#193 Arnold Schwarzenegger (Arnold's first autobiography)

What I learned from reading Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest. I'm not exactly sure why I chose bodybuilding, except that I loved it. I loved it from the first moment my fingers closed around a barbell and I felt the challenge and exhilaration of hoisting the heavy steel plates above my head. The only time I really felt rewarded was when I was singled out as being best. I had it tougher than a lot of my companions because I wanted more, I demanded more of myself. I was literally addicted. I learned that this pain meant progress. Each time my muscles were sore from a workout, I knew they were growing. I could not have chosen a less popular sport. My school friends thought I was crazy. But I didn't care. My only thoughts were of going ahead, building muscles and more muscles. I remember certain people trying to put negative thoughts into my mind, trying to persuade me to slow down. But I had found the thing to which I wanted to devote my total energies and there was no stopping me. My drive was unusual, I talked differently than my friends; I was hungrier for success than anyone I knew. Reg Park looked so magnificent in the role of Hercules I was transfixed. And, sitting there in the theater, I knew that was going to be me. I would look like Reg Park. I studied every move he made. From that point on, my life was utterly dominated by Reg Park. His image was my ideal. It was fixed indelibly in my mind. I had this insatiable drive to get there sooner. Whereas most people were satisfied to train two or three times a week, I quickly escalated my program to six workouts a week. With my desire and my drive, I definitely wasn't normal. Normal people can be happy with a regular life. I was different. I felt there was more to life than just plodding through an average existence. I'd always been impressed by stories of greatness and power. Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon were names I knew and remembered. I wanted to do something special, to be recognized as the best. My dreams went beyond a spectacular body. Once I had that, I knew what it would do for me. I'd get into the movies and build gymnasiums all over the world. I'd create an empire. This inspired me to work even harder. When I felt my lungs burning as though they would burst and my veins bulging with blood, I loved it. I knew then that I was growing, making one more step toward becoming like Reg Park. I wanted that body and I didn't care what I had to go through to get it. My weight room was not heated, so naturally in cold weather it was freezing. I didn't care. I trained without heat, even on days when the temperature went below zero. From the beginning, I was a believer in the basic movements. Most of the people I knew didn't really understand what I was doing at all. My mind was totally locked into working out, and I was annoyed if anything took me away from it. I started this practice early in my career and continued it for as long as it served to help me maintain a clear focus and drive myself toward a fixed point. In two or three years I had actually been able to change my body entirely. That told me something. If I had been able to change my body that much, I could also, through the same discipline and determination, change anything else I wanted. I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else. Every day I hear someone say, "I'm too fat. I need to lose twenty-five pounds, but I can't. I never seem to improve." I'd hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak. By observing the principles of strict discipline that bodybuilding taught me, I can prepare myself for anything. My desire to build my body and be Mr. Universe was totally beyond their comprehension. I listened only to my inner voice, my instincts. Even people's ideas were small. There was too much contentment, too much acceptance of things as they'd always been. I felt I was already one of the best in the world. Obviously, I wasn't even in the top 5,000; but in my mind I was the best. At that point my own thinking was tuned in to only one thing: becoming Mr. Universe. In my own mind, I was Mr. Universe; I had this absolutely clear vision of myself up on the dais with the trophy. It was only a matter of time before the whole world would be able to see it too. And it made no difference to me how much I had to struggle to get there. They paid and came to the gym. But it was a disgusting, superficial effort on their part. They merely went through the motions, doing sissy workouts, pampering themselves. I went right down the line, trying to figure out who I might beat. I got to eighth or ninth place and figured I might have a chance if I tried hard enough. It was a loser's way of looking at it. I defeated myself before I even entered, before I'd even completed the year's training. But I was young. I hadn't yet pulled together my ideas about positive thinking and the powers of the mind over the muscles. Once I was over the initial disappointment of losing, I began trying to understand exactly why I had lost. I tried to be honest, to analyze it fairly. I still had some serious weaknesses. For me, that was a real turning point. I was relying on one thing. What I had more than anyone else was drive. I was hungrier than anybody. I wanted it so badly it hurt. I knew there could be no one else in the world who wanted this title as much as I did. I had thought perhaps he had some special exercises, but that wasn’t true. He concentrated on the standard exercises. That was his "secret" —concentration. Being around Yorton [the winner] backstage for a few minutes made me painfully aware of my own