Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

But I learned in those last years of the 2000s that you can pass some of the most groundbreaking, cutting-edge policies that state government has ever seen and you’ll still feel like a total failure when a voter asks why you can’t keep them in their home, or a parent asks why you cut their kid’s school budget, or workers ask why they’ve been laid off.

my own social media channels started to grow, because anytime I used them to share my wisdom about urgent matters of the day or to offer a calm voice amid the chaos, those videos went even more viral. People really seemed to benefit from learning from me, the same way I benefited early in my career from reading about and meeting my idols, many of whom you will hear about in this book. So I leaned into that. I started spreading more and more positivity out in the world. And the more I spoke, the more people came up to me in the gym to tell me that I’d gotten them through a dark time.

It was fantastic. It was also surprising. I wasn’t sure why this was happening. So I did what I always do when I want to understand something. I stopped and analyzed the situation. What I noticed when I took a step back was that there was so much negativity and pessimism and self-pity out in the world. I also noticed that a lot of people were really miserable, despite the fact that experts keep telling us that things have never been better in the history of human civilization. There has never been less war, less disease, less poverty, less oppression than right now. This is what the data shows. It’s objectively true.

So many people talk about feeling irrelevant or invisible or hopeless. Young girls and women talk about not being good enough or pretty enough. Young men talk about being worthless or powerless. Incidents of suicide and rates of addiction are on the rise.

Things have gotten so bad out there in the culture that they are seeking out someone they can trust, someone who refuses to play the bullshit games, someone who tries to be ruthlessly positive when everyone else is being relentlessly negative. Those are the people I was bumping into at the gym every single day. And I felt a kinship with them because they were expressing a lot of the same emotions I felt after I left office in 2011 and things fell apart. I also noticed that when I offered them advice and encouragement, when I tried to inspire and reassure them and pump them up, I was pulling from a very familiar tool kit.

It was the very same one I reached for more than a decade ago now, when I hit bottom and decided to dig myself out of the hole. This tool kit is not revolutionary. If anything, it’s timeless. These tools have always worked. They always will work.

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.

everything good, all great change, starts with 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.

We always have a choice. What we don’t always have, unless we create it, is something to measure our choices against. 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.

How do we create a clear vision from scratch? I think 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. That’s how it was for me.

What I would learn, though, is that some of the strongest visions emerge like this. From our obsessions when we’re young, before our opinions about them have been affected by other people’s judgments of them. Talking about what to do when you’re dissatisfied with your life, the famous big wave surfer Garrett McNamara once said that you should “go back to when you were three, figure out what you loved doing, figure out how to make that your life, then make the road map and follow it.” He was describing the process for creating a vision, and I think he’s absolutely correct. It’s obviously not that easy, but it is that simple, and it can 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.

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. I know this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Life gets crowded and complicated as you get older. It can be hard to find space and time and not feel like you’re trading off some bigger set of responsibilities, especially now that you’ve got these little daily, weekly, and monthly goals that you’re crushing. And guess what, it is hard at first. But do you know what’s harder? Living a life you hate. That’s hard. This, by comparison, is a walk in the park.

The picture in my mind was so clear you could have put a frame around it and hung it on a wall. It was incredibly similar to the vision I would have in January 2021 in that way. I could see the desk. I could see what was on the desk. I could see what I was wearing. I could see where the cameras would go and where the lighting should be. I could see and feel the Conan sword in my hands. I could hear how my voice would rise and fall as I addressed the big problems we faced and outlined my solutions for them. Before I go any further, I recognize that this sounds like a lot of woo-woo manifestation mumbo jumbo, like The Secret and all those law of attraction books being peddled by bullshit artists. This isn’t that. I’m not saying if you just visualize what you want, then it will come true. Hell no. You have to plan and work and learn and fail and then learn and work and fail some more. That’s just life. Those are the rules. What I am saying is that if you want your vision to stick, if you want to increase the chances of success looking exactly like you hoped it would when you first figured out what you wanted your life to look like, then you need to get crystal clear on that vision and tattoo it to the inside of your eyelids. You need to SEE IT. Elite athletes understand this. They are masters of visualizing their goals.

what they do at a high level is incredibly difficult. Just to get into the elite ranks and be competitive takes an insane amount of effort and skill and practice. If you want to win, you need more than just ability and desire. You can’t hope your way into the winner’s circle. You need to see your way there.

