Biography Edition: Arnold Schwarzenegger's Entrepreneurial Drive

I read the autobiography of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall. It was a really interesting book, and Arnold's accomplished so much in his life. He dominated bodybuilding, then he dominated acting in movies, and then he ended up being the governor of California. So it was a pretty impressive life. And one of the interesting things going through his biography, one of the things that he was— he most thought of himself as was an entrepreneur. So I thought this would be an excellent episode to dive into his life and see what lessons can we learn and how we can apply that to our painting business. So let's jump into things. I was born into a year of famine. It was 1947 and Austria was occupied by the Allied armies that had defeated Hitler's Third Reich. In May, 2 months before I was born, there were hunger riots in Vienna and in Styria, the southeastern province where we lived. The food shortages were just as bad. Years later, if my mother wanted to remind me about how much she and her father sacrificed to bring me up, she'd tell me about how she foraged across the countryside, making her way from farm to farm to collect a little butter, some sugar, and some grain. She'd be away for 3 days at a time. Hamstern, they called it, like a hamster gathering nuts, scrounging for food, was so common. So Arnold comes from a very poor background. His parents are scrounging up for food to feed him, and the society— this is coming right out of World War II, so a lot of discouraged men, like they had just lost the war. And so the the culture he was brought up in was pretty austere and challenging. Going back to the quote here: My boyhood home was a very simple stone and brick building. There was no plumbing, no shower, and no flushing toilet, just a kind of chamber pot. The nearest well was almost a quarter mile away, and even when it was raining hard or snowing, one of us had to go. So very difficult upbringing, and from a young age he has this desire to move to America. He doesn't even know what he wants to do, he just knows, "I want to get out of here and I want to do big things in America." Um, and he has a challenging relationship with his father. Here's a quote from the book: His entrance to life was discipline. We had a strict routine that nothing could change. We'd get up at 6, and it would be my job or Maynard's to get— who's his brother— to get milk from the farm next door. When we were a little older and started to play sports, exercises were added to the chores, and we had to earn our breakfast by doing sit-ups. In the afternoon, we'd finish our homework and chores, and my father would make us practice soccer no matter how bad the weather was. If we messed up on a play, he knew— we knew we'd get yelled at. My father believed just as strongly in training our brains. After Mass on Sunday, he'd take us— he'd take our family to a family outing, visiting another village maybe, or seeing a play, or watching him perform with his police band. Then in the evening, we had to write a report on our activities, at least 10 pages. He'd hand back our papers with red ink scribbled all over them. And if we had spelled the wrong word, we had to copy it 50 times over. I love my father and really wanted to be like him. I remember once when I was little putting on his uniform and standing on a chair in front of the mirror. The jacket came down to the— like a robe, almost to my feet, and the hat was falling down on my nose. But we had no patience with our problems. But he had— but he had no patience with our problems. If we wanted a bicycle, he He'd tell us to earn the money for it ourselves. I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been crippled by his demands, but instead the discipline rubbed off on me and it turned into drive. And this is something that really encapsulates Arnold's life. He has an insane amount of drive and vision, so he He ends up grabbing hold of a magazine that he finds with a bodybuilder called Reg Park, and he develops this plan basically for his life where he wants to become the best bodybuilder in the world, and then that will launch his career into acting, which was basically the Reg Park template, 'cause that's what Reg Park did. He was a bodybuilder back in the '40s, and he did some movies like Hercules, And so Arnold Schwarzenegger, by the age of around 15, basically identified like, that's my plan. And he had a really clear vision and he goes after it with an insane amount of drive. And there's another person that inspired him. And here's a quote from the book: On it was a photo of Mr. Austrian, Kurt Marnell, setting a record in the bench press, 190 kilograms. So he has to do a report in this class and he sees this picture. So he does a report on it and he says, "I felt inspired by this guy's achievement, but what really struck me was he was wearing glasses. They were distinctive, a little tinted. I associated glasses with