shortcomings. They asked when I was going to get a real job, when I was going to become stable. "Is this what we raised," they asked, "a bum?"I continued doing precisely what I knew I needed to do. In my mind, there was only one possibility for me and that was to go to the top, to be the best. Everything else was just a means to that end. If I expected to make it big in the field, I had to become a showman. I had a photographer take pictures at least once a month. I studied each shot with a magnifying glass. I started training in an area where there were no distractions. That gave me enough time to concentrate and find out what bodybuilding was really all about. I was determined and constant. I never wanted to pause or stop training. I sacrificed a lot of things most bodybuilders didn’t want to give up. I just didn't care, I wanted to win more than anything. And whatever it took to do it, I did. You are a winner, Arnold. I wrote this down and put it where I would see it. I repeated it a dozen times a day. I had lists and charts of the things I needed to concentrate on pasted all over. I looked at them every day before I began working out. It became a twenty-four-hour-a-day job; I had to think about it all the time. We made it a regular thing. We brought girls out there to cook. We made a fire outdoors and turned the whole thing into a little contest. We worked hard but we had a good time. After the muscle-shocking sessions we drank wine and beer and got drunk and carried on like the old-time weight lifters back in the 1800s or early 1900s. Sometimes it became pure insanity. It was a great time. We cooked shish kebab, sat around the fire, and made love. We got into this trip that we were gladiators, male animals. We swam naked out in nature, had all this food, wine and women; we ate like animals and acted like animals. We got off on it so much it became a weekly routine-eating fresh meat and drinking wine and exercising. It's important that you like what you do, and we loved it. They weren't mentally prepared for intensive championship training; they weren't thinking about it. I knew the secret: Concentrate while you're training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind. When I went to the gym I got rid of every alien thought in my mind. I knew that if I went in there concerned about bills or girls and let myself think about those things I'd make only marginal progress. It was then I started seriously analyzing what happens to the body when the mind is tuned in, how important a positive attitude is.53. I began looking at the difference between me and other bodybuilders. The biggest difference was that most bodybuilders did not think I'm going to be a winner. They never allowed themselves to think in those terms. I would hear them complaining while they were training, “Oh, no, not another set!" Most of the people I observed couldn't make astonishing advances because they never had faith in themselves. They had a hazy picture of what they wanted to look like someday, but they doubted they could realize it. That destroyed them. It's always been my belief that if you're training for nothing, you're wasting your effort. Ultimately, they didn't put out the kind of effort I did because they didn't feel they had a chance to make it, And of course, starting with that premise, they didn't. You talk yourself into it. You tell yourself you are going to be the hero. I came in second. That did a little number on my mind. I went away from the auditorium overwhelmed, crushed. I remember the words that kept going through my head: "I'm away from home, in this strange city, in America, and I'm a loser." I cried all night because of it. I had disappointed all my friends, everybody, especially myself. It was awful. I felt it was the end of the world. Business fascinates me. I get caught up in the whole idea that it's a game to make money and to make money make more money. Now I had to reach out to the general public, to people who knew nothing about bodybuilding, and educate them to the benefits of weight training. Working in the same way I had to build my body, I wanted to create an empire. I felt I was equipped to go ahead with my own enterprises. I've come to realize that almost anything difficult, any challenge, takes time, patience and hard work, like building up for a 300-pound bench press. Learning that gave me plenty of positive energy to use later on. I taught myself discipline. I could apply that discipline to everyday life. Gradually a conflict grew up in our relationship. She was a well-balanced woman who wanted an ordinary, solid life, and I was not a well-balanced man and hated the very idea of ordinary life. She had thought I would settle down, that I would reach the top in my field and level off. But that's a concept that has no place in my thinking. For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer. The same with business. I'm so determined to make millions of dollars that I cannot fail. In my mind I've already made the millions; now it's just a matter of going through the motions. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  It was the summer I turned 15. A magical season for me because that year I discovered exactly what I wanted to do with my life. It was more than a young boy's mere pipe dream of a distant hazy future. Confused fantasies of being a fireman, detective, sailor, test pilot, or spy. I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world. The greatest. I'm not exactly sure why I chose bodybuilding, except that I loved it. I loved it from the first moment my fingers closed around a barbell, and I felt the challenge and exhilaration of hoisting the heavy steel plates above my head.

