Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

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.

That is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you, based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go. 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?

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.

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.

begin by looking back in time and thinking very broadly about the things you used to love. Your obsessions are a clue to your earliest vision for yourself, if only you had paid attention to them in the beginning.

Only you can create the life you want for yourself—no one is going to do it for you. If you don’t know what that life looks like yet, for whatever reason, that’s fine. We’re here now. The choices you make from here on out are what matters.

First, create little goals for yourself. Don’t worry about the big, broad stuff for now. Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time.

Start doing things you like to do or that make you proud of yourself for having completed them. Do those things every day with a little goal attached to them, and then notice how doing that changes what you pay attention to.

Once you’ve developed a rhythm with those little daily goals, create weekly and then monthly goals. Instead of zooming in from a broad place, build out your life from this small beginning and let your vision open up in front of you from there. As it does, and the sense of uselessness starts to loosen its grip, that’s when you take the second step: put the machines away and create space and time in your life, however small or short in the beginning, for inspiration to find its way in and for the discovery process to happen.

Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

Going for a walk helped them change their routines and their habits; it helped them shake loose solutions to tricky problems; it helped them to process trauma and make big life decisions.

If you are stuck, if you are struggling to figure out a clear vision for the life you want, then all I care about is that you make little goals for yourself to start building momentum and that you create time and space every day to think, to daydream, to look around, to be present in the world, to let inspiration and ideas in. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, at least give it a chance to find you.

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.

If you can’t fully see your vision—if you can’t picture what success is and what it isn’t—it becomes very hard to assess opportunities and challenges like this.

You have to make sure that the person looking back at you 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.

Life isn’t just the high points or the big moments. It’s not just the stuff that ends up seared into people’s memory banks or recorded in photos that are confined to scrapbooks. Life is also those stretches of time in between. Life happens as much in the transitions as it does in the poses. It’s all one long performance, and the greater the impact you want that performance to have, the more important each one of those little moments becomes.

In German, we have a saying: Wenn schon, denn schon. Roughly translated, it means “If you’re going to do something, DO IT. Go all out.”

If your greatest wish in life is to be a parent, don’t just pay for things or think that providing is your only job. Be a great role model who raises healthy, loving kids who go out into the world and do great things themselves.

What I’m saying is, 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.

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.

Regardless of the size of your dream, if you don’t push yourself, if you don’t give it your all, if you don’t cut the legs off your sweatpants when the situation calls for it, then you’re only letting yourself down.

“No man is more unhappy,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”

There will always be people in your life who doubt you and doubt your dream. They will tell you it’s impossible. That you can’t do it or that it can’t be done.

Naysayers are a fact of life. That doesn’t mean they get to have a say in your life.

When it comes to you and your dreams, the naysayers have no idea what they’re talking about. And if they haven’t done any of the things that you’re trying to do, the question you need to ask yourself is: Why should I ever listen to them? The answer is, you shouldn’t. You should ignore them. Or better yet, hear what they have to say and then use it as motivation.

When you reach the mountaintop, it gives you a brand new perspective on the rest of the world, on the rest of your life. You see new challenges that were out of sight before, and you see old challenges in new ways. With this huge victory now under your belt, they all become conquerable.

Why aim for the middle? Why settle for “good enough” before you’ve even done the work to see what you are capable of? What do you have to lose? It’s not like dreaming up a big vision takes more energy than dreaming up a small one.

How big you dream, whether you give it your all, or whether you give in at the first sign of trouble—these things matter.

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.

The purpose of all this hard work—all the reps, all the pain, all the follow-through, all the long hours—was the same in every phase of my career. It’s the same for anything special you could ever want to do with your life,

The purpose is to be prepared. It’s to be ready to perform when the spotlight turns on, when opportunity knocks, when the cameras roll, when a crisis arrives. There is value and meaning in doing hard work for its own sake, don’t get me wrong, but the real reason is so that when the moment arrives for your dream to come true and for your vision to become real . . . you don’t flinch and you don’t falter.

The key is, they have to be good reps. Not lazy, distracted, arched-back, noodle-arm, bullshit reps. You have to use proper form. You have to complete the entire exercise. You have to give maximum effort. Remember, wenn schon, denn schon!

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

This is where we need to get to. This is what we have to do. We have to embrace the boring stuff. We have to nail the fundamentals. We have to do them right and we have to do them often. This is the only way we can build that strong base and all that muscle memory, so that performing when it counts isn’t a question.

To do great things that last, sacrifices are necessary.

Pain isn’t just an indicator of sacrifice, though, it’s also a measure of growth potential.

These are just different ways of trying to tell you that if you want to grow, or you want to be great, it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to hurt a little bit. Or a lot.

Nothing builds character like resilience or perseverance through pain. Nothing destroys character like succumbing to pain and quitting.

The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami once wrote, “I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.”

a lack of follow-through at any moment can cause you to lose a match or lose potential gains, just like it can cause you to lose out in life. It’s an indication that you’re not committing fully, that you’re not going all out, that you’re just going through the motions.

Jimmy Dean who nailed it. He said, “Do what you say you’re going to do, and try to do it a little better than you said you would.”

busyness is bullshit.

If it matters to you, make the time.

Whether it’s a matter of getting into flow state or not, what every person who gets shit done has in common is that they either find the time, make the time, or turn the time they do have into what it needs to be for them to accomplish the task in front of them.

After all this stuff in a typical daily life is accounted for, there are still two hours left in the day to make progress toward your vision.

Turn your TV off. Throw your machines out the window. Save your excuses for someone who cares. Get to work.

No matter the size of your dream, you have to know how to sell it and who to sell it to.

Selling your vision means being open about what you’re trying to achieve and telling your story in such a way that it is perceived in the most positive light possible by the people you need or want to get a yes from. Your customers, in other words.

If you take the time to understand your own environment, it can be just as obvious for you too. The people you need to sell will make themselves known to you, and you can put your focus on them.

They aren’t naysayers in the traditional sense, they’re just scared—for you and for themselves. Your job is to sell them on your vision in order to reassure them and to move them from a potential no to ideally a yes, but at least an OK.