intellectuals, teachers, and priests. Yet here, Kirk McMarnell, lying on the bench with his tank top shirt and tiny waist and enormous chest and his shoes way above his chest, he had glasses on." I kept staring at the picture. How could someone who looked like a professor from the neck up be bench pressing 190 kilos? And that's what I wrote in my essay. I read it aloud and was pleased when I got a good laugh. But I came away fascinated that a man could be both smart and powerful. And he ended up getting some role models, role models in his life, in his early life when he was around 15. He goes on here, the idea of balancing the body and the mind was like a religion for him. You have to build the ultimate physical machine, but also the ultimate mind. He would say, "Read Plato. The Greeks started the Olympics, but they also gave us great philosophers, and you've got to take care of both." So this idea that you got to take care of the body, but also the mind, and feed each one of those and prepare each one of those. So Arnold gets this very clear vision of what he wants to do. He wants to be the best bodybuilder in the world and launch into an acting career. And, you know, at this point he's in a small Austrian town and everyone around him is like, you're crazy, what are you doing? You're wasting all your time going to lifting these weights. Because bodybuilding was not like a popular thing. There were, you know, many other things that are way more popular than bodybuilding back in, back around these times, especially in Austria. But even the United States, bodybuilding was not a super popular thing. So it was very weird that Arnold had really latched on to this plan. It's like nobody could identify, nobody could relate to him. His parents thought he was crazy, all his friends thought he was crazy. He found a couple of friends that were into exercising, that little bit older crowd that he was working with, but for the most part everyone thought he was crazy. But he kind of, for the most part, ignored those naysayers and he just focused on his vision. And he, age 15, he is just building his body and going all out in the bodybuilding scene. So he goes to several different competitions when he was younger. He ends up doing a short time in the military as a tank commander, or as a a tanker, and he ends up sneaking out of the barracks to go to this bodybuilding competition, and he ends up winning. And then he got, he got in trouble, but when his commanding officers found out that he won, they were a little bit more lenient on him. He ends up getting out of the military around— because there was a mandatory service, so— but he ends up getting out a little bit early, and he starts dedicating his time exclusively to bodybuilding during this period. And he ends up winning Mr. Universe by 1967, and he's in London. So by this time, he still hasn't gone to America. But right after that competition where he won the NABA Mr. Universe, Joe Weider, who is a very prominent bodybuilding entrepreneur in the United States, invites him over to the United States and basically says, "Hey, I'll give you a job if you do some interviews and posing. I'll pay you and you can basically work out and I'll kind of track your progress as part of my magazine that I have." So Arnold ends up flying over to the United States on Joe Weider's dime and There's a competition, like, right as he's coming over to the United States, he's flying into Florida. There's a competition in Miami that he's supposed to go and win. By this time, he has won several first-place prizes over in Europe, and, and so this is the first one he's doing in the United States. And he— it's the IFBB Mr. Universe, so it's a similar Mr. Universe, it's just a different organization. And he ends up losing that against Frank Zane. And I'm gonna read you a quote from this because it's pretty interesting. So, "That night despair came crashing in. I was in a foreign country, away from my family, away from my friends, surrounded by strange people in a place where I didn't speak the language. I ended up crying quietly in the dark for hours. It was the fact that I had failed, not my body, but my vision and my drive. I hadn't done everything in my power to prepare. Thinking this made me furious. You are still an effing amateur, I told myself. I decided I wouldn't be an amateur ever again. My mission in America was clear. I was on a path. I needed to train like hell, diet like hell, eat well, and win more major titles. Being— so he loses, he gets second place. In the Mr. Universe IFBB in Miami, Florida, he's just crushed by this loss and he attributes it to basically losing focus and not doing everything he could to make sure that he met his goal. And when he was traveling, he was thinking, "I could have done more exercises. I could have been a little bit more strict on my diet." You know, so he's really, really hard on himself, and you can see this when he— his autobiography, he has no— he has very high standards for