next I'd be working with Joe on a cover story. Then I'd be in meetings about a movie. Everything I did could have been my hobby. It was my hobby. I was passionate about all of it. My definition of living

is to have excitement always. That's the difference between living and existing. And before I get to his next point, we're fast-forwarding in the story. This blew my mind. This is kind of a weird alternate history if you think of that. He gets invited. James Cameron is going to do the Terminator so they have lunch.

And they're trying to convince him to come on board. And originally they did not cast him in the role of Terminator, the machine. He was supposed to be the hero, right? I'm going to read the sentence to you. And this is what they said to him. We pretty much got O.J. Simpson signed up to be the Terminator, which is like a killing machine.

Moving on. Do hard things. There's less competition. People are always talking about how few performers there are at the top of the ladder, but I was always convinced that there was room for one more. I felt that because there was so little room, people got intimidated and felt more comfortable staying on the bottom of the ladder. But in fact, the more people that think like that, the more crowded the bottom of the ladder becomes. Don't go to where it's crowded. Go to where it's empty. Even though it's harder to get there,

that's where you belong and that's where there's less competition. This is him repeating, don't see only problems. You can overthink anything. There's always negatives. The more you know, the less you tend to do something. If I had known everything about real estate, movies and bodybuilding, I wouldn't have gone into them

this is many pages later and you see the same he's echoing the same thing that you have to sell sell sell whenever I finished a movie I felt my job was only half done every film had to be nurtured in the marketplace you can have the greatest movie in the world but if you don't get it out there if people don't know about it, you have nothing. It's the same with poetry, with painting, with writing, with inventions. It always blew my mind that some of the greatest artists from Michelangelo to Van Gogh never sold much because they didn't know how. That wasn't going to happen to my movies. Same with bodybuilding, same with politics. No matter what I did in life i was aware that you had to sell it as ted turner said early to bed early to rise work like hell and advertise

so at this point in the story arnold's already a massive um success as an action hero something i was really surprising the original terminator which i feel is one of the most iconic like well-known movies right cost only four million dollars to make made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars remarkable but anyways that's not the point of this section uh he wants to branch out he doesn't want to be typecast into just hey i'm this big strong person he wants to start doing um comedies and there's this movie i don't know if you've seen it he did it does it with danny devito, it's called Twins. And this is the negotiation process, which I thought was really, really smart.

He's willing to take a risk financially, so he's not typecast. So he winds up having a meeting, he's like, I don't want you to pay me for this, up front. He says, we don't want cash, we said. Let's all share the risk here. The deal we ended up with guaranteed that the three of us, it's him, Danny DeVito, and one of the producers.

So it says the deal that we ended up with guaranteed the three of us 37.5% of all the income from the movie. And that 37.5% was real, not subject to all the watering down and bullshit tricks that movie accounting is famous for. They call it Hollywood accounting. We divided up the 37.5% among ourselves proportionally based on what each of us had earned on the previous movie. Because I'd been paid a lot for The Running Man, I ended up with the biggest slice, almost 20%. It made the math simple.

If Twins was a decent-sized success and made, say, $50 million, it would put almost $10 dollars in my pocket so he says okay listen there's no risk here because they're like well you're in action here what if people don't see you you know can you do comedy so you don't have to pay me up front i'll align my interest with you and willing to make money to the movie successful this winds up he winds up he doesn't make 10 million dollars this is so successful he's still getting paid as when he i think he publishes a book in 2011 something like that he was still getting paid for that movie

he winds up making over 35 million dollars and counting for this one decision i loved his response to um this is way for fast forwarding wayne's story um he winds up doing a movie. It's called The Last Action Hero. It was supposed to be like the blockbuster of the summer, but it had the unfortunate luck of opening right after Jurassic Park. And Jurassic Park just came through and destroyed everything. And so, you know, they're writing up. They're like, oh, is this his career done? It wound up making a profit, but it just didn't do as well as it should have.

And so they're writing all the people are calling him and his wife. They're like, oh, we feel so bad for you. Are you okay? Can we help you? And really what he comes away with is like, yeah, it was temporary embarrassing. But the main takeaway that I know of myself is people are not thinking about you.

They're thinking about themselves. I've talked about this blog over and over again. This writer named Tim Urban, I've taken a lot of ideas from him. In fact, if you go back and listen to, I did a three-part series on his Elon Musk. He wrote essentially like a small book. I think it's like 60,000 words, something like that.

