Founders - #416 Arnold Schwarzenegger

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

What I learned from reading Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Made possible by: Ramp: https://ramp.com Axon by Applovin: https://axon.ai/founders Vanta: https://vanta.com/founders

It was the summer I turned 15, a magical season for me because that year I discovered exactly what I wanted to do with my life. It was more than a young boy's mere pipe dream of a distant, hazy future, confused fantasies of being a fireman, detective, sailor, test pilot, or spy. I knew. I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest. I'm not exactly sure why I chose bodybuilding, except that I loved it. I loved it from the first moment my fingers closed around a barbell, and I felt the challenge and exhilaration of hoisting the heavy steel plates above my head. I had always been involved in sports through my father.

With my father's encouragement, I first got into organized competitive sports when I was 10. However, by the time I was 13, team sports no longer satisfied me. I was already off on an individual trip. I disliked it when we won a game and I didn't get personal recognition. The only time I really felt rewarded was when I was singled out as being the best, so I decided to try individual sports. I still remember my first visit to the bodybuilding gym. There was before me, my life, the answer I had been seeking, it clicked. Once I started, it didn't take long.

I was literally addicted. I love the feel of the cold iron and steel warming to my touch and the sounds and the smells of the gym. I still love it. I remember the first real workout I had as vividly as if it were last night. I rode my bike to the gym, which was eight miles from the village where I lived. I used barbells, dumbbells, and machines. The guys warned me that I'd get sore, but it didn't seem to be having any effect. I thought I must be beyond that.

Then, after the workout, I started riding home and I fell off my bike. I was so weak I couldn't make my hands hold on. I had no feeling in my legs. They were noodles. I was numb, my whole body buzzing. This was my first experience with weight training, and I was crazy for it. The next morning, I couldn't even lift my arm to comb my hair. Each time I tried, pain shot through every muscle in my shoulder and arm.

What's wrong, Arnold? My mother asked. I'm just sore, I told her. My muscles are stiff, but my mother kept on. Why, Arnold? Why would you want to do this to yourself? I couldn't be bothered with what my mother felt. Seeing new changes in my body, feeling them, turned me on. I felt my muscles aching.

I learned that this pain meant progress. Each time my muscles were sore from a workout, I knew they were growing. I could not have chosen a less popular sport. My school friends thought I was crazy, but I didn't care. My only thoughts were of going ahead and building muscles. I remember certain people trying to put negative thoughts into my mind, trying to persuade me to slow down. But I had found the thoughts.

thing to which I wanted to devote my total energies and there was no stopping me. My drive was unusual. I talked differently than my friends. I was hungrier for success than anyone I knew. I started to live for being in the gym and when he wasn't working on the gym, he'd be reading all these bodybuilding magazines and this is where he finds his hero. In one of those magazines I saw my first photograph of Reg Park. I dreamed about being gigantic. Reg Park was the epitome of that dream. Reg Park looked so magnificent in the role of Hercules that I was transfixed, and I was sitting there in the theater, and I knew that that was going to be me. I would look like Reg Park. I would study everything that he did.

From that point on, my life was utterly dominated by Reg Park. His image was my ideal. It was fixed in my mind. I found out everything I could about Reg Park. I bought all the magazines that published his programs. I learned how he started training, what he ate, how he lived, and how he did his workouts. I became obsessed with Reg Park. He was the image in front of me from the time I started training.

The more I focused in on this image and worked and grew, the more I saw it was real impossible for me to be like him. People around me predicted that it could happen within five years, but I didn't think I could wait five years. I had this insatiable drive to get there sooner. Whereas most people were satisfied to train two or three times a week, I quickly escalated my program to six workouts a week. My father was baffled. Don't do this, Arnold. I responded, I want to be the best built man in the world. That made my father sigh and shake his head.

Then I said, I want to go to America and be in movies. I want to be an actor. America, he replied. Yes, America. My God, he cried. He went into the kitchen and told my mother, I think we better go to the doctor with this one. He's sick in the head. He was genuinely worried about me.

