Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

It’s the struggle that makes success, when you achieve it, taste so sweet.

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.

But the value of vision can only be redeemed by good execution.

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.

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.

compounding results and habit stacking.

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

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.

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.”

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.

For whatever reason, they’re much more at ease with people who can accept without questioning that there is simply a way things have always been done.

Maybe this comes from some of our survival instincts. Most of the time, you can endure hunger, but fear of the unknown is hard to overcome.

When you’ve fought for something you believe in and you’ve triumphed—when you’ve helped to literally save the world—I imagine it’s easier to see the joy and possibility in new and beautiful things.