But anyways, I think it's like somewhere in the 15s, Founders 15 or something like that. But he has this great post I always think about. He wrote it years ago and I reread it every so often. And it's called Taming the Mammoth. I'll link to it in show notes if you have not read it. But it's this misinterpretation that is very common in human beings that we think, oh, when something goes wrong in our life, when we make a mistake, everybody's looking at us.

They're pointing at us and laughing. It's like, no, they're looking at themselves. They're not even paying attention to you. Arnold comes across with the same conclusion here in a different manner. He says, and when you feel embarrassed like I did, you tend to assume that the whole world is focused on your failure. I'd go into a restaurant and someone would say, oh, hey, how are you doing? I see the new movies out. That's great.

And I'd feel like that's great. You motherfucker. Didn't you read the L.A. Times? But in fact, not everybody reads the LA Times, or Variety, or goes to see every movie. The poor guy probably knows nothing about it and just wants to say something nice. And again, I think, I really do think,

I mean, I hope you don't think this sounds ridiculous, but I do think a blog post can change your life, and that Tim Urban post is really life-changing. When you realize everybody is self-interested, they're thinking about themselves. And so take the risk. If you're not, if you're worried about taking a risk and failing because what other people think, that reading that post will get you out of that mindset. And I think that's extremely helpful. That's what I mean by life changing. So one thing that this note I left on this page is, wait, what? You were going to hide your heart surgery? So he's got a he has a genetic defect. And he knew for 20 years since he was in his 30s that he'd eventually have to have like a valve in his heart replaced. Right. And he was a very private person, wouldn't

even tell his wife and his kids that he needed this to happen. And he says, I'm a person who does not like to talk about things over and over. I make decisions very quickly and I don't ask many people for opinions. I don't want to think too many times about the same thing and I want to move on. So he's saying like, I can't tell my wife about this because if I tell her she's the opposite, she's going to talk about this and then I'm going to be worried I'm going to die. Okay. So he says, as the surgery approached, I let the doctor in on my plan. I will tell my family that I'm going to Mexico. I said, I'll say I need a little vacation for a week. And then we do the heart surgery. You said I'll be out of the hospital after five days. So after five days,

I'll go to a hotel. I will lie in the sun and get tanned and I will look healthy. And then I'll go home and no one will ever know I had heart surgery. How about that? And the doctor's like, no, Arnold, you're not doing that. That's freaking insane. And it definitely is. Okay, so towards the end of the book, the last chapter actually has, he writes down his rules for life.

And I think the entire book, I've said over and over again, sorry, it's worth the money and it's worth the time invested. But even if you just read the last chapter, it's worth the price of the purchase of the book. But I'm just going to pull out a couple of things here because I love his mindset here. And again, it's just really teaching the same lessons in different ways. This is the idea that, hey, there's plenty of time in your day

that you need to organize your day better. So the heading says, the day has 24 hours. I once gave a talk at the University of California and afterward, a student raised his hand and complained. Governor, since the budget crisis hit us, my tuition has gone up twice. Now it's too high and I need more financial aid. I understand it's difficult, I said, but what do you mean too high? I mean, now I have to work part timetime. Well, what's wrong with that? I have to study. So I said, let's figure this out. How many hours do you go to class? I got two hours one day and three hours another day. And how much studying do you have to do? Well, each day,

three hours. Okay. So far I see six hours one day and several hours the other day. What do you do with the rest of the time? What do you mean? Well, the day is 24 hours. Have you ever thought about working more? Maybe taking more classes rather than wasting your life away? The class was shocked. I'm not wasting my life away, said the student.

Yes, you are. You're talking about six hours a day. The day is 24 hours. So you have 18 hours left. Maybe you need six hours for sleeping. So if your part-time job takes four hours, you still have time for dating and dancing and drinking and going out. Why are you complaining? I explained how as a student, I trained five hours a day, gone to acting class four hours a day, worked in construction several hours a day,

and gone to college and done my homework. So it was interesting. As I'm reading the book, as I normally do, I try to find the latest interviews to see how he's thinking, if the person's still alive, how they're thinking now. And he gave this great interview sometime this year, I think. And he's always very positive. And what's interesting, all the interviews, like I use YouTube mainly for this.