“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.

Knowing what is and isn’t success brings crystal clarity to your vision. And with that clarity, I have found, comes a sense of calm, because almost every question becomes easier to answer.

The problem was that accepting his offer would prevent me from doing movies, which is where my vision was taking me by this point in my bodybuilding career. Knowing that made saying no very easy. I was comfortable with the idea of turning down all that money and the different type of fame the job would bring. I was calm, knowing that I’d just sidestepped something that was an amazing opportunity but also a big distraction.

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. It becomes next to impossible to know for certain if they’ll get you what you want or something close, and if “close” is good enough for you.

As uncomfortable as it can be, you have to look at yourself in the mirror every day in order to know where you stand. You have to check in with yourself if you want to be sure that you’re moving in the right direction. 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. You have to do this to avoid becoming lost and useless, obviously. But you also have to do it to avoid becoming a bad person.

The difference between the good ones and the bad ones is simple and obvious: it’s self-awareness and clarity of vision. The good ones know specifically what they are trying to achieve, and they’re disciplined about measuring their choices against that vision. They check in with themselves on a regular basis. Their vision changes as they change. It grows and evolves with them. The good ones aren’t afraid of the mirror. The bad ones—they avoid the mirror like the plague. Many of them let go of their vision a long time ago, and as a result the most superficial, self-centered version of the vision grabbed ahold of them and took them for a ride. They never did the work to clarify their goals or zoom in on what their world might actually look like in real life if they succeeded. They never felt the need to.

I spent my entire adult life looking in the mirror.

The twenty years before that, as a bodybuilder, the mirror was a literal mirror. I looked in the mirror every day. For hours. It was part of the job. The mirror was an essential tool. You can’t know if an exercise is working properly unless you watch yourself do it in the mirror. You can’t know if a muscle has achieved enough mass or enough definition until you flex in the mirror. You can’t know if you have all your moves down until you stand in front of the mirror and hit all your poses one after the other.

Onstage, the judges aren’t just watching you at the key moments when you’re fully flexed, when you’re at your best. “What you have to realize,” she said, “is that people are watching you all the time.” She was so right! The static poses might be what end up in photos in magazines. They might be how people who weren’t there will know about you. But the people in the room, the people who matter, will be watching and judging every aspect of how you move and how you transition between those key moments.

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.

Like 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.

the Hollywood system is full of naysayers. Their instinct would be to keep me in my lane, because that was the easiest thing for them to understand. Arnold is an action star, so send him scripts for more action movies. I couldn’t go to a bunch of executives and ask them to consider me for their next big studio comedy. If I wanted to star in a comedy, I would have to bring the project to them and make it impossible for them to say no. So that’s what we did.

where Jim really stands head and shoulders above the rest of us is his ability to go all in on his projects. He’s done it time and again. 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.” Jim is the embodiment of that saying.

I wasn’t going to be the kind of person who let that happen. I wasn’t going to let a small thing slide and risk it derailing my bigger vision.

This isn’t just how you should think about chasing your goals, it’s how you should craft them, too, no matter how big or small they are compared to other people’s.

Regardless of the size of your dream, if you don’t push yourself, if you don’t give it your all,

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.”

Naysayers are a fact of life. That doesn’t mean they get to have a say in your life. It’s not that they’re bad people. They’re just not very useful to someone like you. They’re scared of the unfamiliar and the unknown. They’re afraid of taking risks and putting themselves out there. They’ve never had the courage to do what you’re trying to do. They’ve never crafted a huge vision for the life they want and then put a plan together to make it a reality. They’ve never gone all in on anything. Do you know how I know this? Because if they had, they would never tell you to give up or that it can’t be done. No, they would have encouraged you, the way I am encouraging you now!

I didn’t get mad. I welcomed their doubts. I wanted to hear them laugh when I said that I wanted to be an actor. It fueled me. I needed it. For two reasons.

