Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

by Arnold Schwarzenegger

I knew once I got to ten reps I could do a decent job delivering the speech, but twenty reps meant I could knock it out of the park. The words would feel more natural, like I was speaking off the cuff and from the heart. The more I practiced the speech, the more of myself would be present in the room, and the more likely it would be that the people in the audience felt connected to me and the ideas I was sharing with them. 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! It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a dead lift, a press conference, or a run-through of an entire speech. You need to be all there, all in, every time. Trust me, I’m speaking from experience here. It only takes one slipup, one wrong move, one wrong word, to derail your progress and set you back.

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 it.

It’s why in firearms training they say “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” It’s why first responder types, like paramedics and firefighters, train obsessively and practice the fundamentals of their jobs over and over again until it becomes second nature for them. It’s so that when the shit hits the fan and the unexpected happens—which it always does—they don’t have to think about the run-of-the-mill, life-saving parts of their work, and they can use that little bit of extra mental space to deal with the situations they’ve never seen before without wasting precious seconds.

What he practiced in private and what he played in public seemed like they weren’t even the same art form, but they were intimately connected. It was all his practice of the fundamentals that made the improvisational music he played onstage seem like magic. Practice was rigid and structured, predictable and boring. His playing was free flowing and spontaneous and brilliant. It was like he didn’t even have to think about the notes, which he didn’t. Because he couldn’t. If his improvisational style was going to mesh with the styles of the other players on the stage, there couldn’t be any delay. There were no precious seconds available to think. Like a paramedic at the scene of an accident or a firefighter in a crumbling building, he had to know what to do, where to go, and what move to make, in the moment.

They are able to blow our minds when the lights go on because they’ve done all the shitty, hard work when no one was watching. 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.

To do great things that last, sacrifices are necessary. That’s the beauty of pain. Not only is it temporary, which means you don’t have to deal with it forever, it tells you whether you’ve begun to give enough of yourself in pursuit of your dreams. If the work of being great or achieving something special hasn’t hurt or cost you anything, or at least made you uncomfortable, then I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’re not working hard enough. You’re not sacrificing all that could be sacrificed in order to be all that you could become. Pain isn’t just an indicator of sacrifice, though, it’s also a measure of growth potential. In the gym, if an exercise doesn’t start to hurt, then I know I haven’t done enough to unleash the growth potential of the muscle I’m targeting. Reps build strength, but pain builds size.

I was smiling because I was feeling the pain of the work, which told me that growth was on the horizon. With each painful rep, I was taking another step closer to making my bodybuilding dreams a reality. That made me happy,

they know a driven candidate will take care of the physical part on their own time. They’re looking for character growth. Which, in the pursuit of greatness and grand visions, is sometimes the most important thing. Nothing builds character like resilience or perseverance through pain.

But we’re not talking about that kind of pain here—the kind with no purpose attached to it. We’re talking about productive pain. The kind that produces growth, that builds a base and builds character, that gets you closer to achieving your vision.

If you have a job to do or a goal you’re trying to achieve, or you’ve made a commitment to protect something or someone, and it’s important to you that everything happens the way it’s supposed to, it’s up to you to follow through all the way.

This is how you follow up. This is how you follow through. It’s about leaving no stone unturned. It’s about dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s. It’s about closing the loop and circling back. I don’t even want to think about what might have happened to some of those nursing home residents if we’d done even 1 percent less than we did. And yet so many people are content to depend entirely on plans and systems, or to do the bare minimum asked of them, and then think to themselves, This is all set, I took care of it. No. Don’t be a lazy fuck. Do the work. The only time you are allowed to use the phrase “I took care of it” is when it is done. Completely.

I am a follow-through fanatic. In a lot of ways, I consider following through the crux of the hard work that is necessary for important things to get done, because important stuff is never simple or straightforward. It almost always depends on timing, on other people, on lots of moving parts—and you can’t count on any of those things.

It seems like a small thing in isolation, but 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.

those people know how good it feels to work hard and do things the right way.

“Do what you say you’re going to do, and try to do it a little better than you said you would.” Follow up and follow through, fully. Do just those two things, which I know you can do if your vision means enough to you, and it will set you apart from the pack. Unlike the vast majority of people who say they’re motivated to do something important or to make a difference, it will show that you’re serious about doing the work to make your vision real.

My hope for you is that you don’t waste much of your time at all. Sadly, a lot of people waste a lot of time. The worst offenders are the ones with big, ambitious dreams who desperately want to change their lives, but when I ask them what they’re doing to achieve their dreams, they spend twenty minutes explaining how busy they are. Not surprisingly, the people who complain the most about not having enough time do the least amount of work. 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.

I bought an apartment building so I had a place to live and I wouldn’t need to worry about rent, which has always been one of the major factors that has driven aspiring actors to take crappy jobs that weren’t part of the vision they had for their careers. I didn’t want to be a working actor. I wanted to be an action hero and a leading man. Having a roof over my head meant I could be patient and say no to all those offers for bit parts as a Nazi soldier or a skinhead bouncer.