himself, and if he deviates from those standards, he is very hard on himself. So with that lesson that he learned in Miami, he ends up going on and winning first in pretty much every competition except for one, uh, when he went to Mr. Universe. He got second, but then he ended up getting Mr. Universe first place for like several years in a row through the '70s. Now kind of shifting gears, focusing more on the business side of things, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that Arnold Schwarzenegger thought of himself more like an entrepreneur. And one of the quotes from the book is, "Being a businessman to me was the ultimate." And he Joe Weider, the guy that paid for him to come over to the United States, he kind of becomes his apprentice almost, and he starts learning a lot about business from Joe Weider. And during this time where he's winning these competitions in bodybuilding, he's also starting different businesses. And he starts a mail-order business where he's basically selling plans, pictures, autographs, things to his fans in the mail. And he also starts a real estate business where he's investing in real estate. And what I thought was really awesome was before he even gets to acting, he was actually a millionaire before he even went out for any roles. So this put him in a very good position because he, he, when once he shifts gears into acting He wants to be a star. He doesn't want to be just another actor. And so he's very particular about the roles he's choosing because he wants to accomplish— he wants to be a leading man star in Hollywood. And so because he has that fortune built up, he's a millionaire from real estate and from his mail order business, um, which is coming from the bodybuilding stuff, he can be very selective about the roles he chooses. One of the other funny things he did, or cool things he did was that he actually started a construction business in the United States with one of his bodybuilding buddies. And one of the fun things that he's always talking kind of crap on the other bodybuilders saying that they're lazy, they're not doing, you know, they don't work hard enough, they're always asking for handouts from Joe Wheater. And so he thinks of himself as very motivated, gets stuff done. He starts a construction business with one of the not lazy bodybuilders that's actually Italian. And they both came from a similar background where they were kind of poor and they moved to the United States, Franco Columbo. So him and Franco Columbo start a construction business. And one of the quotes is, "We put an ad in the newspaper that said European bricklayers, experts in marble and stone." And they kind of used the fact that they were European to their advantage, like to kind of differentiate themselves. And they did a good amount of revenue in that business while they were doing bodybuilding things. And he also ends up going to school. Here's another quote, "Going to school, training 5 hours a day at the gym, working in the construction and mail order businesses, making appearances and going to exhibitions." All of it was happening at the same time. Some days stretched from 6 in the morning until midnight. Another quote, I always wrote down my goals. I had to be very specific so that all those fine intentions were not just floating around. Another quote, how could you stand the pressure? You have the responsibility of renting out the other 5 units. You have to collect the rent. What if something goes wrong? Problems were all that he sees. So this is a friend that's telling him like, how can you stand the pressure? When you have to follow this real estate. And Arnold is like, he has a very strong action bias. He just does things. He doesn't dig into the details on why he shouldn't do it. He kind of just takes action and figures it out on the go. So going back to the quote here, "Arnie, you almost just scared me just now," I laughed. "Don't tell me any more of this information." I like to always wander in like a puppy. I walk into a problem and then figure out what the problem really is. Don't tell me ahead of time. Often it's easier to make a decision when you don't know as much because you can't overthink. If you know too much, it can freeze you. And this is something that I'm very guilty of. I get into analysis paralysis where I'm looking at a thing, should I do it? And I just analyze it over and over again and days, days and weeks of just thinking about this problem and like wondering if I should do it or not do it when, when I could have just done it, you know, weeks ago and kind of seen what it was, what the problems were actually were and get through it a lot faster instead of just getting stuck in this analysis paralysis. I was thinking it was Jeff Bezos that said that there's different types of decisions that you have to make. There's the two-way door decisions and there's the one-way door decisions. So the decisions that you can decide to do something and then if it doesn't work out you can just