Have 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.
The happiest and most successful people in the world do everything in their power to avoid bad decisions that confuse matters and drag them away from their goals. Instead, they focus on making choices that bring clarity to their vision and bring them closer to achieving it. It doesn’t matter if they’re considering a small thing or a huge thing, the decision-making process is always the same.
The only difference between them and us, between me and you, between any two people, is the clarity of the picture we have for our future, the strength of our plan to get there, and whether or not we have accepted that the choice to make that vision a reality is ours and ours alone.
So how do we do that? How do we create a clear vision from scratch? Arnold thinks there are two ways to do it. You can start small and build out until a big, clear picture reveals itself to you. Or you can start very broad and then, like the lens on a camera, zoom in until a clear picture snaps into focus. Elite athletes understand this. They are masters of visualizing their goals.
The Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps was famous, all the way back as a teenager, for visualizing his split times down to the tenth of a second during training and nailing them lap after lap. Before every single shot, the Australian golfer Jason Day steps back behind his ball, closes his eyes, and visualizes his approach—from his address, to his backswing, all the way through contact, and picturing the ball hitting where he’s aimed. During his multiple world championship seasons, the German Formula One driver Sebastian Vettel was known for sitting in his car before qualifying sessions with his eyes closed visualizing every turn, every gear shift, every acceleration and braking zone.
Bodybuilders, dancers know. You can’t grow unless you watch yourself do the work. You can’t get better unless you judge your effort against what you know it should look like, in your heart and in your mind. To give the performance of a lifetime, to achieve any kind of vision, no matter how insane or impossible, you need to be able to see what the world sees when they’re watching you try to achieve it. That doesn’t mean conforming to the world’s expectations, it means not being afraid to stand in front of the mirror, look yourself in the eyes, and really see.
Never Think Small
If you are the first person in your family to go to college, don’t just go to get drunk and walk out of there with a piece of paper. Dream of learning something that will change your life. Dream of really bettering yourself. Dream of the dean’s list, not just of the diploma. If you want to be a police officer, don’t just aim for your badge or your pension, aim for the captain’s bars. Aim to do good and to be an example for others.
If you’re going to do it, do it. Not just because going all in might be the thing that guarantees your success, but because not going all in will absolutely guarantee that you fall short. And it’s not just you who will suffer as a result. It’s like that cheesy motivational saying: Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll end up among the stars! Setting aside that whoever came up with it never took an astronomy class, the point is that if you aim for a big goal and give it your all and you come up short, that’s OK because you’ve still probably done something pretty impressive: graduated college, become a police officer or a mechanic or a parent, and so on.
But the flip side of that is also true, and perhaps more important. If you only aim for the smaller goal, the big goal is automatically out of reach, in part because you are no longer motivated to truly go all in and focus on all the little things that make the difference between greatness and good enough.
Work Your Ass Off
If there is one unavoidable truth in this world, it’s that there is no substitute for putting in the work. There is no shortcut or growth hack or magic pill that can get you around the hard work of doing your job well, of winning something you care about, or of making your dreams come true. People have tried to cut corners and skip steps in this process for as long as hard work has been hard. Eventually, those people either fall behind or get left in our dust, because working your ass off is the only thing that works 100 percent of the time for 100 percent of the things worth achieving.
Take something that most of us can relate to: becoming wealthy. It’s pretty remarkable when you realize that some of the least happy people you’ll ever meet are lottery winners and people with old family money. 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. And they definitely didn’t get to reap the rewards from successfully applying those lessons to their dream.
Arnold says, from his earliest bodybuilding days, putting in the work has always meant repetitions. Not just doing reps, but tracking them. The whole point of doing lots of reps is to give you a base that makes you stronger and more resistant to silly, unfortunate mistakes, whatever that means for you. The goal is to increase the load you’re able to handle so that when it’s time to do the work that matters—the stuff that people see and remember—you don’t have to think about whether you can do it. You just do it.
It’s why in firearms training they say “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” It’s why first responder types, like paramedics and firefighters, train obsessively and practice the fundamentals of their jobs over and over again until it becomes second nature for them. It’s so that when the shit hits the fan and the unexpected happens—which it always does—they don’t have to think about the run-of-the-mill, life-saving parts of their work, and they can use that little bit of extra mental space to deal with the situations they’ve never seen before without wasting precious seconds.
Sell, Sell, Sell
You are your first customer, when you really think about it. The purpose of getting crystal clear on your vision and thinking about how it’s going to happen is to sell yourself on the possibility of your own dream. But eventually you need to sell the world on it too. One of the easiest, most authentic ways to start selling it is to speak your inner voice out loud so others can hear it. All those things you tell yourself about what you’re going to achieve, you should start saying to other people.
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 do this all the time in political campaign rallies. It’s not “Please welcome to the stage, the man who will be the next governor of California . . .” It’s always “Please welcome to the stage, the next governor of California . . .”
Saying things this way is very powerful for two reasons: First, it presents your vision to the world as if it were real, which puts you in the position of having to work hard right now to make it true. Second, in cases where you need other people to believe in your vision for it to reach the highest heights, making it sound like it’s already gotten there is the ultimate marketing. To the people who want to be part of your company, or your movement, or whatever it is, giving them the sense that the dream has come true is like a call to arms.