He felt I wasn't normal. And of course, he was right. With my desire and my drive, I definitely wasn't normal. Normal people can be happy with a regular life. I was different. I felt there was more to life than just plotting through an average existence. I'd always been impressed by stories of greatness and power. Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon were names I knew.

and remembered. I wanted to do something special, and I wanted to be recognized as the best. That was an excerpt from the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is Arnold, the education of a bodybuilder, and Arnold wrote this all the way back in 1977 when he was just 30 years old. And the reason this came to mind is because I've been reading a lot about SpaceX, and I was thinking of the fact that Elon founded that company when he was just 30 years old.

And I think it's interesting to go back and read what Elon was saying at that age, when the future success of SpaceX is still a decade or two in the future. There's another example of this from Bernard Arnaul, the founder of LVMH. I read this really hard to find biography of his, which is out of print. It's like when you do find copies, they sell for, you know, sometimes $3,000. And when the book ends, Arnold is in his 40s. And he lays out the plan that he winds up pursuing over the next three decades. It's exactly what happens in the book that I'm holding in my hand.

Arnold lays out what he learned to get to the top of this. this very unusual and frankly wildly ridiculed sport of bodybuilding back then and says, hey, wait, the same principles I used to get to the top of this sport, I'm going to use to become a movie star and build a business empire and then goes and does it. So what we'll see here is how he was thinking before he achieved his success. And so let's go back to this idea that Arnold found his blueprint. My dreams went beyond a spectacular body. Once I had that, I knew what it would do for me.

I'd get into the movies and build gymnasiums all over the world. I'd create an empire. Reg Park became my father image. I pasted his pictures on all the walls of my bedroom. I read everything about him that was printed in German. I had friends translate the English stories for me. I studied every photograph of him that I could get my hands on. This inspired me to work even harder.

When I felt my lungs burning as though they would burst and my veins bulging with blood, I loved it. I knew then that I was growing, making one more step towards becoming, like Reg Park. I wanted that body and I didn't care what I had to go through to get it. My weight room was not heated. So naturally in cold weather, it was freezing. I didn't care. I trained without heat. Even on days when the temperature went below zero. And so even though he's a teenager at time, he's pursuing an individual sport, he starts to understand the importance of building like this team around him. So at this time, he's has a bunch of other bodybuilder friends, many of which are older. And one of them sets Arnold on this lifelong path of developing intense

mental strength. Over and over again in this book, Arnold talks about it's all in the mind, it's all in the mind, it's all in the mind. There were certain days when something held me back and I didn't train as hard as the other days. This was inexplicable to me. Some days nothing could hold me back.

Other days I'd be down. On the down days, I couldn't handle anywhere near my normal amount of weight. This puzzled me. Carl and I discussed it. He had read a great deal of psychology and his argument made sense to me. In fact, this helped lay the foundation

for my later thinking. It's not your body, Arnold. your body can't change that much from one day to the next. It's in your mind. On some days your goals are just clear. On bad days you need someone to help you get going. It became extremely important to have somebody standing behind me saying, let's do one more, Arnold.

Come on, another set. One more rep, Arnold. And it was just as important for me to help somebody else. And then he openly admits wanting to be perceived as special. It's really important for him to be perceived by other people as being the best, as being special. It says before long, people being looking me, as a special person. Partly this was a result of my own changing attitude about myself.

I was growing, getting bigger, and gaining confidence. I was given consideration I had never received before. This strange new attitude towards me had an incredible effect on my ego. It supplied me with something I had been craving. I'm not sure why I had this need for special attention. Most of the people I knew didn't really understand what I was doing at all. In the beginning, it was kind of hard for me to handle.

I was young and impressionable. I knew I wanted to do it so badly that nobody could stop me. But many times I did question it. I wondered why I was so different. My choice of sport confused other people. Why did you have to pick the least favorite sport in Austria? It was true. We only had 20 or 30 bodybuilders in the entire country at the time.

I couldn't come up with an answer. I didn't know. It had been instinctive. I had just fallen in love with it. My mind was totally locked into working out, and I was annoyed if anything took me away from it. And then he talks about cutting literally every other thing out of his life because he needed stable emotions to concentrate on his work.