• 0:44David Senra?

  I had always been involved in sports through my father, a tall, sturdy man who was a champion at ice curling. We were a physical family, oriented towards training, good eating, and keeping the body fit and healthy. With my father's encouragement, I first got into organized competitive sports when I was 10. However, by the time I was 13, team sports no longer satisfied me. I was already off on an individual trip. I disliked it when we won a game and I didn't get personal recognition. The only time I really felt rewarded was when I was singled out as being best. I decided to try some individual sports.

• 1:27David Senra?

  I still remember my first visit to the bodybuilding gym. There it was before me. My life. The answer I'd been seeking. It clicked. The other bodybuilders noticed immediately how hard I was working out. They encouraged me to get into bodybuilding. Because of my build, I'd always had it easier at sports than most boys my age. But I had it tougher than a lot of my companions because I wanted more. I demanded more of myself. Once I started, it didn't take long. I was literally addicted. I loved the feel of the cold iron and steel warming to my touch, and the sounds and smells of the gym. I still love it.

• 2:11David Senra?

  I remember that first real workout I had as vividly as if it were last night. I rode my bike to the gym, which was eight miles from the village where I lived. I used barbells, dumbbells, machines. The guys warned me that I'd get sore, but it didn't seem to be having any effect. I thought, I must be beyond that. Then after the workout, I started riding home and I fell off my bike. I was so weak, I couldn't make my hands hold on. I had no feeling in my legs. They were noodles. I was numb, my whole body buzzing. I pushed the bike for a while, leaning on it. Half a mile farther, I tried to ride it again, fell off again, and then just pushed it the rest of the way home.

• 2:56David Senra?

  This was my first experience with weight training, and I was crazy for it. The next morning, I couldn't even lift my arm to comb my hair. Each time I tried, pain shot through every muscle in my shoulder and arm. I couldn't hold the comb. I tried to drink coffee and I spilled it all over the table. I was helpless. "What's wrong, Arnold?" my mother asked. "I'm just sore," I told her. "My muscles are stiff." But my mother kept on. "Why, Arnold? Why do you want to do this to yourself?" I couldn't be bothered with what my mother felt. Seeing new changes in my body, feeling them, turned me on. I felt my muscles aching. I learned that this pain meant progress.

• 3:41David Senra?

  Each time my muscles were sore from a workout, I knew they were growing. I could not have chosen a less popular sport. My school friends thought I was crazy. My family did too. But I didn't care. My only thoughts were of getting ahead, building muscles and more muscles. I remember certain people trying to put negative thoughts in my mind, trying to persuade me to slow down. But I had found the thing to which I wanted to devote my total energy, and there was no stopping me. My drive was unusual. I talked differently than my friends. I was hungrier for success than anyone I knew.

• 4:23David Senra?

  That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder. And it was written by Arnold Schwarzenegger, first published all the way back in 1977. So I found this book after seeing multiple different people, seeing different highlights of, from it on Twitter. And I found, I originally read Arnold's fantastic autobiography. That was Founder's, episode number 141. His autobiography is called Total Recall: My Unbelievable Life Story. And I actually found his autobiography the same, a similar way. I was reading, there's this guy named Derek Sivers, who's one of my, he was an entrepreneur, but he's also one of my favorite writers. And he has a blog at sivers.org. And on that blog, he has his personal highlights from like 250 books. And so I read through his highlights from time to time.

• 5:08David Senra?

  It's a good way to find books. And that's how I discovered Arnold's autobiography. And I could not believe what I was, the highlights I was reading on Derek's site. So I immediately ordered the book. To this day, it's one of my favorite books that I've ever, I've ever read. It's, it's absolutely fantastic. And I had the same feeling when I saw a bunch of people posting highlights from this book. I just could not believe what I was reading again. I didn't even know the book existed. And so I immediately ordered it and devoured it. I had a hard time putting it down and have a ton of highlights. I do want to compare it to another great book I read, though, because the book was published in 1977. Arnold's about 30 years old. And so another great book was Founder's, episode number 140. It's Bill Gates. It's, the book's called Hard Drive: Bill Gates and I Think the Making of the Microsoft Empire, if I remember correctly.

• 5:53David Senra?

  And the reason I think that's so fascinating is because that book covers the first 35 years of Bill Gates' life, all the way up to Microsoft's IPO, and then it ends. And so we see that that Bill Gates is the one that he's, that version of Bill Gates is the one that built the foundation of success that the Bill Gates that's alive today gets to enjoy. And I think in that book, when you see the extreme mentality that Bill Gates has, it's almost the same extreme mentality that a young Arnold Schwarzenegger had. I think in that, in that podcast, I called Bill Gates, that version of Bill Gates, like a gangsta con dressed as Mr. Rogers. In that book, he winds up, he's, I think he's like 21 years old at the time. He's, he's in this lawsuit. And the guy he's going against worked with him for a long time.

• 6:36David Senra?

  And he told the people that were helping him, and his name's Ed Roberts, he's like, they're like, "Oh, don't worry about it. He's just a 21-year-old kid. We can handle him." And he goes, he's like, that was like, that was like Churchill thinking he could deal with Stalin. So it just gives you an insight into how hardcore and how extreme these younger versions of a lot of these founders are. But reading books like the one I have in my hand and the book Hard Drive, I think is really, really educational because we see who these people were before we came to know them. Everybody knows who Bill Gates is now. Everybody knows who Arnold Schwarzenegger is now. This is way before. I mean, and you, it won't be surprising to you. You know, this is Arnold's life before Terminator, before

• 7:18David Senra?

  being the governor. But when you read the book and as we go through the podcast, you'll quickly realize it's no wonder that he went on to succeed. It's not surprising at all that he went on to succeed in so many different fields. And the reason I want to study is because we can apply his philosophy on bodybuilding to doing anything, to any craft. And he even talks about that. He's like, listen, I'm approaching, I'm taking the same mindset. I'm going to approach to business. He's like, I'm going to make millions of dollars. I'm going to build an empire. I'm going to be an actor. He says all these things in this book, way before that happens. So I'm going to jump right into the book. I want to go towards the end and then I'll go back to the beginning. But I really think this gives you an insight right up front into how unique and unusual his mindset is. And he's talking

• 8:00David Senra?

  about the fact that he just retired from being a professional bodybuilder. He gets into his first serious relationship ever because before he would not allow himself any distractions. And this relationship winds up ending because he, she wanted a like normal type life. And the way you describe Arnold, he's like, I'm not here to be average by any means. So he says, gradually a conflict grew in our relationship. She was a well-balanced woman who wanted an ordinary, solid life. And I was not a well-balanced man. And I hated the very idea of ordinary life. She had thought that I would settle down, that I would reach the top in my field and level off. But that's a concept that has no place

• 8:39David Senra?

  in my thinking. For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

• 8:54David Senra?