like roll it back and easily just like, okay, never mind, let's not do that. Those are two-way decisions. And then there's like one-way decisions where if you go down that path, you don't really— you can't really undo it. You have to keep going down that path. Or, you know, if you did stop going down that path, then it was very difficult to unwind it. So an example might be if you're going to go into business with a partner, that is a very, almost a one-way thing. Now you can unwind the partnership, but it's very difficult. So you want to make sure you make the right decision for a partnership because it's basically like getting married. And so that is something you want to really make sure you're making the right decision on because it's basically a one-way decision. Whereas a two-way decision might be just hiring a consultant, right? That's, you can hire the consultant, if it doesn't work out, you know, you can always just stop the, assuming you're not in some kind of long-term agreement, you can just stop the service and then, you know, try something else if that didn't work. So that's like a two-way decision or two-door, two-way door decision. So the way I kind of interpret what Arnold's saying here is, You know, if it's something that you can take back or, you know, you should just act and see what the problems are and solve them on the fly. Don't get hung up on the analysis paralysis piece of it. You know, only really big decisions should you really analyze to a great degree. Here's another quote from the book. I'd noticed the same thing at school. Our economics professor was a two-time PhD, but he pulled up in a Volkswagen Beetle. I'd had better cars for years by that time. I said to myself, knowing it all is not really the answer because this guy is not making the money to have a bigger car. He should be driving a Mercedes. The more you know, the less you tend to do something. If I hadn't known everything about real estate, movies, and bodybuilding, I would have— I wouldn't have gone into them. I felt the same about marriage. I might have not done it if I'd known everything I'd have to go through. So as I said, Arnold ends up winning Mr. Olympia title in 1970, and he has dominance in the bodybuilding world, winning 7 Mr. Olympia titles throughout the '70s. And he ends up popularizing this sport. He thought of himself as a as an advocate, that it was his part of his role was to make the sport more popular. And he does that with his mail order business, and he does different spots on TV popularizing the sport. And he's very much a promoter. He was always promoting. And he gets to a point where he's pretty much dominated the bodybuilding sport, and he decides to pursue a new career in acting. Going again back to what he had planned out when he was a kid, the template that he used from Reg Park, his idol, he decides to try to break into acting. And so he has a lot of struggles. Obviously, he didn't speak the language when he first came to America. He didn't speak the language, so he's learning the language. He has a very heavy accent, and he also is a huge And back in the day, back in the '70s, '60s and '70s, being like very muscular was not a thing that was very common and people didn't really want to see that, I guess. It was very different. Obviously that all changed with him in the '80s and '90s. But he was, you know, when he would go to directors and try to get roles, people would say he'd have too much muscles, like that wasn't white. And then obviously his accent was something that was holding him back. So he put a lot of work into getting rid of his accent. And he would also sometimes lose a lot of muscle to get certain roles. But like I said before, he was very focused on being a leading man and being a star. And there's a quote from the book, "Lucille Ball gave me some advice about Hollywood." 'Just remember, when they say no, you hear yes and act accordingly. Someone says to you, we can't do this movie. You hug them and say, thank you for believing in me.' And so that's just, I thought it was a funny quote from Lucille Ball, who actually gives Arnold a spot on her show, an acting opportunity. And it just reinforces the idea that, you know, get your vision of what you want to do in your life and ignore the naysayers and just pursue it. With determination and drive. And then there's a few parts in the book where he actually focuses on meditation, 'cause you know, back when he was a kid, even his dad was like, "Hey, you gotta feed your mind, you gotta feed your body, take care of both." And he kind of revisits this in this part of his life when he's going into his acting career. And here's a quote from the book. Hearing them talk about the need to disconnect and refresh the mind was like a revelation. Arnold, you're an idiot, I told myself. You spend all this time on your body, but you never think about your mind. How to make it sharper and relieve the stress. When you have muscle cramps, you have to do more stretching, take