Arnold Schwarzenegger's INSPIRING Moments - #MentorMeArnold

What's up, Believe Nation? I started the Mentor Me series to try to learn from people who've done a lot more than us, spend a little bit more time with them, and hopefully some of their beliefs, their viewpoints, their mindset seeps into us to help us become the best version of ourselves. So today we're gonna learn from Arnold Schwarzenegger and some of his most inspiring moments. Mentor me, Arnold. And as always, guys, as you're watching the videos, if you see something that really resonates with you, please leave it in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired. And if you write it down, it's much more likely to stick with yourself as well.

The most important thing is that you have a vision, that you have a goal, because without that vision and without that goal, again, you're drifting around and you're never going to end up anywhere. People don't become successful just by accident. You know, I mean, maybe the guy that found gold in California and started the gold rush, but don't count on that. That's a one in a lifetime kind of a situation. So you got to really have a specific goal. And to me, to have that vision that I want to be Mr. Universe, that I want to be the greatest bodybuilder of all time, that was a great vision. And that specifically to look like Reg Park and to be up there on that stage and to lift the trophy over to go ahead and to win the championship over and over and over again. So that was a great goal. You have to have a goal. Now it doesn't have to be that specific goal, but it has to have some goal. This is why I always recommend to people, sit down, take your time, and start thinking about why do you want to work out? What is your goal? And then it can be as crazy as it is. It could be, you know, I want to impress girls. If that's your goal, so be it, but it motivates you. It could be that you're emulating a certain bodybuilder or a certain football player, a certain boxer, whatever it is. Have those pictures put all over the wall like I did when I was a kid. I put pictures of Reg Park and of Sonny Liston, of boxers and of Ali and of powerlifters and weightlifters all over my bedroom wall so that every day when I go to sleep, every day when I wake up, I look at those pictures and they motivate me. You need that motivation. And then therefore you have this kind of imprint in front of you all the time and you know exactly what you're chasing. This is why I always smiled when I was in the gym. People always came up to me and said, why are you smiling? You're working out 5 hours a day. You're doing the same as the other guys, but the other guys have a sour face. They're pissed off that they have to do another rep or another set or something. I looked forward to, I looked forward to another 1,000 reps of sit-ups. I looked forward to another 500 pounds of leg press or squat. I looked forward to doing more and more curls until my arms fall off. Why? Because I knew that every rep that I did and every set that I did and more weights that I lifted, I get one step closer to turning that vision into reality. So I was turned on by that. I was excited. I couldn't wait to get to the gym. When I used to do seminars on how to become a champion, I would always ask people Why do you want to be a champion? Or what do you want to accomplish?

Why are you training?

And they will— if a guy will get up and he will say, well, I want to train because I think that if I get muscular and, you know, I feel like I'm getting the kind of definition, then I maybe can enter a bodybuilding competition. I said, sit down. I said, if you think this way You're going to be a loser. You're never going to make it because there's no maybe. You've got to get up and say, I want to be a champion and I do whatever it takes. The amount of hours it takes, the posing, the this, the that, the visualization, looking at training footage, looking at motivational books, reading this, reading whatever it takes, I would do. That's the answer I want to hear from you. You can detect right away those that are going to be shaky and that will fall behind and they will not go all the way, and those that are very hungry and a hunger you have to develop because you have to create a goal for yourself, whatever that may be, a short-term goal and a long-term goal. And you got to go after that. And if you do not see it and if you do not believe it, who else will?

Don't be afraid to fail. Anything I've ever attempted, I was always willing to fail. In the movie business, I remember that you pick scripts. Many times you think this is a winning script, But then, of course, you find out later on when you do the movie that it didn't work, and the movie goes in the toilet. Now, we have seen my movies, I mean, Red Sonja, Hercules in New York, Last Action Heroes. Those movies went in the toilet. But that's okay, because at the same time I made movies like Terminator and Conan and True Lies and Predator and Twins that went through the roof. So you can't always win, but don't be afraid of making decisions. You can't be paralyzed by fear of failure, or you will never push yourself. You keep pushing because you believe in yourself and in your vision, and you know that it is the right thing to do, and success will come. So don't be afraid to fail.

In one word, one word only, how did a small-town boy from Austria become one of the most famous people on Earth?

Why do you want me to say it in one word?

One word, Arnold.

I don't stay with your rules.

Dream. Dream. Dream. I was poor because I didn't have anything. I had no money, I had no things, we had no TV, we had no refrigerator, we had nothing as kids. But I was rich because I had a dream.

You had a dream.

I had a dream of becoming the greatest bodybuilder, and I had a dream to use bodybuilding as a means to get into films. But I had no idea that it would go as far as it did, that it would go beyond the body role beyond the muscles and then do movies like Terminator, Predator, End of Days and stuff like that. That was like, you know, I had to kind of reinvent my dream after I achieved that.

Okay, but this dream of bodybuilding, we'll come to that, but there must have been a time in your life before that when you didn't have any thoughts of bodybuilding at all. What sort of child were you?

