Lessons from the week (26 Nov 2023)
Be Useful: Seven tools for life by Arnold Schwarzenegger
I have become a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Watching his Netflix documentary, listening to him speak on podcasts and reading his book has made me form a positive opinion on the man. His positiveness and relentless drive to achieve whatever you set your mind to is contagious. And according to him, it all starts with having a CLEAR VISION.
Vision is the most important thing. Vision is purpose and meaning. To have a clear vision is to have a picture of what you want your life to look like and a plan for how to get there. The people who feel most lost have neither of those. They don’t have the picture or the plan.
Does the picture you have in your mind of your ideal future get blurrier or sharper because of this thing you’re about to do?
He then talks about either having a broad vision and then zooming in to the specifics or having a narrow vision and zooming out. In either case it is the daily progress which builds momentum which then gets you closer to the picture in your mind.
When you’re chasing a vision and working toward a big goal, there is nothing more energizing than making progress.
The other thing Arnold focuses attention on is actually creating space and time in your life to find inspiration. This actually requires putting your devices away to wander. Let your mind just flow from one thought to another. That is where discovery happens.
Many of history’s greatest thinkers, leaders, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs found some of their greatest inspiration going for walks. The writer Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
A 2014 study by researchers at Stanford University showed that walking increased the creative thinking of 100 percent of the study participants who were asked to walk while completing a series of creative tasks.
Once you have a Vision, Arnold says that you should REALLY SEE IT.
“What you can ‘see’ you can ‘be,’” as the sports psychologist Don Macpherson has famously said. You need to be able to see what you want to achieve before you do it, not as you do it. That’s the difference.
You have to make sure that the person looking back at you [in the mirror] is the same one you see when you close your eyes and visualize the person you are trying to become. You need to know whether or not your vision aligns with the reality of your choices.
Arnold then gives you good reasons for NEVER THINKING SMALL.
It’s no harder to think big than it is to think small. The only hard part is giving yourself permission to think that way.
He compels us to Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll end up among the stars! That is because if you only aim for the smaller goal, the big goal is automatically out of reach. And then he ends by highlighting one of my favorite quotes from Seneca:
“No man is more unhappy, than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”
IGNORING THE NAYSAYERS is a highlight reel of success despite rejections. I love it.
The author of Lord of the Flies was rejected by publishers 21 times. J. K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times. The great comic-book artist Todd McFarlane was rejected 350 times by different comic-book publishers. Andy Warhol gave the Museum of Modern Art one of his drawings for free, and they gave it back! The producers of The Godfather fired Francis Ford Coppola multiple times because they didn’t believe in his version of the story.
U2 and Madonna were both rejected by multiple record labels before they got their deals.
The founders of Airbnb were rejected by all seven investors they pitched when they first tried to raise money.
Steve Jobs got fired from his own company. Walt Disney’s first animation company went bankrupt. Netflix tried to sell to Blockbuster for $50 million, and the Blockbuster folks laughed them out of the room.
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, got rejected from Harvard ten times, and at one point couldn’t even get a job at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The one thing all these brilliant people have in common is that in the face of doubt and skepticism, they kept going.
I welcomed their doubts. I wanted to hear them laugh when I said that I wanted to be an actor. It fueled me. I needed it. I was going to need all the motivation I could find to overcome the resistance of these naysayers who were in positions of power or influence and stood in my way.
NO PLAN B
Once you know that path is there, once you’ve accepted that it’s an option, it becomes so, so easy to take it whenever things get difficult. Fuck plan B!
This advice had me scratching my head a little. I don't think I would do well if someone has a gun pointed at my head on a cliff and asked me to perform. That would just be too much stress. But then I looked at Arnolds life. He actually became a millionaire before he ever became an actor. The way he did it was by owning real estate. That real estate allowed him to look after the basics and then pursue his Vision with full force. It is also why he could say NO to shitty roles which did not align with his Vision of being a leading star in Hollywood. He didn't need the fucking money. So he could work day and night to make his dreams come true.
So NO PLAN B does not mean that you are broke and hungry till your Vision comes true. NO PLAN B means that you should do whatever you need to do to survive, so that all the rest of your waking hours can go towards making your Vision a reality. In other words, don't have two Visions. Have ONE that you live and die for.
THERE IS NO END POINT
After cofounding PayPal and revolutionizing online banking, Elon Musk didn’t take his money and go home. He founded SpaceX and revolutionized space travel, then he joined Tesla and helped revolutionize electric cars.
The music world is full of one-hit wonders. There are plenty of writers who had only one great book in them, or directors who had only one great film. But they never stop working or dreaming. They never say, “I made it, my work here is done.”
People who think big and succeed almost always continue to push and to strive and to dream bigger.
WORK YOUR ASS OFF
This chapter is my favorite because he points out how good it feels to make your own money. There is no better joy than earning the fruits of your labor. All the money I have made, I have earned. I feel proud of myself because of it. If the same money was given to me, I would not understand the value of it because I would not have had to work for it.
By some estimates, 70 percent of lottery winners go broke within five years. Among the generationally wealthy, rates of depression, suicide, and alcohol and drug abuse all tend to be higher than for the middle class or the people who worked hard to build their fortunes. There are a lot of reasons this is the case, but a big one is the fact that new-money lotto winners and old-money rich people never got any of the benefits that come from working toward a big goal.
