Make sure to check out my review of Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards! Great addition to this book where you can learn and master the hacks for brilliant conversations!
Have you ever reached a point where life feels comfortable but not exciting? Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger gives some really honest and practical advice to keep in mind that will help you and others to keep pushing forward towards the vision that you have.
Have a Vision
And that’s where it starts – a vision. You all know Arnold. And if you don’t – where have you been? Starting from bodybuilding, to being a globally-renowned actor, to a politician, he’s a person that fits a very exclusive club where people have made dreams and visions into reality through hard work, grit and reps, reps, reps.
Having a clear vision rather than just a goal is the first thing to figure out before you can work out the steps to get there. What’s the difference between a goal and a vision? Most of us have goals. We all want to be successful, have a well paying job, own a home and have a family. A vision is a clear end state or where you see yourself after all the milestones. It can be a bit tricky to think about a Vision in this way and one of the big tips that I learnt in the book was to look broad and then try to zoom in.
Do you take walks? Some of the most renowned visionaries like Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs took walks. I’ve been doing the same the last few months. After listening to a lot of podcasts as well as reading a lot on the subject I practice grounding – walking barefoot on grass/outdoors. It may be a little unusual and I often get looks but having consistently done this for over a year now (come rain or shine) there are two impacts that I can tell you about.
One – it has really improved my mental health and mood. I don’t know the physiological impact but it gets you out of your head, you start looking around and my posture has also slightly improved. One benefit is that some of those looks I talked about earlier turn into short conversations with friendly strangers who take the effort to ask why. I had one dog owner who passed me by and the small dog returned and sat next to me for 15 minutes whilst I made conversation with the owner. It was really nice and such a sweet dog.
Two – it’s a powerful medication for brain fog. In writing a lot of these blog posts I sometimes experience a kind of traffic jam in my head. Not knowing what to write or how to write the post. These walks provide an opportunity for my mind to wander. I’ve started to just take a walk without my earphones. It’s really amazing how my mind just wanders and I start to think a bit more creatively about different things going on in my life. I carry a backpack with my trainers and tissues/towels as well as a notebook and pen. Once I’m done I make some quick notes – literally half an A5 page – that’s it. Those notebooks – I promise you – reading them back, they are more valuable to me than a bar of gold (I’ll still take the bar if anyone’s offering!)
Many of history’s greatest thinkers, leaders, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs found some of their greatest inspiration going for walks.
Beethoven used to take walks carrying blank pages of sheet music and a pencil. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth used to write as he took walks around a lake where he lived. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle would lecture their students while taking long walks with them, often working out their ideas at the same time. Two thousand years later, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” Einstein refined many of his theories about the universe while walking around the Princeton University campus. The writer Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
Schwarzenegger, Arnold. Be Useful: Seven tools for life (p. 17). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Resilience and Go All The Way!
Life is about success and failure – this is the key message that Arnold starts off with. Failure has always had a bit of a negative connotation in most people’s minds. Arnold however shifted this to think of it positively so that he always shifted, took it as a feedback mechanism, and kept going all the way to the end vision. I think this mindset is incredibly important in personal and work life.
In academic and work life I have had a number of failures. As a now chartered accountant like many others I have failed an exam and this was at the last stage just before completing the final case study exam. This story is not unique- so many others have fallen into this. I remember when I failed that exam and I told a friend about the result on WhatsApp , my message was “mate I’m done with this, I’ve had enough”. I was really thinking about packing it in. I was so thankful and glad to have a friend that reminded me how far I’ve come and the successes I’ve had and also how close I really was. Pain is only temporary. Sure I was really disappointed, I was fed up, I was burnt out, but giving up at that point – I can’t imagine how I would have felt right now writing this.
Arnold had similar experiences in his early bodybuilding career. I actually never knew Arnold as a bodybuilder. I just saw the Terminator and it was and still is one of my most favourite movies. Before this Arnold had failures when he moved to America and lost in his first try at the Mr Universe competition. He took this as feedback after the initial disappointment when he realised that yes his muscles were stronger and bigger than other bodybuilders – but that’s not totally what is going to win you the title. It comes down to the finer margins like tone, shape, asymmetry as well as the ancillary muscles that I think even today most people at the gym don’t really pay attention to – myself included if I’m honest.
Using this feedback he shifted his training regime and target areas. He won the following years Mr Universe and consecutive years following this whilst becoming a world renowned actor. This followed into other key lessons which included going all the way, don’t do small things and own your story.
Jim (James) Cameron & Danny Devito
There were notable stories in Be Useful on others. I loved and really was inspired by Jim (James) Cameron. He went all the way in every single blockbuster from the first Terminator, Titanic – creating a 755 feet film set with sloping and elevating capabilities, and the Avatar series. James Cameron is one of those exceptional producers and directors who has a love for his craft and his industry to create exceptional stories by speaking to actors, writers and all involved rather than just taking a script and delivering it. Jim didn’t do just right or just acceptable – he always went all the way and did not compromise on creating an experience for the viewer, not just another movie.
Danny Devito was also iconic and pretty influential in Arnold’s successes as a movie actor. It surprised me to find out that Twins and Kindergarten Cop were actually the highest earning and most successful movies in Arnold’s film career – not the Terminator series as people might think. What was unusual about their collaboration at the time was how they navigated the naysayers by taking on more risk for themselves personally to get into comedy. This was a major re-shift and focus, which all the production companies at the time never believed would be successful but this incentivised both Arnold and Devito to rethink how they could creatively pitch their ideas.
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.
Schwarzenegger, Arnold. Be Useful: Seven tools for life (p. 67). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
I want to add one of my personal life lessons which the book touches on but doesn’t mention it explicitly. The power of compounding. You have to do the work and start small first before getting further up the ladder. A lot of young people often shift career paths repeatedly in their early years. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The idea of compounding however is utilising all your skills to captivate and capitalise on new opportunities. When you change careers frequently or sometimes jobs, you do kind of lose momentum which means starting a little behind sometimes or unintentionally/implicitly slowing down progression in your career despite what may seem like a senior job title. This is why having a vision at the start is so important so you know where to go before you can figure out how to get there.
Giving Back and circularity of human ecosystem
It doesn’t matter how young or old you are, how much or how little you have, how much you’ve done or how much you have left to do. In every case, giving more will get you more. Want to help yourself? Help others. Learn to start from that place, and that is how you will become the most useful version of yourself—to your family, to your friends, to your community, to your nation … and to the world.
Schwarzenegger, Arnold. Be Useful: Seven tools for life (p. 258). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
The last chapter in the book on why it’s so important to give back and help your community I feel is really important. Giving back is actually quite addictive – it does release oxytocin and endorphins. Helping your fellow man has loads of synergies which actually help you yourself to move further. You get a lot more life skills that you can use at work or business.
If you think about the circularity of the human ecosystem, enabling a more free flowing and productive ecosystem can help all parts of that ecosystem to be more productive. So helping your local community whether through donating your time or money will have larger benefits which do come back around to you because it means that other people or other parts of the ecosystem develop more which create more opportunities for all. Economically it makes sense and is a big enabler of development.
Be Useful is a memoir, self help book and business book that is well written with exceptional life stories from an exceptional person born in Austria but that was made in America. There are some important life lessons I think each one of us can relate to and think about to improve how productive and impactful we are in this world. And this fits in with Arnold’s dad’s message to him when he was younger – “Be Useful”.
Nobody remembers the person with potential. They remember the person who actually did something with it. Be Useful.
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