  Okay, so now I'm gonna go back to his early life. Arnold's a teenager at this point. He just started working out and he finds his blueprint. And this is something that occurs over and over again in these biographies that we're reading, that they find somebody that's older, that's further along down the path of life, and they realize, hey, I like what that person's doing. If they can do it, I can do it too. Arnold's blueprint was this guy named Rege Park. And it's almost, I mean, he almost followed this blueprint to the T. He far exceeded Rege Park, but this is a little bit about that. He says, "In one of these magazines, these bodybuilding magazines, I saw my first photograph of Rege Park. I dreamed about being Rege Park. Rege Park looked so magnificent in the role of Hercules," so he's sitting in a movie theater this time, "that I was transfixed. And sitting there in the theater, I knew that was going to be me. I would look like Rege Park.

• 9:39David Senra?

  I studied every move he made." So Rege Park first becomes famous by being a bodybuilder. He becomes Mr. Olympia. Then, due to that fame, he gets cast in a bunch of roles like Hercules. This is gonna sound just like Arnold. And then from there, he winds up marrying a beautiful woman. He has this beautiful giant house in South Africa. And so, the more Arnold learned about Rege Park, the more he's like, okay, I wanna do this. At this time, I think he's like a 16, 17-year-old kid, living in a tiny village in Austria, right after the end of World War II. So he says, "I studied every move he made. From that point on, my life was utterly dominated by Rege Park. His image was my ideal. It was indelibly fixed in my mind. I found out everything I could about Rege Park. I bought all the magazines that published his programs.

• 10:23David Senra?

  I learned how he started training, what he ate, how he lived, and how he did his workouts. I became obsessed with Rege Park. He was the image in front of me from the time I started training. The more I focused in on this image and worked and grew, the more I saw it was real and possible for me to be like him." And so, he's telling the people he's training with, his other friends that are older than him, that are also in the bodybuilding. He's like, "Man, I wanna be Rege Park." And they're like, "Listen, you have a lot of potential. You're working really hard. Maybe this could happen in five years." And we see another aspect of Arnold's mindset. And again, this is not a book... So this book is split into two halves. The first is like an autobiography and the second half is like his training program and all, how he thinks about working out. It's not a book about working out.

• 11:08David Senra?

  It's not a book about bodybuilding. It's a book about what it means to be completely 100% mentally dedicated to your craft. And that's where I think there's just so many good lessons in this book. I mean, it is amazing. It's just short. The autobiography part is like, what, less than 120 pages? It's amazing how many highlights I have. So let's go into his mindset. This is wild. But I didn't think I could wait five years. I had this insatiable drive to get there sooner. Whereas most people were satisfied to train two or three times a week, I quickly escalated my program to six workouts a week. And so he starts amping up his workload. His dad's seeing what's going on. He's like, what the hell are you doing, Arnold? And they're having a conversation. I'm going to jump right into the conversation.

• 11:51David Senra?

  I want to be the best built man in the world, I said frankly. That made him sigh and shake his head. Then I want to go to America and I want to be in movies. I want to be an actor. America? Yes, America. My God, he cried. He went into the kitchen and told my mother, I think we'd better go to the doctor with this one. He's sick in the head. He was genuinely worried about me. He felt I wasn't normal. And of course, he was right. With my desire and my drive, I definitely wasn't normal. Normal people can be happy with a regular life. I was different. I felt there was more to life than just plodding through an average existence. I'd always been impressed by stories of greatness and power. Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon were names I knew and remembered.

• 12:35David Senra?

  I wanted to do something special, to be recognized as the best. And so before I go to the next highlight, that's one of the benefits, I would say, of reading not only this book, but I heavily recommend you read his autobiography as well, is because he says a lot of things that most people won't verbalize. Even when he admits his mistakes, when he talks about, he's crying because he disappointed himself. Later in his autobiography, he talks about ruining his family and cheating on his wife. It just, he's unbelievably blunt and takes what normal people

• 13:06David Senra?