Well, I grew up in Austria after I was born after the Second World War in 1947. It was poverty, there was no food around, no, really nothing, and I think that was the reason why I I developed such a tremendous desire, a desire to get out of there and a desire to make it in life, to achieve big things. And then when I learned in school later on about America and about the skyscrapers, the big freeways, the big cars and all that, I said to myself, you know, I want to be part of this big thing. Everyone has a problem with time, but the day is 24 hours. And we sleep 6. Now I know there's some out there that say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I need 8. Well, I say just sleep a little faster because the bottom line is we have 6 hours of sleep, 24 hours are available, so you have 18 hours now available to your work, your family, your hobbies, and also to learn something new or to do something new. Which could easily be that you want to learn a new language, or that you want to read, and as a New Year's resolution, I have to read a book every week, or you say, I'm going to go and reshape my body. So you're going to go and take this hour out of your schedule and say, I'm going to train an hour every day. So this is, for most people, a huge challenge, but it is totally doable, I can tell them, because the kind of things that I did when I came to this country, I mean, I went to school, I was working in construction, I was working out my 5 hours a day. I was taking acting classes from 8 o'clock at night to 12 midnight. I was doing all of those things. I wanted to make sure that out of the 24 hours of the day that I don't waste one single hour. Those hours were too precious. And so there I just want to tell people, don't give me this thing, I have a difficult time with the time and I don't have time for this and I don't have that. You have time. You make the time. When you're a competitive athlete, you learn very quickly how strong you are or how energetic you are, all of those things. But it could very well be that there's a lot of people who have an equally as good a body as you have that performs just as well, that is as muscular. Let's say bodybuilding, there's exactly the same kind of, uh, you know, proportions and all those things. So the question really is, what puts you over the top? It is the mind that really creates the body. It's the mind that makes you really work out the 4 or 5 hours a day. It is the mind that visualizes of what the body ought to look like as the finished product. The body is very important, but the mind is more important than the body. We have to visualize what that body ought to look like in order to make it win, because that's what creates then the will, the will that you need go to the gym every day. The will that makes you go into the forced reps, the will that makes you go beyond. You do your 500-pound reps in the squats and you can't do another rep and your body is shaking. It's the will that makes you go one more time down and struggle up one more time. And so it's all of this, the mental aspect that motivates you, that makes the difference between you being in the gym full of joy and looking forward to doing that extra rep and looking forward to doing those extra 100 reps in the sit-ups and working past the pain barriers, that always the mind, that's not the body. So this is why I think the body is very important, but the mind is more important than the body.

We have so many rules in life about everything. I say break the rules, not the law, but break the rules. My wife has a t-shirt, my wife has a t-shirt that says Well-behaved women rarely make history. Well, you know, I don't want to burst her bubble, but the same is true with men. It is impossible to be a maverick or a true original if you are too well-behaved and don't want to break the rules. You have to think outside the box. That's what I believe. After all, what is the point of being on this earth if all you want to do is be liked by everyone and avoid trouble? The only way that I ever got anyplace was the breaking some of the rules. After all, I remember that after I was finished with my bodybuilding career, I wanted to get into acting and I wanted to be a star in films. You can imagine what the agents said when I went to meet all those agents. Everyone had the same line that it can't be done. The rules are different here. Just look at your body. You have this huge monstrous body, overly developed. That doesn't fit into the movies. You don't understand. This was 20 years ago, the Hercules movies. Now there is the little guys that are in, Dustin Hoffman, Woody Allen, Jack Nicholson, before he gained weight, of course, that is. But anyway, those are the guys that were in. And the agent also complained about my accent. He says, no one ever became a star with an accent like that, especially not with a German accent. And yes, I can imagine with your name, Arnold, Schwarzen Schnitzel or whatever the name is on a billboard. Yeah, that's going to draw a lot of tickets and sell a lot of tickets. Yeah, right. So this is the kind of negative attitude they had, but I didn't listen to those rules, even though they were very nice and they said, look, we can get you some bit parts, we can get you to be playing a wrestler or a bouncer. Oh, maybe with your German accent we can get you to be a Nazi officer in Hogan's Heroes or something like that. But, you know, I didn't listen to all this. This were their rules, not my rules. I was convinced I could do it, that if I worked as hard as I did in bodybuilding, 5 hours a day, and I started getting to work, I started taking acting classes, took English classes, took speech classes, dialogue classes, accent removal classes I even took. I remember running around, "A fine wine grows on a vine." You see, because Germans had difficulties with the F and the W and the V. So fine wine grows on the vine. I know what some of you now say is, I hope that Arnold got his money back. But let me tell you something, I had a good time doing those things and it really helped me. And finally I broke through. I broke through and I started getting the first parts in TV, Streets of San Francisco, Lucille Ball hired me. I made Pumping Iron, Stay Hungry, and then I got the big break in Conan the Barbarian. And there the director said, "If we wouldn't have Schwarzenegger, we would have to build one." Now think about that. And then when I did Terminator, "I'll be back" became one of the most famous lines in movie history, all because of my crazy accent. Now think about it, the things that the agent said would be totally a detriment and would be impossible for me to get a job, all of a sudden became an asset for me. All of those things, my accent, my body, and everything. So it just shows you, never listen to that you can't do something. And you have to work your way up, of course, run for something else first. I mean, it was the same when I ran for governor, the same lines that you have to work your way up, it can't be done. And then, of course, I ran for governor and the rest, of course, is history. They said you have to You start with a small job as mayor, and then as assemblyman, and then as lieutenant governor, and then as governor. And they said, that's the way it works in a political career. I said, I'm not interested in a political career. I want to be a public servant. I want to fix California's problems and bring people together and bring the parties together. So like I said, I decided to run. I didn't pay attention to the rules, and I made it, and the rest is history.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know, what did you think of this video? What did you learn from Arnold? That's gonna have the biggest immediate impact on your life or your business? Which one was your favorite clip and why? Please leave it in the comments below and I'm gonna join in the discussion. Finally, I wanna give a quick shout out to Vincent Montello. Vincent, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Year One Word, and making that book summary video on your YouTube channel. I really, really, really appreciate the support. Today we are covering Evan Carmichael's Year One Word. Word. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.