I needed stable emotions, total discipline. I needed to be training for two hours in the morning and two hours at night, concentrating on nothing except perfecting my body and bringing it to its peak. Whatever I thought might hold me back, I avoided. And it starts affecting the relationship he has with his parents. I eliminated my parents too. it seemed they always wanted to see me. Then when I was around, they had nothing to say.

I grew accustomed to hearing certain questions. What's wrong with you, Arnold? Don't you feel anything? Don't you have any emotions? I always let it pass with a shrug. I knew that what I was doing was not only justifiable, it was essential. My self-confidence grew as I saw how much control I was gaining over my body. In two or three years, I had actually been able to change my body entirely.

That told me something. If I had been able to change my body that much, I could also do the same, discipline and determination change anything else I wanted. That is the central point of the book. The book ends. And he literally just says, the same stuff I'm doing for bodybuilding, I'm going to apply, watch me do it, I'm going to build a business empire, I'm going to be an actor, I'm going to dominate America. He has this living girlfriend when he gets to America.

I think they're together from the age of like 21 to 26. And in the book that she wrote about her relationship with Arnold, she talks about how differently they looked at life. She said, I looked at life as something that happened, and Arnold looked at life as something that was directed. And he's saying so here, if I had been able to change my body that much, I could also, through the same discipline and determination, change anything else. I wanted. I could change my habits, my whole outlook on life. During these early years, I didn't care how I felt about anything except bodybuilding.

It consumed every minute of my days and all my best effort. I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else. The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym. Self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest, hard work. Many people are aware of these principles, but very few can put them into practice. Every day, I hear someone say, I'm too fat. I need to lose 25 pounds, but I can't. I never seem to improve.

I would hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak. I could lose 10 to 40 pounds rapidly, easily, pain. by simply setting my mind to do it, by observing the principles of strict discipline that bodybuilding taught me, I can prepare myself for anything. I was just on stage at an event with my friend Eric, who's the co-founder and CEO of Ramp. When I looked over to my right, I noticed that on the sleeve of Eric's jacket, it said, we win when our customers win. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and the way that Ramp helps their customers

win is by helping you save time, save money, and grow revenue. median company running on ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. The median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only all in one platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top CEOs and founders that I know run their business on ramp. I run my business on ramp and you should too. go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue.

That is ramp.com. And so then he repeats, everybody around him. He's like, hey, this is a really weird habit. You're in this odd subculture with these other freaks and misfits. You're not doing what we expect you to do. And he says to them, the only acceptable way of life was being a banker or a secretary, a doctor, or salesman, taking some kind of regular job, doing something legitimate. My decision to build my body and be Mr. Universe was totally beyond their comprehension.

I listened only to my inner voice and my instincts. Everybody else didn't understand my drive at all. And Arnold does a really good job of essentially just shutting out this negativity. If you say negative things about him, if you have a pessimistic attitude, he just cut you out of his life. But he also realizes he's in the wrong culture and he needs to get to America. My real aspiration was somehow to get to America. I'd always had a claustrophobic feeling about Austria. I've got to get out of here.

It's not big enough. It's stifling. It won't allow me to expand. Even people's ideas were small. There was too much contentment, too much acceptance of things as they had always been. And so when he turns 18, he has to go to serve in the army. It says one year of service was obligatory in Austria.

And there's two kind of contradictory traits of Arnold that you'll see here where he's extremely disciplined, but also unmanageable and uncompromising and willing to take a lot of risks. I mean, for the story he tells here, he essentially goes AWOL during base. training so he could take part in his first competition and as a result he has to spend a week in military prison and he doesn't care at all so he says for me the army was good experience i like the regimentation the firm rigid structure discipline was not a new thing to me and so he talks about

sneaking off the base and competing in his first tournament which is mr europe junior he winds up winning he says i love the sudden attention i knew for certain that i was on my way to becoming the world's greatest bodybuilder i felt i was already one of the best in the world obviously i wasn't even top 5,000, but in my mind I was already the best. The army was not impressed. They caught me as I was climbing back over the wall. I sat in jail for seven days with only a blanket on a cold, stone bench and almost no food. But I had my trophy and I didn't care if they locked me up for a whole year. It had been worth it. And I can't remember if it was in this book or the other books I read about Arnold. He wrote two autobiographies, one when he was 30, one in 70s, read both. I read the book

