Be Useful — Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Be Useful” is Arnold’s latest book which is a great blend of self-help and his biography. Through this book, Arnold shares his life experiences, how his life took turns, how he made gold out of the opportunities he received. He put in tremendous amount of hard work and faith, what took him to succeed while at the same time how he made meaningful contributions to others. Arnold never thought he would ever write a self-help book. Based on the lessons’ life taught him, some of his groundbreaking experiences and moments of realization led him to reflect about them and share with the audiences. Arnold admits thats the seven tools for life mentioned in this book are timeless tools that have always worked if implemented rightly. They are like roadmap to a happy, successful, useful life.
The tools are:
1. Have a clear vision
- Having a clear vision in life is important or else without that life would look hazy. Arnold states the importance of clarifying the vision. One should always start with a vision, be it uncertain or unclear, which mostly it will be initially. The critical thing is to get clearer about your vision and your goals as you make day by day progress towards it.
This also reminds me of Captain Raghu Raman’s words, one should have a vision or goal. Once there is commitment towards the goal, then progress will follow as one gains more and more clarity towards their goals.
2. Never think small
- Arnold says he didn’t want to be a bodybuilder. Or just another bodybuilder. He wanted to be the greatest bodybuilder of all time. Best of all times. He didn’t want to be an action star. He wanted to be the leading man, and the highest paid in the business. Here Arnold’s advice is to always think big, so big that other people may deem you crazy. When you think big and succeed, it boosts your self-confidence. Slowly, thinking big becomes addictive, and you learn that the only limits that exist are in your own mind. When others see your big success, they realize their potential is limitless too. Therefore, by thinking big, you have a huge impact on others. Sky is the limit!
3. Work your ass off
- People have various desires to be big successful businessman, or best entrepreneur or may be look the best, but none of your big dreams or vision will be achieved without hard work. Arnold states his own example of how he trained for five hours a day when he arrived in America. It seemed like too much in one session, so he split his five-hour routine and trained two and a half hours in the morning and two and a half hours in the evening. With consistently putting his hard work, he became the greatest bodybuilder in the world. Nothing in the world replaces hard work.
My thoughts — It is important for one to not only put in hard work, but one needs to adopt the discipline of consistently putting in the hard work towards achieving their goal. Hardwork is inevitable, but consistency of keeping up that hard work leads to real progress towards achieving one's goals.
Pairing hard work and “smart” work is needed at times. Smart work might involve conducting research to know how things are around your goal, how they might work, learnings from teachers/experts in that area so that you don't repeat those mistakes as they made etc. will help you conquer your tasks effectively and with much more efficiency.
4. Sell, sell, sell
- As we work towards our vision, Arnold says its important to sell or promote your ideas out to other people. If your vision involves working towards a great novel idea, people wont notice it exists until you promote or sell that idea out in the public. Its also equally important to promote your hard work in a way that helps people understand about your idea, but this also helps in making them understand the value of it and its importance to you in your life.
5. Shift gears
- In this chapter, Arnold talks about how to reframe failure and confront problems with courage instead of complaining about them. People often complain about the small happenings in life. But Arnold says, that just distracts us from achieving our own vision. If we remain distracted, we will never be able to focus on getting to our big dreams. Whatever your vision is, there are going to be ups and downs in it. No one's life is carved out. Everyone goes through their own struggles. Then there are some unprecedented external factors that also contribute to this. There will be things and people that bug you. You have to learn how to manage those moments and learn from them. Arnold stresses on the fact that focusing on negativity is a waste of time. One must shift gears and find the positive in every situation. That includes finding the positive in failure. One must reframe failure, take the learnings and bring in that positive spin which will help in getting back on your track of achieving your vision.
6. Shut your mouth, open your mind
- Arnold learned early from a childhood mentor that you can’t just be hungry for fame and money and muscles. One should be hungry for knowledge. Muscles will help in getting you only certain things, but one should widen their forum by reading more, learning from other experiences. That will lead you to be more successful in everything you do. As with more and more knowledge gain, it helps open up lot new perspectives, you start thinking more, correlating things more and overall improves the value of our life. The world, and life, are the ultimate classroom and you need to be like a sponge, soaking up as much of it as you can. One of the best ways to become a “sponge for knowledge” is to always be curious. Listen more than talking. Once you’ve learned something, put your knowledge to good use. God has granted us two ears and one mouth, so start listening more and talking less. You will notice the difference by yourself!
7. Break your mirrors
- I truly loved this piece in the last chapter. Arnold has been very open, humble & vulnerable. He gets appreciated a lot as being a self-made man, but Arnold stresses on the fact that it was just not him alone that lead him to what he is today. He contributes his success to all the others who have helped him in his journey, and he truly wishes to give them back. He feels that as others helped him, it is important to pay back to them and to the society. When you give back, everyone benefits because when you’re a giver, you get an endorphin-like, addictive high. Also, one truly understands the underlying feeling and meaning behind “giving” others. Unless you give, you won't feel the emotion behind this pristine feeling.
Arnold’s late father-in-law, Sargent Shriver, gave a piece of advice in one of his speeches. He said, “Break your mirrors.” What he meant was that our society is so self-absorbed, it’s important to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor than about your own. It is important to look beyond yourself and read into others. Unless you adopt that mindset and have that empathy to look into how others tough life is or so, one can never grow beyond themselves. These days people are self-obsessed about their own achievements, things they own and so on. It is great to appreciate the good values in others, take learnings from them, rest all crap should be cut off. This helps in not only opening up new perspectives by listening to others, also gives you good practice to shift gears, and start focusing on your goals again.
My thoughts — Great self-help and motivational advice in this book. It is truly inspiring to read it as Arnold narrates each of these seven tools along with his stories from childhood till now. A truly unbelievable and inspiring set of stories from Arnold, would highly recommend reading this book. I had a chance to listen to the audible of this book and I could truly feel the emotions behind all his true-life stories as he narrates them.