I needed their doubt and their laughter, because it worked for me. Growing up in Austria, all forms of motivation involved negative reinforcement. Everything, always negative, from the earliest days of childhood. One of the most popular books of German fairy tales when I was growing up, for example, was called Der Struwwelpeter. It contains ten fables about how misbehaving children can ruin everybody’s lives with horrific consequences. At Christmastime, when St. Nicholas visits your house to bring presents to all the good boys and girls, he comes with a demon-like figure called Krampus with huge horns, whose role is to punish all the bad kids and to scare them straight. In small villages like Thal, the dads would go to one another’s houses on the Feast of St. Nicholas wearing a Krampus mask and scare the shit out of one another’s kids. My Krampus was our downstairs neighbor. My father was the Krampus for a number of families in the village.

You have a choice with the naysayers you face on the road to achieving your goals. You can ignore them or you can use them, you just can’t ever believe them.

Fulfilling a dream gives you the power to see further and deeper—further out into the world toward what is possible, and deeper into yourself to what you are capable of. It’s why there are so few stories about people who have done something big then just packed their bags and moved to a private island never to be heard from again. People who think big and succeed almost always continue to push and to strive and to dream bigger. Think about the last time you did something difficult, that you were proud of. You didn’t stop doing stuff after that, did you? Of course not. That success gave you more confidence to do other things. New things. That’s how all the greats are. They may not succeed at the level of their greatest achievement. The music world is full of one-hit wonders. There are plenty of writers who had only one great book in them, or directors who had only one great film. But they never stop working or dreaming. They never say, “I made it, my work here is done.” As long as they are alive, they will be working to achieve the vision they have created for the life they want to live.

Thinking big and succeeding does something to us. It certainly did something to me. It became addictive, because I learned that the only limits that truly exist are in our minds. I realized that our potential is limitless—mine and yours! What’s just as powerful, I believe, is that other people realize their potential is limitless, too, when they watch someone like you or me bust through barriers and blaze new trails. When we think big and make our own dreams a reality, those dreams become real to them too.

Watching someone with a crazy goal give it everything they’ve got and then succeed is so powerful. It’s like magic, because it unlocks potential we didn’t even know we had. It shows us what is possible if we put our mind to something and then back that up with effort.

As a philanthropist, my focus has been on pollution in the environment. My goal is to help fix the earth. It’s just how I think. Big. I often wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t do everything that way. If I’d done things differently. If I’d dreamed smaller.

I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. A life of smaller dreams that I half-assed, doing some version of what everyone else does? That sounds like a slow death to me. I want no part of it, and neither should you.

It’s no harder to think big than it is to think small. The only hard part is giving yourself permission to think that way. Well, I don’t just give you permission, I demand it of you, because when you’re thinking about your goals and crafting that vision for your life, you have to remember that it’s not just about you. You could have a huge impact on the people around you. While you are breaking new ground in your own life, you could be blazing trails for people you didn’t even know were watching. How big you dream, whether you give it your all, or whether you give in at the first sign of trouble—these things matter. They matter for your own happiness and success, obviously. But they also matter because it could make a real difference in the world, far beyond what you can directly impact yourself.

I bet you and I have a lot in common. We’re not the strongest, smartest, or richest people we know. We’re not the fastest or the most connected. We’re not the best looking or the most talented. We don’t have the best genetics. But what we do have is something a lot of those other people will never have: the will to work. 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.

Work works. That’s the bottom line. No matter what you do. No matter who you are. My entire life has been shaped by that single idea.

When I retired from bodybuilding and transitioned into acting, I took those five daily training hours and allocated them to the work of becoming a leading man. I took acting classes, English and speech classes, accent removal classes (I still want my money back for those). I took countless meetings and read hundreds of scripts—the ones that were sent to me for consideration and any others I could get my hands on so I could learn the difference between a bad script, a good script, and a great script.

I then took that philosophy into politics. During my campaign in 2003, I devoured briefing books on every issue that was important in the state of California. Each one was filled with detailed memos written by top experts about obscure topics I never imagined I would need to think about, let alone care about or potentially make decisions about. Things like microstamping on gun ammunition and nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in county hospitals. After my morning workouts down the hill in Venice, I opened the doors of my home to anyone who was willing to teach me about governing, about policy, about the things that mattered to Californians. I was committed to living up to and following through on the promise I’d made to voters during my campaign to be a different kind of politician. So I took those five training hours that I’d previously dedicated to bodybuilding, and then to the craft of acting, and I turned them into a kind of immersion program for the language of politics and government. Every day, I studied and practiced like a foreign exchange student trying to learn the local language, reviewing my notes over and over again, and then speaking from memory until the words came naturally.

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.