Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

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.