  Are, I guess, he's definitely not normal. What even high achieving people would normally maybe keep to themselves or like their inner monologue, he reveals a lot of that. And this whole obsession with being, you know, he sought adulation. He talks about, you know, I visualize myself on the podium and everybody just bowing down to me. I mean, he has an extreme, extreme mindset. My dream went beyond a spectacular body. Once I had that, I knew what it would do for me. I'd get into movies and I'd build gyms all over the world. I'd create an empire. Reg Park became my father image. I pasted his pictures all over the walls of my bedroom. That inspired me to work even harder. When I felt my lungs burning as though they would burst and my veins bulging with blood, I loved it. I knew then that I was growing, making one more step towards becoming like Reg Park.

• 13:51David Senra?

  I wanted that body and I didn't, he repeats this over and over again. And I didn't care what I had to go through to get it. And this is an example of that. My weight room was not heated, so naturally in cold weather, it was freezing. I didn't care. I trained without heat, even on days when the temperature went below zero.

• 14:13David Senra?

  And so eventually he needs, he's training by himself. He, a couple of days a week, he's at the gym. Couple of days a week, he's built like his own weight room. And he realizes what this next section, it reminds me, there's this great book I read a long time ago. It's by Steven Pressfield. It's called The War of Art. And it's really about writing, but any kind of creative or difficult endeavor. And it talks about like, why do you procrastinate? Why do you, especially writers have such a hard time just sitting down, doing the act of writing? A lot of them, when you read their biographies or they talk about their craft, they talk about, I hate writing, but I love having written. And so Pressfield puts that phenomenon, that thing that holds you back, that may make you procrastinate, that may inhibit you working as hard as you can and what you're actually trying to achieve in life as a resistance.

• 14:58David Senra?

  And he says, resistance is evil. And so when I read this section, and that's a great like mental model to have, Pressfield's description of resistance popped into my mind. And so he does understand, remember, he's still a young kid. I think he's 16 years old at the time this is happening. And he just doesn't understand. He's like, I want to do this so bad. I'm obsessed. And yet I have like, there's these peaks and valleys. And during the valleys, I lose this this motivation. And so he gets, he gets counsel from an older, wiser person. And it's like, you've got to learn how to master your mind. This is, again, this is a, not a book about bodybuilding. It's about mental dedication. There were certain days when something held me back and I didn't train as hard as other days. This was inexplicable to me.

• 15:41David Senra?

  Some days, nothing could hold me back. Other days, I'd be down. On the down days, I couldn't handle anywhere near normal amount of weight. So this is where his friend Carl comes in. It's not your body, Arnold. Your body can't change that much from one day to the next. It's in your mind. On some days, your goals are just clear. On bad days, you need someone to help you get going. And so Arnold constantly surrounds himself with people that have similar goals. So he's, he's constantly being pushed with them. It became extremely important to have somebody standing behind me saying, let's do one more, Arnold. Come on, another set, one more rep. And it was just as important for me to help somebody else. So the way I think about that is one solution to Arnold's resistance was to have a partner. This is another just random two highlights here. Something I think, it comes up on a lot in

• 16:26David Senra?

  these biographies, but I feel you and I have been talking a lot about it the last few weeks. And that's just the, the, the masters of their craft, master the fundamentals. They don't try to focus on all this complicated stuff. They just really try to get really good at the fundamentals. Arnold talks about the same thing here. From the beginning, I was a believer in the basic movement. This is also something he learned from Reg Park. The basic exercises were creating for me a rugged foundation, a core of muscle I could later build upon for a winning body. And so he's already making a lot of progress. This is where he just talks about like his, this, this spread of confidence. When you have a little, you start to see a little bit of success, you can start to see other people react to your work. It can push you further. And he talks about at length, I

• 17:10David Senra?

  like being different and I like feeling special. Before long, people began looking at me as a special person. Partly, this was the result of my own changing attitude about myself. I was growing, getting bigger and gaining confidence. I was given consideration I had never received before. The strange new attitude towards me had an incredible effect on my ego. It supplied me with something I'd been craving. I'm not sure why I had this need for special attention.

• 17:37David Senra?

  So now he talks a little bit about the negative reaction, that people didn't understand this strange new sport. There was, bodybuilding was, you know, in its infancy. And says, "Most of the people I knew didn't really understand what I was doing at all. In the beginning, it was kind of hard for me to handle." He's talking about that negative feedback, that you're weird, what are you doing? "I was young and impressionable. I knew I wanted to do it so badly, nobody could stop me. Least of all, people I wouldn't even bother to count as friends. But many times, I did question it. I wondered why I was so different. People recognized my athletic talents, but my choice of a sport confused them. Why did you have to pick the least favorite sport in Australia?" They would ask. "It was true. We only had 20 or 30 bodybuilders in the entire country. I couldn't come up with an answer. I didn't know." Now, this is the young version of Arnold.

• 18:21David Senra?