They never got to experience how good it feels to make money; they only know what it’s like to have it. They never got to learn the important lessons that struggle and failure produce.
If you don’t get to experience what it feels like to push yourself, to do more than you thought you were capable of, and to know that the pain you put yourself through will lead to growth that you alone are responsible for creating, then you will never appreciate what you have the way that same thing is appreciated by someone who earned it, who worked for it.
Work works. That’s the bottom line. No matter what you do. No matter who you are. My entire life has been shaped by that single idea.
REPS, REPS, REPS
The purpose is to be prepared.
I knew once I got to ten reps I could do a decent job delivering the speech, but twenty reps meant I could knock it out of the park. The words would feel more natural, like I was speaking off the cuff and from the heart. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a dead lift, a press conference, or a run-through of an entire speech. You need to be all there, all in, every time.
They are able to blow our minds when the lights go on because they’ve done all the shitty, hard work when no one was watching.
SELL, SELL, SELL
You have to communicate and promote so that people know it exists. So they know what it’s all about and why they should care. In other words, you need to sell it. No one is better equipped or motivated than you to sell your vision to the world. It’s your job to sell them on this vision.
Obviously you don’t need their approval to pursue your dream, and you shouldn’t let it stop you if their approval doesn’t come, but if you can sell them it’s always better to have more people in your corner.
It’s not “I will be a great bodybuilder.” It’s “I can see myself as a great bodybuilder.”
It’s not “I will be a leading man.” It’s “I can picture myself as a leading man.”
They didn’t say, “Bodybuilding will be a huge sport one day.” They said, “Bodybuilding is a huge sport.”
There is a motivational saying I love: “See it. Believe it. Achieve it.” But I think it’s missing a step in between: Explain it.
REFRAME
The way you do this, Jim taught me, is to listen to the question being asked and then to start your response by accepting the premise of the question in order to establish common ground with your questioner. Once you’ve made them feel a little more comfortable by doing that, then you immediately pivot to reframe the question and say whatever you want. Here, I’ll show you.
“Arnold, you’ve never run for office before at any level. What makes you think you’re equipped to run the biggest state in the country?” “That’s a great question, but you know a better question is how can the greatest state in the country afford to continue down this road with the same kind of politicians who got us into this mess in the first place?”
AMOR FATI
I owe a lot to my upbringing. I was made for it and made by it. I wouldn’t be who I am today without each one of those experiences. The Stoics have a term for this: amor fati. Love of fate.
“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to,” the great Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus said. “Rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens. Then you will be happy.”
Nietzsche talks about this too. He says, “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary … but love it.”
FAILURE VS QUITTING
When it comes to achieving your vision, it isn’t failure you have to worry about, it’s giving up. Failure has never killed a dream; quitting kills every dream it touches.
No one who has set a world record, or started a successful business, or set the high score on a video game, or done anything difficult at all that they cared about, has been a quitter. They got to where they are on the back of numerous failures.
Take someone like the chemist who invented the lubricant spray WD-40. The full name of WD-40 is “Water Displacement, 40th Formula.” It was called that in the chemist’s lab book because his previous thirty-nine versions of the formula failed. He learned from each one of those failures and nailed it on the fortieth try.
When one of his assistants commented that it was a shame they hadn’t produced any promising results, Edison said, “Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
Your job is to bust your ass in pursuit of your vision—yours and nobody else’s—and to embrace the failure that is bound to come.
When you’re chasing a big vision, you have to expect that you’ll face resistance. People who lack vision are threatened by those who have it.
WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO LOSE?
The real question when it comes to thinking about risk: What do you have to lose? The reason my risk tolerance has always been very high, and therefore why I’ve done so many things that people thought were unlikely or impossible, is because for most of my early life I didn’t have a lot to lose.
If I lost or failed, I didn’t complain. Instead, I used it as a learning experience. I went back to the gym or to the drawing board or to the briefing books, and I did the work to get better and smarter and to come back stronger the next time.
BE CURIOUS
Curiosity has been a superpower for me. It’s magnetic. Simply by opening my mind to the wonders of the world around me, my curiosity has attracted many amazing opportunities to me.
Important, interesting, powerful people are drawn to those who ask good questions and listen well. When you’re curious and you’re humble enough to admit that you don’t know everything, people like that want to talk to you. They want to help you. Your curiosity and humility show them you don’t have too much of an ego to listen to them.
HELP OTHERS
In 2008, researchers at Harvard did an experiment where they gave one group of participants five dollars and another group twenty dollars and told them to either spend it on themselves or give it away. When the researchers followed up with participants at the end of the day, they found that the people who gave their money away reported having a much better day than those who kept their money.
And here’s the really interesting part: there was no meaningful difference in the level of increased happiness between the people who gave away five dollars compared to those who gave away twenty.
Which means it’s not about the amount that you give, it’s about the fact that you give at all. It’s the act of giving that produces the increased happiness.
In multiple studies over the last forty years, psychologists and neuroscientists have learned that giving back, whether through charitable donations or volunteering, releases oxytocin and endorphins. These are the same hormones your brain produces during sex and working out.
Giving back is also known to produce a neurochemical called vasopressin, which is associated with love. In fact, just thinking about or remembering moments of being charitable triggers the release of these same hormones. Social scientists have a name for this phenomenon: they call it “helper’s high.”
Want to help yourself? Help others.
*All the italic text above is from Be Useful: Seven tools for life by Arnold Schwarzenegger
Harsh Batra
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