Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

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

They involve knowing where you want to go and how you’re going to get there, as well as having the willingness to do the work and the ability to communicate to the people you care about that the journey you want to bring them on is worth the effort. They include the capacity to shift gears when the journey hits a roadblock, and the ability to keep an open mind and learn from your surroundings to find new ways through. And most important of all, once you get where you’re trying to go, they demand that you acknowledge all the help you had along the way and that you give back accordingly.

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. They look in the mirror and they wonder, “How the hell did I get here?” but they don’t know. They’ve made so many decisions and taken so many actions that have landed them in this place, and yet they have no idea what any of them were. They’ll even argue with you: “I hate this, why would I have chosen it?” Except no one forced that ring on their finger or put that second cheeseburger in their hands. No one made them take that dead-end job. No one made them skip class, or miss workouts, or stop going to church. No one made them stay up late every night playing video games instead of getting eight hours of sleep. No one made them drink that last beer or spend their last dollar.

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 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.

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.

“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.

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

Let me tell you something: Nothing good has ever come from having a plan B. Nothing important or life-changing, anyway. Plan B is dangerous to every big dream. It is a plan for failure. If plan A is the road less traveled, if it’s you carving your own path toward the vision you’ve created for your life, then plan B is the path of least resistance.

Work works. That’s the bottom line. No matter what you do. No matter who you are.

I took acting classes, English and speech classes, accent removal classes (I still want my money back for those).

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. It’s the easy part.

We say, “I want to do this great, fantastic thing,” then we get the ball rolling, and we just expect it to keep rolling, simply because we want it to. As if hope and good intentions are worth anything.

I actually think it was the American country singer and sausage maker 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.”

Let me put it another way: busyness is bullshit. We’re all “busy.” We all have things to do every day. Obligations and responsibilities. We all have to eat, sleep, pay the bills. What does that have to do with putting in the work to reach your vision? If it matters to you, make the time.

When you’re chasing a vision and working toward a big goal, there is nothing more energizing than making progress.

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.

Nothing sells better than a true story from a genuine person. Especially when the story is about that person.

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.

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.

Being positive has made my life better, it’s that simple.

Nothing works up an appetite like bobbing up and down like a pogo stick on an empty stomach.

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.

Failure is inevitable in a lot of ways. But when it comes to achieving your vision, it isn’t failure you have to worry about, it’s giving up.

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.

Really, what do you have to lose?

And when we did talk, it was better to ask good questions than to make smart statements.

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.

Having the patience and humility to listen well is an essential ingredient of curiosity, and it’s the secret to learning.

The world needs more sponges.

Curiosity. Hunger for information. Being open-minded. Putting your knowledge to good use.

There is a lot of science that indicates the simple act of giving back significantly increases the happiness of the giver, and that the increase starts to happen almost immediately.

Helping others is a simple practice that requires nothing more than awareness, willingness, and a little bit of effort.

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.