“When did you ever have fun?” others will wonder. I never wasn’t having fun, I’ll say. Why would I bust my ass like that if it wasn’t fun?

“Weren’t you always tired?” That is always the follow-up question. And my answer is the same every time: no. Now to be fair, I’ve always had a lot of energy, even going back to when I was a kid, so there’s a part of this that is genetic. But the bigger part, the more important part, is the one that so many people miss. When you’re chasing a vision and working toward a big goal, there is nothing more energizing than making progress. When a concept from one of my business classes clicked for me in my studies, I immediately wanted to go deeper. When I could hear my English getting better, I wanted to talk to people and practice more. In the gym, when I felt the pump, I knew progress was happening, and it made me want to lift until my arms fell off.

And while I was definitely physically exhausted, mentally I was totally switched on. I was excited and energized, because I’d just spent two hours moving closer to achieving my vision.

This is the kind of headspace people are referring to when they talk about slipping into “flow state.” Time expands and collapses simultaneously. You get into something, you start making progress, then boom, the next thing you know, you look up and it’s the morning. Writers, musicians, computer programmers, chess masters, architects, artists, anyone with a hobby they are truly passionate about—they all have stories like this. Stories of doing work that seem to defy the limits of human attention span and physiology, when at some point time should have caught up with them and shut their brains off.

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. When you hear stories like these, if you’re still worried about eating or energy or sleep or fun, maybe your problem isn’t time at all. Maybe it’s what you’re spending your time on. Do you know how many times people tell me they don’t have time to work out, and then I ask them to take out their phones and show me their screen time stats and it says they spent three and a half hours on social media? It’s not hours in the day you lack, it’s a vision for your life that makes time irrelevant.

Or maybe you do have an amazing, powerful vision that motivates you, but the time required to achieve it is so great that the journey toward success has become overwhelming and paralyzing. That’s a real possibility, and it can be very scary. I get it.

If I’d focused completely on the end result or tried to swallow the elephant in one bite, as the saying goes, I absolutely would have choked. I would have failed. The only way to achieve the kind of sustainable, life-changing success that I wanted was to do the hard, incremental work day in and day out. I had to focus on doing the reps and executing well. I had to listen to the pain and build on the growth that would eventually come. I had to follow through, every day, on the plan I’d created in pursuit of my larger vision.

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. I can already hear the question coming from a bunch of you: What about time for rest and relaxation? First of all, rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people. Which one are you? If you want to do something special, if you have a big dream that you want to achieve, I believe you’re going to have to put relaxation aside for a while. But fine, you want some relaxation, take half of the remaining time for your little nap. That still gives you an hour each day to work toward your goal.

Do you have any idea how powerful an hour a day is? If you want to write a novel, sit down and write for an hour every day, and aim for just one page. At the end of the year, you will have a 365-page manuscript. That’s a book!

Why were they fixated on our posing briefs or the oil we’d use to highlight muscle definition? They’d ignore the years of work and sacrifice we’d all put in, then they’d reduce a world championship competition to the simplest visual: a group of tanned, shiny men flexing next to one another onstage, very clearly overcompensating for what must be lacking inside the very little clothing we had on.

How would a writer know how many hours a day we work? How would they know how much we lift or how strong we are or how disciplined we have to be? How would they know any of this stuff if we didn’t tell them? My bodybuilding peers didn’t want to talk to journalists because they continually mischaracterized who we were and what we did, but not talking to them was how we got ourselves into this position of misunderstanding in the first place.

you’re trying to get exposure for something and grow your business—even if that business is an unconventional sport—you have to tell people about it. You have to communicate and promote so that people know it exists. So they know what it’s all about and why they should care. In other words, you need to sell it.

Newspapers, TV shows, journalists? They shouldn’t be our enemy, they should be our partners. They need stories to fill up their pages and their air time just as much as we need to get our story out there. If we want the sport to be big, we should be filling those buckets of space for them with our own descriptions of our sport and our own ideas about what makes it special. We couldn’t expect them to fill those buckets the way we could, and we certainly couldn’t count on them to fill that space the way we wanted them to. Just look at what happened when they were left to their own devices. If we wanted to change the image of bodybuilding, we had to be the ones to educate the journalists, and therefore the public. We had to be the ones to explain the sport to them, to promote it, to sell it.

When entrepreneurs and athletes and artists ask me for advice nowadays—it doesn’t matter if they’re talking about their newest product, their latest piece, or how to get representation—the one thing I tell them that they should be doing more of is promoting. Communicating. Selling. Sell, sell, sell! You can have the most amazing idea, the most fantastic plan, the best in class of virtually anything, but if nobody knows that it exists or knows what it is, then it’s a waste of time and effort. It might as well not exist at all.

When it comes to realizing your dreams, you cannot allow that to happen. In fact, it should never happen, because no one is better equipped or motivated ...

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.

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. Obviously you don’t need their approval to pursue your dream, and you shouldn’t let it stop you if their approval doesn’t come, but if you can sell them it’s always better to have more people in your corner.