that his living girlfriend wrote about him. But there's a quote that I have saved that I want to read that I think really is instructive and gives you an understanding of the way he looked at it this part. Why the hell is he so extreme? He says this was my only way out. It became clear to me that bodybuilding was the thing for me. This is what I was meant for at that time. And I then saw very clearly what I could achieve.

And that gave me a tremendous amount of motivation. Instead of training two hours a day like most other people did, I would train twice a day for four hours, totally abnormal. And sometimes three times a day and sometimes four times a day. I would go home during my lunchtime and then do for an hour straight, just sit-ups to get that extra hour that no one else had gotten in, just to be ahead of everyone else. What separates the champion from the guy that is second best or the loser

is the person who really has the psychological advantage. Everything is in the mind. I had a psychological advantage. I had no other things available. It was easy to have that drive and develop this kind of attitude of, this is my only way out of this town, out of this village. I always felt my way out was through bodybuilding.

I couldn't have figured out any other way. He gets out of Austria, goes to Berlin, working in a gym as a trainer, trying to make a little bit of money. He's really struggling financially at this point. So he's training other people during the day and then working on his own body because he wants to compete in mystery.

At that point, my own thinking was tuned into one thing and one thing only, becoming Mr. Universe. In my own mind, I was Mr. Universe. I had this absolutely clear vision of myself up on the stage with the trophy. It was only a matter of time before the whole world would be able to see it too. And it made no difference to me how much I had to struggle to get there. I had to live a split life. So he talks a lot about, essentially, this guy has almost no theoretical knowledge. It's all practical trial.

such a practical knowledge through trial and error, through experimentation. And many of the things that he's learning now in the 70s, people used to this very day. And so he says, I had to live a split life, acting as an instructor to the club, to the health club, this is a gym, to the health club clients on one hand and trying to train myself for the Mr. Universe title on the other. It was frustrating. People who would never benefit from what I told them kept taking my time. They paid and came to the gym, but it was a disgusting, superficial effort on the other.

their part. They merely went through the motions, doing sissy workouts, pampering themselves. And there was so much I wanted to do with these wasted hours. I trained both morning and evening. It was the beginning of the split routine that would later become famous. But I got into it originally because it was expedient. There was no initial theory involved. I worked out from 9 to 11 in the morning and then again from 7 to 9 at night. I couldn't believe the results. And then again, he talks about learning to strengthen his mind, just like he's learning to strengthen his body. He's still very, very young at this point. And he realizes that you can actually defeat yourself before you even get on the field.

Even though his confidence is growing, he still has an element to him, which he calls a loser's mentality. This is something he fixes. He's kind of disgusted by himself, actually, and that causes him to fix this. So he goes to this competition. And he's looking at all the photographs of the people that he has to compete against. This is before the competition. It says, no, I decided. I can't beat that guy who,

I'd look at the second place winner. No, I can't beat him. I'd look at the guy who plays third. I can't beat him either. I went right down the line trying to figure out who I might beat. I got to eighth or ninth place and figured I might have a chance if I tried hard enough. It was a loser's way of looking at it. I defeated myself before I even entered, before I'd even completed the year's training. But I was young. I was being self-protective. I hadn't yet pulled together my ideas about positive thinking and the powers of the mind. And so in one of these competitions, he thought he was actually going to win and he comes in second. And after he gets over the initial emotional shock, he actually does something really smart.

He says, once I was over the initial disappointment of losing, I began trying to understand exactly why I had lost. I tried to be honest. I tried to analyze it fairly. I still had some serious weaknesses. For me, this was a real turning point. I decided I had to go back and spend a year on the things I had never really given any attention to at all. I was relying on one thing. What I had more than anyone else was drive.

