Would you take life advice from Arnold Schwarzenegger?
A large, slow-moving Austrian immigrant with gappy teeth, son of a violent father, and an accent as thick as sachertorte, Arnold Schwarzenegger has over the decades, changed the world. His next project only serves to further his golden mission.
It’s impossible not to love Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the age of 76, the five-times-Mr-Universe-cum-Hollywood-action-hero-cum-comic-actor-cum-member-of-the-Kennedy-family-cum-multi-millionaire-entrepreneur-cum-best-selling-author-cum-Californian-governor-cum-philanthropist-cum-environmentalist takes every setback on the chin. A large, slow-moving Austrian immigrant with gappy teeth, son of a violent father, and an accent as thick as sachertorte, Schwarzenegger has done more than merely change his body, life and fortune; he has, over the decades, changed the world.
Among other initiatives, he chairs the After School All-Stars, a nationwide US after-school program to stop deprived children falling between the cracks, and co-founded the R20 Regions of Climate Action, a global non-profit dedicated to helping subnational governments develop, implement, and communicate the importance of low-carbon and climate-resilient projects.
While these community efforts are laudable, it is Schwarzenegger’s discipline, good humour, and empowerment of the vulnerable that cement his standing as a species of godhead.
Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, his seventh book, only serves to further his golden mission.
Schwarzenegger’s modesty is the axis of his charm. “This wasn’t my only experience with public failure, obviously,” he writes in the introduction. “I had dramatic losses in my bodybuilding career, I had movies that went in the toilet, and this wasn’t the first time I’d watched my approval ratings fall like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But I wasn’t even close to rock bottom. And it wasn’t the recession that brought my world crashing down. I did that to myself. I blew up my family. No failure has ever felt worse” – here, he is referring to his affair with Mildred Baena, his family’s unprepossessing, married housekeeper, that resulted in a doppelganger son, Joseph. “I was face down in the mud, in a dark hole, and I had to decide whether it was worth it to clean myself up and start the slow climb out, or to just give up.”
Clearly, this hero doesn’t die in the last frame. Schwarzenegger doesn’t have it in himself to give up. A main character in art and life, he knows that both success and failure can be transmuted into gold (“It’s the struggle that makes success, when you achieve it, taste so sweet”).
Using his enormous, glorious, prismatic existence as a benchmark of that which self-belief can achieve, Schwarzenegger, like the good (if somewhat priapic) boy scout he is at heart, guides. The book is divided into seven chapters, each dealing with a different step to achieve maximum impact, pleasure, and utility in life, despite even seemingly insurmountable odds.
“So many of our best people are lost,” Schwarzenegger writes. “So many of the good ones don’t know what they’re doing with their lives. They’re unhealthy. They’re unhappy. Seventy per cent of them hate their jobs. Their relationships are unrewarding. They don’t smile. They don’t laugh. They have no energy. They feel useless. They feel helpless, as if life were pushing them down a road to nowhere.”
His solution? Clarity of vision.
This is a take on empowerment titan Tony Robbins’ “central decision” thesis – namely, that one must decide on a goal and ensure that every decision, no matter how inconsequential, supports its achievement.
Schwarzenegger admits that his tool kit is far from revolutionary, but he infuses it with a brazier-like warmth absent in the intense, long-toothed Robbins, whose exhortations can sing like the blade of a boning knife.
Unusually, Schwarzenegger’s optimism never overrides his pragmatism. He suggests beginning the journey to fulfilment by building self-esteem in increments: the completion of small, daily tasks “with a little goal attached to them”. What begins as an apparently trivial sense of achievement then begins to assume substance, resulting in a worldview shift. “Once you’ve developed a rhythm with those little daily goals, create weekly and then monthly goals,” he advises. As the sense of purpose increases, “the sense of uselessness starts to loosen its grip.”
He suggests walking to stimulate the unconscious – Aristotle, Charles Dickens, Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau, and William Wordsworth were avid walkers – and to limit exposure to iPhones and television. Inspiration, though, can only strike when space is made for it.
“I know this isn’t as easy as it sounds,” Schwarzenegger writes. “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,” but, as he points out, living a life you hate is harder.
Realistic objectives are, to him, a non-negotiable (“As uncomfortable as it can be, you have to look at yourself in the mirror every day in order to know where you stand”). This self-confrontation is, of course, a deeper affair: more than an evaluation of fitness of objective, Schwarzenegger is advocating the assessment of self. Without established self-regard, navigating the darker parts of life can otherwise be “like trying to move inside a set of Russian nesting dolls full of shit and hair gel. And the thing is, it’s very easy to get swallowed up by them if you aren’t sure of yourself and sure of what you’re trying to accomplish.”
There is no question that Schwarzenegger, who has, from birth, seemingly been powered by a solar battery, is sincere in his desire to help. Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life is, however, more than inspiring and heartfelt; it’s an effective tool to rectify the emotional stagnation that blights so many lives, and created by a man whose company, whether on film or paper, has always been a joy.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke’snew book is Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine. Follow her on instagram.com/gambottoburke
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