A good salesman knows that the key to making a sale and creating a customer for life is to give the customer more than they expected and leave them feeling like they’re always getting the better end of the deal. When it’s you that you’re selling, the best way to exceed expectations every time is to keep those expectations low for as long as possible. Or maybe a better way to put it is that you shouldn’t be afraid to let your customer hold on to their low expectations, because then it’s that much easier for you to blow them away and sell them on what you have to offer.
Shift Gears
Failure is actually the beginning of measurable success, because failure is only possible in situations where you’ve tried to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. You can’t fail when you don’t try. In that sense, failure is kind of like a progress report on your path to purpose. It shows you how far you’ve come, and it reminds you how far you still have to go and what you have to work on to get there. It’s an opportunity to learn from your mistakes, to evolve your approach, and to come back better than ever.
The beauty of weight lifting is that failure is baked into the practice. The whole goal in weight lifting is to work your muscles to failure, which we sometimes forget. When you can’t squeeze out that last rep or lock out those elbows before dropping the weight, it’s not uncommon to feel a flash of frustration, but then you have to remember that your failure on that particular lift doesn’t mean you’ve lost somehow. It actually means that your workout was a good one, that your muscles were fully fatigued. It means you did the work.
In the gym, failure doesn’t equal defeat, it equals success. It’s one of the reasons Arnold always been comfortable pushing the limits in everything he does. When failure is a positive part of the game you play, it’s much less scary to search for the limits of your ability—whether that’s speaking English, acting in big movies, or tackling big social problems—and then once you’ve found those limits, to grow beyond them. The only way to do that, though, is to constantly test yourself in a manner that risks repeated failure.
As you think about this thing you want to do, or the mark you want to make in this world, remember that your job is neither to avoid failure nor to seek it out. 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. Much like how those last painful reps in the gym are a signal that you’re one step closer to your goal, failure is a signal of which direction your next step should go.
This is why failure is worth the risk and important to embrace: it teaches you what doesn’t work and points you toward the things that do.
Shut Your Mouth, Open Your Mind
Having the patience and humility to listen well is an essential ingredient of curiosity, and it’s the secret to learning. Some of history’s wisest thinkers and philosophers have been preaching to us about this for thousands of years, with lines like “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” You see that idea pop up time and again throughout history. In the Bible: “Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak.” In the words of the Dalai Lama: “When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.” Ernest Hemingway said, “When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” The late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “I’m a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.”
These are all just different ways of saying that you don’t know as much as you think you do, so shut your mouth and open your mind. Being curious and being a good listener are a big part of how to effectively utilize your relationships with other people in pursuit of your goals. I don’t mean that in a manipulative way, only practically. When it comes down to it, people are resources. But it’s only when you learn to soak up what those people tell you—not just let it go in one ear, out the other—that you truly begin to make yourself useful to others and become a resource yourself.
The world needs more sponges. It needs more smart, hopeful, driven, useful people with vision. It needs people who can dream up the world of tomorrow, which only happens when people are first able to soak up the knowledge of the world from today.
Break Your Mirrors
Hollywood is full of very insecure actors who, when they aren’t given the right guidance or support by their inner circle, will turn a movie into a zero-sum game. They will try to dominate every scene they’re in, to get more screen time than their costars, and to blow other actors off the screen. They think this is what great actors do. That this is how you become a star or win awards. The reality is, that kind of personal ambition and me-first behavior makes movies worse. It makes them awkward, and it affects the viewing experience in a negative way.
But when actors help one another in their scenes, when they set one another up, when they make space for one another to have great moments and memorable performances, that’s when movies go from good to great, and they connect more deeply with audiences. That’s when they become successful. And having a successful movie means the actors who were in it are more likely to get offers for other, bigger movies that are more lucrative than the movie they just did together.
You end up saying to yourself things like, “Who am I? I’m just a nobody trying to get by.” Or “What can I do? I don’t have any special skills.” Or “What do I have to offer? I’m not rich and famous like these other people.”
The first thing to realize is that at the simplest, most basic level, you don’t have to rearrange your life to help other people. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open and be engaged with the world around you. When you see someone struggling—with a bag of groceries or a difficult emotion—stop and give them a hand or a hug. If a friend you haven’t talked to for years calls in the middle of the night, answer the phone. If there is someone who looks like they might need help, answer the call, whether they asked for help or not.
The second thing to realize is that you have more to offer than you know. Do you speak a foreign language? Are you good at math? Do you know how to read? You could tutor middle-school kids once a week at an after-school program near your house. You could read to elementary school kids at the local library or to patients at the children’s hospital. Do you have a reliable car or van? You could deliver meals to the elderly or drive residents at assisted living facilities to their physical therapy appointments
It doesn’t matter how young or old you are, how much or how little you have, how much you’ve done or how much you have left to do. In every case, giving more will get you more. Want to help yourself? Help others. Learn to start from that place, and that is how you will become the most useful version of yourself—to your family, to your friends, to your community, to your nation . . . and to the world.