Arnold Schwarzenegger interviews are some of the only place where the YouTube comments are all positive. This guy has a massive fan base that all love him. That's very rare like that. But he's so he's always very charismatic. The closest he gets to showing a flash of anger is when people, when he's asked the question, okay, what do you say to the people that say they don't have time to work out or they don't have time to, to, to work on their business or they don't have the time to do whatever they're doing. And it's almost in a brief second, you could see him like smashing the table. He doesn't do this, but he essentially, he does not accept that argument at all. And he repeats very similar to what he told the student

that you have plenty of time. You're just not using the time correctly. And he's just not big on excuses, which again, I think that like tough love, um, is very beneficial to young people to think, Oh my God, I have to work part time. I go to school. You know, he's just not, he's not ridiculing this guy, this kid, but he's just like, come on, man. Come on. You're talking about six, seven hours a day. You got plenty of other, like, organize your day better. And I think this is very helpful.

It's very helpful to say, hey, what do I want to do in life? And then write down how you're spending your time. And you realize that a lot of times we just delude ourselves. We come up with these fantasies in our mind of what we really want to do. Actions express priority. So write down how you're spending your time. This is something I do. Write down how you're spending your time.

And then seeing, are my actions lining up with what I tell myself? Or am I lying to myself? And in many times we find that we're lying to ourselves. That kid was lying to himself. All right, this is another one, reps, reps, reps. He talks about when he was a young man starting to lift weights back in Austria. I'm going to skip over the part other than he does something smart about he had a piece of plywood and they'd write out in chalk what they have to do. So it says, okay, you cannot leave until you do five.

I'm going to skip over the reps and stuff, but five sets of 10 reps, all this other stuff. But he says, I'm going to get to the punchline. Then as soon as you were done with the first set, you went to the wall and crossed off the first line so it became an X. All five lines would have to be turned into an X before the exercise was done. This practice had a huge impact on my motivation. I always had the visual feedback of, wow, an accomplishment. I did what I said I would do. Writing my goals became second nature,

and so did the conviction that there are no shortcuts. It took hundreds and even thousands of repetitions for me. He talks about building his body. But he says there are no shortcuts. Everything is reps, reps, reps. No matter what you do in life, it's either reps or mileage. If you want to get good at skiing, you have to get on the slopes all the time. If you want to play chess, you have to play tens of thousands of games on the movie set the only way you have your act together is to do the reps if you've done the reps you don't have to worry and then this is a unique piece of advice and it's called it says don't blame your parents and i just want to read some parts to you from here they've done their best job for you and if they've left you with problems those problems

are now yours to solve maybe your parents were too supportive and protective and now that you feel needy and vulnerable in the world don't blame them for that or maybe they were too harsh talks about his parents his father was extremely harsh so he says he was exacting which was his nature he was also brutal at times but i don't think that was his fault. It was the war. If he had lived in a more normal time, maybe he'd been different. But I've often wondered, what if he'd been warmer and nicer? Would I have left Austria? Probably not.

And that is my great fear. I became Arnold because of what he did to me. I recognized that I could channel my upbringing in a positive way rather than complain. So that's just another example of his mindset. He reverses it. Very similar to, I just got done rereading 21,000 words or something like that of my notes when I read Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. And I noticed in those highlights that Warren does that a lot. He reverses things. He reverses the way normal people think and just and when you reverse you arrive at vastly different conclusions and usually beneficial conclusions i feel that that

is what arnold's doing here so it says he was brutal at times but i don't think it was his fault i've often wondered would it okay i just read that part and that was my great fear i became arnold because of what he did to me i recognized that i could channel my upbringing in a positive way rather than complain. See, complaining would be what normal people do, right? I could use it to have a vision, to set goals, and to find joy. His harshness drove me from home. It made me come to America and work for success.

And I'm happy it did. I don't have to lick my wounds. It's not always obvious what you should celebrate. Sometimes you have to appreciate the very people and circumstances that traumatized you. Today, I hail the strictness of my father and my whole upbringing and the fact that I didn't have anything that I wanted in Austria. Because those were the very factors that made me hungry. Every time he hit me,

every time he said my weight training was garbage, that I should do something useful and go out and chop wood, every time he disapproved of me or embarrassed me, it put fuel on the fire in my belly. It drove me and motivated me. And finally, stay hungry. Be hungry for success. Hungry to make your mark. Hungry to be seen, and to be heard, and to have an effect. My father always told me, be useful.

Do something. He was right. If you have a talent or a skill that makes you happy, use it to improve your neighborhood. And if you feel a desire to do more, then go all out. You have plenty of time to rest when you're in the grave. Live a risky life and a spicy life. And like Eleanor Roosevelt said, every day do something that scares you. We should all stay hungry. For the full story, buy the book.

If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That's 141 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.