  It's funny, because later on, he talks about that he just absolutely would not allow any other distractions from the outside world to get in. And I wonder, now rereading this for the second time, I wonder if this is, this confused reaction that he was getting at the very beginning. Somehow, he realized, okay, this is not healthy for me. I need to just focus on my, my internal instincts, the fact that I love it and I'm just going to do it regardless of other people's, what other people say. So let me start at the beginning. "I couldn't come up with an answer. I didn't know. It had been instinctive. I'd just fallen in love with it. I loved the feeling of the gym, of working out, of having muscles all over. Now, looking back, I can analyze it more clearly. My total involvement had a lot to do with the discipline, the individualism, and the

• 19:05David Senra?

  utter integrity of bodybuilding." And the note I left myself on that page, which is on the notes, they're full of my notes in this book, is just absolute, complete dedication. Okay, so now we get into how he started to understand the need for complete dedication, for no distractions, and the lengths he would go to, to ensure that. He was completely focused on being Reg Park at this point in his life. "I couldn't be bothered with girls as companions. My mind was totally locked into working out, and I was annoyed if anything took me away from it. I started this practice early in my career and continued it, continued it for as long as it served." For as long as it served to help me maintain a clear focus and drive and drive myself toward a fixed point.

• 19:50David Senra?

  This didn't mean I had no fun, but I needed stable emotions, total discipline. I needed to be there training for two hours in the morning and two hours at night, concentrating on nothing except perfecting my body and bringing it to its peak. Whatever I thought might hold me back, I avoided. I crossed girls off my list, except as tools for my sexual needs. I eliminated my parents, too. This is what I mean, where he admits stuff that most people are not willing to admit. I eliminated my parents, too. It seemed they always wanted to see me. Then, when I was around, they had nothing to say. I grew accustomed to hearing certain questions. "What's wrong with you, Arnold? Don't you feel anything? Don't you have any emotions? How can you answer that?" I always just let it pass with a shrug.

• 20:34David Senra?

  I knew that what I was doing was not only justifiable, it was essential. And he starts seeing progress, which reinforces the fact that this mindset is working for him. In two or three years, I'd actually been able to change my body entirely. That told me something. If I'd been able to change my body that much, I could also, through the same discipline and determination—this is why I want to read the book. Let me—I'm gonna start this over, because I just ran over the point here. Okay, so it says, "That told me something. If I had been able to change my body that much, I could also, through the same discipline and determination, change anything else I wanted." That is the definition of a growth mindset there, right? "I could change my habits, my whole outlook on life.

• 21:18David Senra?

  During the early years, I didn't care how I felt about anything except bodybuilding. It consumed every minute of my days and all of my best effort. I know that if you can change your diet and exercise program to give yourself a different body, you can apply the same principles to anything else." That's why I mentioned at the very beginning, it's like, you read this book, it's like, yeah, no wonder this guy went on to be one of the highest grossing actors of all time. He wants to run for governor, he can do that. He can literally do whatever he wants to do with this mindset and this philosophy and this level of discipline and dedication to what he's focused on. It's amazing. And so he goes into more of that here. "The secret is contained in a three-part formula I learned in the gym. Self-confidence, a positive mental attitude, and honest, hard work."

• 22:03David Senra?

  Many people are aware, and another thing about the book, he constantly talks about, like, I have a, he's kind of disgusted by normal, what he considers normal people. And the fact that he would not allow himself to think like them, that he relished being different and special, and you're going to see him talk about this here. "Many people are aware of these principles, but very few can put them into practice." So he's saying, "It's simple, but not easy, right? Every day, I hear someone say, 'I'm too fat. I need to lose 25 pounds, but I can't. I never seem to improve.'" And this is where we see the monster that's inside of Arnold. "I'd hate myself if that was my kind of attitude, if I were that weak.

• 22:45David Senra?

  I can lose 10 to 40 pounds rapidly, easily, painlessly, by simply setting my mind to it. By observing the principles of strict discipline that bodybuilding taught me, I can prepare myself for anything." And so he gives examples where he has to, he's too big. And so the director that he's working with, because he just started doing movies, like, you need to, can you lose, you know, can you get down to 210 pounds? So he has to lose 40 pounds, because he's 250 at the time. And he comes in at 209. He made sure to go under, and then, right after the movie's done, he starts adding, he goes in the other direction. And so he needs to compete for a next competition, so he winds up adding, I think, 30 or 40 pounds. And so that's what he's talking about. It's like, "Listen, like, you know what you need to do.

• 23:28David Senra?

  You're just making excuses, saying, 'I need to lose 25 pounds, but I can. I never seem to improve.'" And his response is, "I'd hate myself if I had that kind of attitude, if I were that weak." Okay, so let's go back to this conflict that he keeps having with his parents. "To them, the only acceptable way of life was being a banker, secretary, doctor, salesman, being established in an ordinary way, taking the regular kind of job offer through an employment agency, something legitimate. My desire to build my body and be Mr. Universe was totally beyond their comprehension." And so his response, "I listened only to my inner voice and my instincts."

• 24:03David Senra?