I was hungrier than anybody. I wanted it so badly it hurt. I knew there could be no one else in the world who wanted this title as much as I did. And this was really, really important because he's able to ask the person he lost to, the person that won the competition questions after. And he thought, okay, this guy must be doing something different. He must have some kind of special sauce. And he says the exercises he named were not different than the ones that I was doing,

but he did them in a different way. his number of repetitions was higher. I had thought perhaps he had some special exercises, but that wasn't true. He concentrated on the standard exercises. That was his quote unquote secret concentration. Being around him for a few minutes made me painfully aware of my own shortcomings. And this, again, talks about the difference of what he wants for his life.

Even his friends, even his fellow bodybuilders, when they found out, oh my God, you came in second. He says they were ecstatic. their minds were blown. They wanted to have a big victory celebration, but there was just one thing in my mind. I could not wait to get to the gym and start working for next year's contest.

I didn't lay off at all. Twice a day religiously, I put everything else out of my mind and did my work. And again, every time he talks to his parents, they're not supportive. They were upset about me leaving home to manage a gym and refusing to go to school and prepare myself for some respectable profession.

They asked when I was going to get a real job. When I was going to become stable, is this what we raised, they'd ask? A bum? How long are you going to go living off in this dream world? I let everything they said pass over my head. My thinking went totally beyond that, beyond jobs, beyond Austria, and small town respectability. I continued doing precisely what I knew I needed to do. In my mind, there was only one possibility for me, and that was to go to the top, to be the best.

Everything else was just a means to that end. one thing that saved me was my interest in business. So he says that he thought being an entrepreneur, it was the ultimate. There was nothing higher than being an entrepreneur. So he says, I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I realized that it would have to be good at understanding the mechanics of business in order to make my dreams profitable. I began putting this to use. I turned the publicity from having placed second in the Mr. Universe contest to attracting new members to my gym. In almost no time, I built the membership from 70 to 2%.

I also began to understand that bodybuilding was just show business. If I expected it to make it big in this field or any other, because he applies this for all future endeavors, I had to become a showman. And as a result of a lot of the early success that he's having, he gets to meet his idol. He gets to spend time with Reg Park and learn directly from him. Working out with Reg Park for that short time

helped me more than anything to clear up this confusions I had about the principles of other champions. I learned that you can't really say, you must do this to get such and such a result. You have to try out certain things and find out what is best for you. I collected advice from Reg the whole time. I wrote it out down and used it as it served me best. I discovered that taking measurements gave me both satisfaction and incentive.

I measured my calves, arms, and thighs regularly, and I'd be turned on if I saw I'd increased an eighth inch or a half an inch. On a calendar, I kept even fractional changes in measurements and weight. I had a photographer, take pictures at least once a month. I studied each shot with a magnifying glass. How bad do you want it? How many other bodybuilders you think are doing that? Studying their photographs with a magnifying glass.

Meeting Reg Park made me want to become a better person. I already felt I was better than anyone else. He would walk around. So he constantly is talking about brainwashing himself and forcing himself to have a positive mental attitude and believe that he has already won. He sees it in his mind. He talks about visualization over and over again in the book.

So he's walking around. saying, I'm great, I'm the greatest. I was continually trying to convince myself of this. I knew I was a winner. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way.

So there's actually, talks about the importance of like what's going on in your mind. And this is what's interesting about Arnold because he's open and honest about things that most people are incentivized to hide. And so he talks about what his inner monologue was at this time. I never went to a competition to compete. I went to win. 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. Step aside and give me the trophy. I pictured myself high up on the pedestal trophy in hand.

Everyone else would be standing below and I would look down. And then when he would fail to live up to his own expectations, he could be equally as devastating and harsh with himself. So he goes to America, competes, thinks he's going to win and winds up losing. And this is what he said about that experience. That night, despair came crashing in. I was in a forward 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 quietly crying, wow. I ended up crying quietly in the dark for hours. 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're still a fucking amateur, I told myself. I decided I would never be an amateur again.

And so then he talks about using pain as fuel. I was learning to utilize both the good and the bad points of my upbringing. Because of my strict parents, I was very disciplined. However, I didn't get certain things I needed as a child. And so he didn't get love and affection. And he felt his older brother was the favorite. And so he says, I didn't get love and affection. That made me hungry for achievement, for winning in other ways, for being the best, for being recognized.