a jacuzzi, put on ice packs, take more minerals. So why aren't you thinking that the mind also can have a problem? It's overstressed, or it's tired, it's bored, it's fatigued, it's about to blow up. Let's learn the tools for that. So he does meditation to take care of the mind. Again, relearning that lesson he did when he was younger. And at this point, as he's shifting into his acting career, putting more focus on it, he ends up breaking up with his longtime girlfriend who actually wrote a book on Arnold called Arnold and Me. And here's a quote about that. There was nothing normal about me. My drive was not normal. My vision of where I wanted to go in my life was not normal. The whole idea of conventional existence was like kryptonite to me. And so his girlfriend basically wanted him to, she wanted a normal life. She wanted to have a family, she wanted to get married, she wanted to settle down. And she was thinking that Arnold would just calm down and settle down and not have these crazy goals. But that wasn't the case. They ended up breaking up. Arnold was very straightforward on what he wanted to do. Like, hey, I want to be the best bodybuilder in the world, then I want to become the best actor in the world and be a star. And so he was very focused on what he wanted to do, and there was nothing that could take him away from what he— his vision was. But, uh, she thought that she could change him, and that wasn't the case. So they ended up breaking up, um, and this is where he's going and really pursuing becoming a star in Hollywood, and he's looking for leading man parts. And here's a quote from the book: "They wanted me to play a Nazi officer, a wrestler, a football player, a prisoner. I never took jobs like that because I would say to myself, 'This isn't going to convince anybody that you're going to be a star.'" So he's denying a lot of roles. And again, the reason why he could do this is because he already built up a large amount of money through his construction business, mail-order sales, and as his, uh, in his real estate business. So finally he gets a breakthrough role in Conan the Barbarian in 1982. There's a funny part in the book where he goes to this producer's office. His name is Dino, and he's a very short guy. And Arnold goes in there, and this very short guy is sitting at a very large desk And Arnold just thinks it's hilarious and starts making fun of the producer, which is kind of weird because Arnold's there to try to basically suck up to this guy to get a— well, at least his agent was hoping that Arnold would suck up to the guy so he'd get the leading spot in Conan the Barbarian. But Arnold doesn't do that. He just starts making fun of Dino, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. Which reminds me, there is a documentary called Arnold on Netflix where a lot of these things are played out in this documentary. Really good documentary, definitely recommend it. So Arnold ends up getting the role of In Conan the Barbarian because he gets in with the director and the director really wants him. And there's some negotiations back and forth about the pay for Arnold. And there's a quote from the book here. The lawyer announced, "Dino doesn't want to give you 5 points like it says in the contract. He wants to give you no points." I said, and Arnold says here, "Take the points. I am in no position to negotiate because that's not what I'm doing the movie for." I understood the reality. The situation was lopsided. Dino had the money and I needed the career. So it made no sense for me to argue. It was just supply and demand. But I also thought the day will come and the tables will turn. And Dino will have to pay. So Arnold realizes like he's doing this to become a star. He doesn't need the money because he already built the fortune that he has. He really wants to become a star, so he negotiates there. And then he goes into the preparation that Conan required. There's a lot of things like swordplay, riding horses, things that he's never really done before. In his life, and he emphasized basically that he has to put in the reps. And this is something you see again and again with Arnold. He is always talking about, you got to put in the reps. Obviously makes sense in bodybuilding, but he's also talking about, you know, acting and doing stunts. And then later on when he's a politician campaigning, and he's always, you got to put in the reps, you got to put in the reps. And so they, they film the movie, and then after the movie, he's all about promoting. And this is something that you see again and again in the movies, that he's part of, he wants to promote the movie, which is not something that actors are typically doing, or at least back then. Actors kind of, they do the acting and then they're done. They don't want to have to— sometimes are kind of forced to because of the contract or whatever, but they're not super into the promotion part of things. But Arnold is completely the opposite. He wants to promote