  And part of the reason I think he did that is because they were satisfied living in Austria for the rest of their lives. And he was dying, even way before he found bodybuilding. He knew he wanted to come to America. I think he said he was 10 years old at the time he realized he wanted to come to America, started finding bodybuilding, I think he was 15. And he's just, the summary of this next section is, "I've got to get out of here. My real aspiration was to somehow get to America. I'd always had a claustrophobic feeling about Austria. I've got to get out of here," I kept thinking. "It's not big enough. It's stifling. It wouldn't allow me to expand. There never seemed to be enough space. Even people's ideas were small. There was too much contentment, too much acceptance of things as they'd always been."

• 24:48David Senra?

  So this next part, he gets into the difference between him, and he's going to repeat this a few times. He's saying that bodybuilders in general, and you could apply this to other domains, is like, everybody just wants to keep working on what they're good at. He's like, "I want to identify and fix my weaknesses." And so he goes to this, and I'll share later on some details of how extreme he goes to identifying these weaknesses and making sure he's correcting them. "I was always honest about my weak points. That helped me grow. I think it's the key to success in everything. Be honest. Know where you're weak and admit it. There's nobody in bodybuilding without some areas that need work. There's nobody in any area without some areas that they need work. There were some muscles that seemed too stubborn. They refused to grow as rapidly as others. I wrote them on note cards and stuck the cards around my mirror where I couldn't avoid

• 25:33David Senra?

  seeing them. I wrote them down and adjusted my workouts. I increased some exercises. I experimented. I watched my muscles for the results. Slowly, I adjusted and evened out my body. It was a long, almost unending process."

• 25:49David Senra?

  Okay, so moving ahead, everyone at this point had to do at least one year of military service in Austria. And so this is, this time in his life is also going to be the first time he ever enters a bodybuilding competition. So he says, "For me, the army was a good experience. I liked the regimentation, the firm, rigid structure. The whole idea of uniforms and medals appealed to me." Discipline was not a new thing to me. You can't do bodybuilding successfully without it. Then too, I'd also grown up in a disciplined atmosphere. My father was always act— my father always acted like a general. And so while he's in the army, he gets an invitation to his first contest. And he's not allowed to go by the army. So he decides to go AWOL and winds up just taking the risk.

• 26:34David Senra?

  And he wins the contest. Finally, the announcement came. I had won. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Europe Junior. Mr. Europe Junior, excuse me. I love the sudden attention. I knew for certain that I was on my way to becoming the world's greatest bodybuilder. I felt I was already one of the best in the world. Obviously, I wasn't even in the top 5,000, but in my mind, I was the best. At first, the army was not impressed. I had borrowed money to travel back to the base and they caught me as I was climbing over the wall. I sat in jail for seven days with only a blanket, on a cold stone bench and almost no food.

• 27:14David Senra?

  But I had my trophy and I didn't care if they locked me up for the whole year. It had been worth it.

• 27:23David Senra?

  So because of his— he's out of the army now at this point. Because of his early success in winning competitions, he winds up getting—he can move from Austria. He gets an opportunity to manage a gym in Munich, Germany. And I want to take you right into this conversation he's having with the guy that owns the gym, saying, "Hey, I might sponsor you. Maybe you can go check out this competition." And really, the summary of this section is, "I'm not in this world to be a spectator." "Next fall, I'll even pay for your way to London so you can watch the Mr. Universe contest." "What do you mean, 'watch'?" "You can watch the Mr. Universe contest," he repeated. "Watch?" The word stuck in my mind. He gave me a funny look. "You don't think..." "Yes," I said. "I'm going over there and compete." "No, no, no," he said.

• 28:07David Senra?

  "You can't do that. You don't want to compete against them." "Not yet." And this is Arnold's response. "I was gonna go do what I wanted. If I go over there, I'm going to compete," I told him. "Not to watch." He laughed. And I think if I'm not mistaken, he winds up coming in second in that competition. So it was unexpected. He did a lot better, whether it was second or not, he did a lot better than than expected. All right, so this next section is about visualization, which he's constantly talking about, seeing things that happen in your mind before they happen in your life. Why A players only want to work with other A players, or another way to put that, that's something we've seen over and over again. Steve Jobs talks about that. Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, talks about that. Why professionals don't like working with amateurs.

• 28:52David Senra?

  And then necessity is the mother of all inventions. So that no makes sense. Let's move through these highlights. My ego, so he's in Munich, he's training to be Mr. Universe, right? But he's also, he needs to make money, so he's got, he's being a personal trainer, he's managing a gym, he's doing odd jobs, he's doing whatever, he has no abundance, like he doesn't have any slack in his schedule. There's no extra time for anything, because he has no money at this point in his life. My ego wouldn't allow me to tell my parents what, how much I was struggling. At that point, my own thinking was tuned into only one thing: becoming Mr. Universe. In my own mind, I was Mr. Universe. I had this absolutely clear vision of myself, myself up on the pedestal with the trophy. It was only a matter of time before the whole world would be able

• 29:37David Senra?