If I had gotten everything I needed, meaning emotionally as a kid, and been well balanced, I wouldn't have had my drive. So as a result of this negative element in my upbringing, I had a positive drive towards success and recognition. I started training in an area where there were no distractions. That gave me enough time to concentrate. I don't know how many times he says that word in this book, concentrate, focus, concentrate. They gave me enough time to concentrate and find out what bodybuilding was really about. never was there any even the slightest doubt in my mind that I would make it and this helped me keep training and keep trying I was determined and constant I never wanted to pause or stop

training I trained 12 months of the year so most other bodybuilders at the time would take like a month or two off arnold went straight through the entire year with no let up most of the other bodybuilders didn't do that I sacrificed a lot of things most bodybuilders didn't want to give up I just didn't care. I wanted to win more than anything. And whatever it took, I did. And so even though he's winning a bunch of competitions, he has this peer group, these other bodybuilders,

and he realized he sees very different from even the other elite bodybuilders. He talks about this in his other autobiography that he wrote when he was a older man. Let me read some quotes from that book. It's an excellent book, by the way. It's called Total Recall. They couldn't handle working every day, lazy bastards.

I wanted to be rich very quickly. For me, work just meant discovery and fun. If I heard someone 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 found joy in the gym because every rep and every set was getting me one step closer to my goal. It would make me sick to miss a workout. I knew I couldn't look at myself in the mirror the next morning if I didn't do it.

I had a need to be the best in the world. There was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go and life was not normal. The whole idea of a conventional existence, of a conventional existence, was like kryptonite to me. The training was intense and time-consuming, and I took to it completely. Peter Thiel is one of my all-time favorite quotes. It's in his book, Zero to One.

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over again he is brainwashing himself with these positive mantras i've seen this a million times in these biographies by the way you are a winner arnold i wrote this down and put it everywhere where i would see it i've repeated it a dozen times a day so i have a crazy story for you that i got to tell you about real quick there's this guy named todd graves i did an episode of founders on him. The episode winds up getting back to Todd Graves. He listens to it, starts listening to Founders. Todd Graves is the founder of Raising Cains. He owns over 90% of this business. He's been working on it for 30 years. He has ground himself to a net worth of excess of $20 billion selling chicken fingers. I got to spend four and a half hours with Todd. He was a guest on my new show. I assume you already

know this, but I launched a new show in addition to founders. It's called David Senator. If you're not already following it, please just search wherever you're listening to this. Follow that. show instead of me just sitting here going through biographies, I actually have long-form conversations of some of the greatest living founders. Me and Todd speak two hours on the podcast. You can watch that episode. I highly recommend you do. Then we spend two and a half hours after that talking. We shot that episode in the very first Raising Cains that Todd built with his own hands 30 years ago. He lived in a shitty little apartment behind the store. So he'd work all the time to exhaustion, go try to crash in the apartment, but would peek out the window and when there'd be like a backup in the drive in the

drive-thru, he'd like run from his apartment and go back to work. But what he did was crazy. Much later, he buys the entire apartment building. It's kind of like this like crappy little two two-story duplex. And then he rebuilt the apartment that he lived in when he started the company to the exact specification of what it was when he was 23, 30 years ago. I'm talking the pictures in there are pictures of him at that age. All the technology. It's the TV he had. The VCR. There's, you know, there's no technology. It's the early 90s. The bedspread is the same. It was a two-bedroom apartment. One bedroom he slept in. The other bedroom is the office. You go in the office. Of course, you see these like old school computers. You see a fax machine. But more important than that,

you see these printed out positive affirmations that he has over the entire room. He was literally brainwashing himself not to give up, brainwashing himself to believe in himself. He says stuff like nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically. A man of passion rides a mad horse. There was like a dozen of these things. Arnold is doing the exact same thing in the 1970s. The mind is a powerful place which you feed it affects you in a powerful way. And this is the end result.