and get the word out and So he's always asking like, what can we do to promote this? What can we do to make this bigger? So here's a quote from the book. Very few actors like to sell. I see the same thing with authors and in the book business. The typical attitude seems to be, I don't want to be a whore. I create. I don't want to shill. It was a real change when I showed up saying, let's go everywhere because this is good, not only for me financially, but also for the public. They get to see a good movie. And then again, he goes in, I saw myself as a businessman first. Too many actors, writers, and artists think that marketing is beneath them, but no matter what you do in life, selling is a part of it. You do a book or a movie, you promote the hell out of it. For me, work just meant discovery and fun. If I— okay. And so basically he's all about promotion. He later quotes Ted Turner, which we'll talk about in another episode. Ted Turner is a media mogul, basically. He grew his dad's little outdoor advertising business into a billion-dollar entity. It's a pretty impressive story. But Arnold also was inspired by Ted Turner. And ends up taking one of his sayings, "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise." And Arnold is not afraid of work. He's always working, working, working. And one of the quotes from the book is, "For me, work just meant discovery and fun. If I heard somebody complaining, 'Oh, I work so hard, I put in 10, 12-hour days,' I would crucify him. What are you talking about? The day is 24 hours long. What else did you do?" So Arnold is not afraid to put in the work to make things, to get results, and he definitely emphasized that throughout the book. So Conan kind of launches his movie career, and he ends up getting another big role with The Terminator in 1984, and that ends up becoming a huge hit as well, and then just hit after hit after that. So, and then he eventually gets into politics, which is really interesting as well, becomes the governor of California. But at the end of the book, he goes through some rules that he has for his life, which I thought was really interesting. Just the rules itself was worth the cost of the book. And one of the things was, one of the rules he has is don't overthink. Basically have a bias for action like we were talking about, which I think pairing that idea up with what Jeff Bezos says. Where you have those two-way decisions, two-way door decisions or one-way door decisions. You know, if it's a one-way door decision, think, think longer and harder about it. Like if you're going to get married, if you're going to get a partner in a business, those kinds of decisions. But if it's a two-way door, you know, bias towards action, just go for it. And then the, the other rule he has is the day has 24 hours, so don't waste time. And, you know, use every moment of your time towards your goals, you know, and there's no excuse to not be able to accomplish your goals. You have 24 hours in the day. And then the other rule he has is reps, reps, reps, which again, he makes sense of the bodybuilding, the bodybuilding domain. He came up with the idea of splits in the day, like splitting part of the day in the morning, you work your upper body, and then the other part of the day, the last part of the day, do your legs. So split training and just putting in a massive amount of reps to build your body. But he also took that same idea into acting when he was on the set of Conan or in Terminator when he had to ride a motorcycle and fire the weapon. Like, just every, every component that anything was hard, he would put reps in, reps, reps in to get the result that he wanted. And then again, even when he was a politician going around campaigning, he just put a huge amount of reps in to get the result that he, he desired. And then the another rule I liked was, uh, stay hungry. Here's a quote from the book. Ted Turner goes from running his father's outdoor advertising business to founding CNN, to organizing the Goodwill Games, to raising bison and supplying bison meat, to having 47 honorary degrees. That's what I call staying hungry. And so he idolized Ted Turner, which we're actually gonna do Ted Turner in a separate episode. He has a really interesting story as well. So those are the main rules that I liked coming out from the back of the book. It basically the don't overthink, the day is 24 hours, reps, reps, reps, and staying hungry. Overall, the book was really interesting. Arnold does not hold back on what he thinks. He goes into a lot of details of his life that weren't, you know, you know, very pleasant, I'm sure, to rehash, you know, where he gets divorced and all this stuff. And he's pretty blunt about it. So it was really interesting. I think you get a good look into the kind of person he is. And I think we can take some good lessons on what he did to take his life to a crazy level. And maybe we can take some of that and apply it in our own lives. And with that, I'll see you next week.