Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

I can already hear the question coming from a bunch of you: What about time for rest and relaxation? First of all, rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people.

I don’t shy away from responsibility. I own who I am and the things I do—my successes and my failures.

But more importantly, I have a rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don’t come to the table with a potential solution, I don’t want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn’t be that bad if it hasn’t motivated you to try to fix it.

And when exactly has complaining ever gotten someone closer to achieving their goals? You work to make a dream come true, you don’t whine it into existence. Plus, problems and adversity are a normal part of every person’s journey. Whatever your vision is, there is going to be struggle. Tough times. Things that bug the shit out of you. You have to learn how to manage those moments. You have to get good at shifting gears and finding the positive in things. You have to know how to reframe the failure you experience and understand the risks you’re undertaking. Confronting problems instead of complaining about them gives you the chance to practice all these skills.

Only fairly recently have social scientists really understood why we seem to respond to negative things more strongly than we do to positive things. We click on negative images and news stories more than positive ones. We focus more energy worrying about negative outcomes than hoping for positive results. We even have more words to describe our negative emotions than we do for our positive emotions. There’s a name for this phenomenon: it’s called “negativity bias,” and scientists tell us that it’s probably a kind of survival mechanism. Our ancestors who worried less about what could make them sick or kill them and focused more on pleasant experiences probably tended to get weeded out disproportionately, so over the last six million years of human evolution we have geared ourselves to be more sensitive to negative influences than to positive ones. We have many biases from our deep past that aren’t as useful as they once were, and this is no doubt one of them.

You can turn a negative situation into a positive experience. It all starts by catching yourself any time you start to complain, then talking yourself into switching gears and looking for the good in things. If you can choose joy over jealousy, happiness over hate, love over resentment, positivity over negativity, then you have the tools to make the best of any situation, even one that feels like failure.

“It’s how things have always been done.” When I hear those words, I see red. It bothers me when people use them to justify saying no to new things that they don’t understand. But what really pisses me off is when the people who are doing the new things being objected to accept that seven-word status quo and give up.

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. When you’re closed-minded, they know there’s no reason to waste their breath. What’s the point of trying to teach you something if you’re already so sure you’ve got it all figured out?