He winds up winning Mr. Universe 19. I looked out at the audience. They were screaming. I was caught up in the strange, unreal splendor of it. I thought, this is what you have been training for, this moment. There's just no way I could take it all in. It was like confronting something impossible to lift. I tried to realize what it meant.

What is happening to you right now, now I told myself, is the most important moment in your life. It was what I had meant when I made up my mind at the age of 10 to be the greatest person in one field. I was 20 years old and I was already the greatest and the best. I repeated it over to myself. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Universe, 1967. Steve Jobs has the best advice when somebody asks,

like, what do you do when you accomplish something? It's like, well, you make something wonderful and then you just go and do it again. And Arnold, like anybody great, is not going to wrestle on their laurels, not going to sleep on their wind. So he says, I set myself a schedule to train straight through the entire year again. I began blasting my body in the gym,

going early in the morning, staying late at night, doing some ferocious work. I asked myself over and over again, what can you do to be special and different? So once a week, I took a training partner and we drove out into the country with our weight. So he does this crazy, almost like gladiator kind of workouts in the forest. He's going to do this like naked too.

He says, we limited ourselves to one exercise for a particular body part. I remember the first day we carried 250 pounds out into the forest and we did squats for three hours straight. We ended up doing something like 55 sets of squats each. The last hour seemed endless, but it worked. Our thighs pumped up like balloons. That first day, we gave our thigh muscles such a shock that we couldn't walk right for a week. We could barely crawl.

Our legs had never experienced anything as tough as those 55 sets. We made it a regular thing. We brought girls out there to cook. We made a fire outdoors. We worked hard, but we had a good time. After the muscle shocking sessions, we drank wine and beer and got drunk and carried on like old-time weightlifters back in the 1800s. It became pure insanity.

We cooked, sat around the fire, and made love. We got into this trip that we were gladiators, male animals. We swam naked out in nature and had all this food, wine, and women. We ate like animals and acted like animals. We got off on it so much, it became a weekly routine, eating fresh meat and drinking wine and exercising. It's important that you like what you do and we loved it. We had fun, but we also.

We also did astonishing workouts. We did torturous workouts in the fresh air. We challenged each other. We experienced a lot of pain. I knew pain could become pleasure. We were benefiting from pain. We were breaking through the pain barrier and shocking the muscle. We looked at this pain as a positive thing because we grew.

It was a fantastic feeling to gain size from pain. All of the sudden I was looking forward to it as something pleasurable. I learned about things like the split routine, the shock method, breaking through the pain barrier, all for practical reasons. I wanted bigger, better muscles. None of this came from other bodybuilders. They were all my own ideas, completely original methods designed by me for my body. And then he goes back to training his mind, the importance of concentration and focus. This is the thing he repeats by far the most times.

The point is I was learning more and more about the mind, about the power it has over the body. He talks about his competitors. They weren't mentally prepared for intensive championship training. They weren't thinking about it. I knew the secret. Concentrate while you're training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind. When I went to the gym, I got rid of every alien thought in my mind.

I knew that if I went in and I was concerned about bills or girls or let myself think about any other thing, I'd only make marginal progress. It was then that I started seriously analyzing what happens to the body when the mind is tuned in. how important a positive attitude is. I began looking at the difference between me and other bodybuilders. The biggest difference was that most bodybuilders did not think I'm going to be a winner. They never allowed themselves to think in those terms. I would hear them complaining while they were training. Oh, no, not another set.

Most of the people I observed couldn't make astonishing advances because they never had faith in themselves. They had a hazy picture of what they wanted to look like someday, but they doubted they could realize it. That destroyed them. It has always been my belief that if you're training for nothing, you're wasting your effort. Ultimately, they didn't put out the kind of effort I did

because they didn't feel they had a chance to make it. And of course, starting with that premise, they didn't. It is in the mind. You talk yourself into it. You tell yourself you're going to be the best. The year 1968 was intense. I worked out two and three hours at a stretch twice a day. I enrolled in business school.

If I wasn't training or taking care of the gym, I was in class studying. I was insatiable. I was unstoppable. My friends were shaking their heads. Arnold, you're crazy. You're going to burn yourself out. Slow down. I laughed at them and then pushed myself harder.

And one of the things about him training the mind that I think is really important is his, again, he's just like focus on, he's completely present. He's in the moment and he realized that his other competitors and his peers could not do that. So he gives an example. One of the people he's training with says, I wish we didn't have five more sets to do. And Arnold's reply is, we just have the one rep that we're on. So do it. And so the mecca of bodybuilding is happening in Venice, California. So, of course, Arnold gets there.

He continues to compete. When he gets to America, he actually decides that he meets this girl that's really special to him. Before he said he essentially just used women for sex. He's very open and honest. He talks a lot about that in the book. but he had deep feelings for this woman named Barbara. She actually writes this book that I read many years later. I think it's like episode 309 of Founders.

I think I titled the episode something like Arnold before he was successful because it's all about how he was between the age of like 21 and 26. And I think reading her description of him at this time, again, like all his success, the vast majority of his success is just decades into the future. So let me just read a couple quotes from that book. And then he talks about her in this book too. But she says Arnold was not a man of many surprises. He was clear in his focus, firm in his decisions, and egocentric at all costs.

No one could restrain his mutinous energy. This man was masterful in plotting the necessary actions to carry out his great feats. He fulfilled almost every competitive and financial craving. He was the most goal-oriented man I had ever met. He always sought out those with brains worth examining. His intelligence did not show on report cards, yet he mastered his goal. goals like a wizard. And so this is how Arnold describes the end of this six-year relationship.

A conflict grew in our relationship. She was a well-balanced woman who wanted an ordinary life, and I was not a well-balanced man and hated the very idea of ordinary life. She thought I would settle down, that I would reach the top in my field and then level off. But that's a concept that has no place in my thinking. For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead.

head to go up to achieve to conquer i wanted to grow i wanted to go on the life she wanted wouldn't permit that and so he breaks up with her and so that observation that his girlfriend had that you know arnold in his early 20s was the most goal-oriented man i ever met he talks about this he goes i always wrote down my goals i had to make it very specific so 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. Nothing was going to distract me from my goal.

No offer, no relationship, nothing. I decided that the best course for independence was to mind my own business and make my own money. And to me, that's a simple genius of Arnold, just realizing that these principles that he learned and that he succeeded with could be applied to anything, and that is how the book ends. working in the same way I had to build my body, I wanted to create an empire. Because of my business education and the practical aspects of the business that I had learned, I felt that I was equipped to go ahead with my own enterprises. I established a series of mail-order training courses,

which enabled me to help educate thousands of bodybuilders all over the world. I sold photo albums, t-shirts, posing trunks, personalized programs. I worked out seminars all over the world, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Finland, Spain, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. I began promoting bodybuilding competitions in America. In order to keep up my name and make it grow, I continued to defend my titles. Eventually, I wanted every single person who touched a weight to equate the feeling of the barbell with my name. The moment he got a hold of it, I wanted him to think, Arnold.

I think the most important things I developed through bodybuilding were my personality, confidence, and character. When I was young, I suffered from the same insecurity every kid has, but as I transformed myself into something strong and unique, discovering I could do one thing well, confidence came to me naturally, and that gave me a great deal of security. I've come to realize that almost anything difficult, any challenge takes time, patience, and hard work, like building up for a 300-pound bench press. Learning that gave me plenty of positive energy to use later on. I'm a I taught myself discipline. I could apply that discipline to everyday life.

I use it in acting in going to school. And keep in mind, in acting, his first big break in acting. Remember, he winds up becoming the highest paid actor in his field at one time. But his first big break doesn't happen for another half a decade after he's writing these words. I used it in acting and going to school. Whenever I didn't want to study, I would just think back and remember what it took to be Mr. Universe, the sacrifice, the hard work, and I would plunge myself into studying. I can apply my success to everything.

With acting, now I am determined to work as hard on removing my accent as I was on improving my poor calves. The same with business. I'm so determined to make millions of dollars that I cannot fail. In my mind, I've already made the millions. Now it's just a matter of going through the motions.