  to see it too. And it made no difference to me how much I had to struggle to get there. That's probably the third or fourth time I've repeated so far in this book. It's repeated dozens of times. I don't care what I have to do, I will do whatever. If I have to sit in a jail for seven days on a stone bed with a tiny blanket and no food, I don't care. I will do it. It made no difference to me how much I had to struggle. Go back to him saying, I have this gym, it's freezing in Austria, it's below freezing, there's no heating, I don't care, I'm still working out. This absolute 100% mental dedication to his goal, I'm going to move forward no matter what. If there's an obstacle, I'm jumping over it, I'll run through it, I'll go around it, it does not matter. I had to live a split life, acting as an instructor to my clients on one hand, and

• 30:21David Senra?

  trying to train myself for Mr. Universe title on the other. It was frustrating. This is what I mean about A players only want to be around A players, professionals don't want to work with amateurs. Most people are amateurs at everything. It was frustrating. People who would never benefit from what I told them kept taking my times. He's talking about his clients. And this is what he's talking about. It's not very, this is a very similar mindset. We've talked about people complaining, I can't lose 20 pounds. And he was just disgusted about how weak they were, right? They paid and they came to the gym, but he uses the word disgusting. They paid and came to the gym, but it was a disgusting, superficial effort on their part. They merely went through the motions, doing sissy workouts, pampering themselves. And there was so much I wanted to do with those wasted hours. I trained both morning and evening.

• 31:05David Senra?

  This is the necessity of his mother of all invention part. I trained both morning and evening. It was the beginning of the split routine that would later become famous. But I, he's, he's the one that made it famous. But I got into it is originally because it was expedient. There was no initial theory involved. I worked from, I worked out from nine to 11 in the morning and then again from seven to nine at night. I couldn't believe the results. And he had to do that because he was working on, in the, in the, in between and all those other hours. So he goes to this competition in London. I think this is the one he was referencing earlier where he's like, I'm not, I'm going to, uh, I'm going to compete, not to just to watch. And this is where he, he says, you know, I was young and not mentally developed at this time.

• 31:47David Senra?

  I had a loser's, I, I was still capable of falling back into what he calls a loser's mentality. And we're going to see that there. So he's like, I had no idea how I'd do in London. All I had to judge were the photographs of other competitors that he was going to compete against. So he goes through this whole list. He goes, no, I decided I can't beat the guy who won. They're talking about last, the last competition. I'd look at the second place winner. No, I can't beat him. I'd look at the guy who placed third. I can't beat him either. I went right down the line trying to figure out who I might be. I got to eighth or ninth place and I figured I might have a chance if I tried hard enough. It was a loser's way of looking at it. I defeated myself before I even entered, before I'd even competed, or excuse me, before I'd even completed that year's training. But I was young.

• 32:32David Senra?

  I hadn't yet pulled together my ideas about positive thinking and the powers of the mind. So in this competition, he winds up coming in second. And this is where he's constantly saying, you gotta be honest, you gotta analyze your weaknesses. And then we're gonna see where he finds his edge, is that he's just hungrier than anyone else that he's competing against. Once I was over the initial disappointment of losing, I began to trying to understand exactly why I had lost. I tried to be honest, to analyze it fairly. I still had some serious weaknesses. For me, that was a real turning point. I decided I had to go all, I had to go back and spend a year on things I had never really given any time to at all. And so then he starts realizing, he's like, well, the guy I lost to, alright, he's won

• 33:16David Senra?

  every single competition that you can win, he's already in movies, and he's just like, well, what's the chance? Like, if I, I'm a lot hungrier than that guy is, right? He's already at the top of the hill, I'm still doing my climb. So I think if I like lean into the fact that I have drive like no one has ever seen, and I'm hungrier than this guy is, I'm gonna beat him next year. I was relying on one thing. What I had more than anyone else was drive. I was hungrier than anybody. I wanted it so badly, it hurt. I knew there could be no one else in the world who wanted this title as much as I did. So after the competition, he's able to actually meet with the winner, and he's able to ask the winner questions.

• 33:59David Senra?

  And he goes into this, this is fascinating. And this is something we've seen over and over again, I'm gonna give you one of my favorite quotes of all time. And he said, "I had thought perhaps he had some special exercises, but that wasn't true. He concentrated on the standard exercises." So again, echoes that same point, master the fundamentals. Don't worry about the fancy stuff, master the fundamentals. He says, but he finds out that's not his secret. What his secret was, was concentration. He concentrated on the standard exercises. That was his secret, concentration. Being around Jorton backstage for a few minutes, that's the guy's name, made me painfully aware of my own shortcomings, I would say, the same thing that Arnold's feeling there, being around the guy he lost to, same feeling.

• 34:44David Senra?

  It's a good feeling to have when you read these biographies. When you start reading biographies of great people, you're like, oh, okay, I got so much more work to do. And that's exciting. It should excite you. It's like, okay, I'm not anywhere near my final form. So let's go back to this idea, it's like, no, I just focus on, I concentrate, right? And I could read you a million quotes. I could sit here for another two hours reading you quotes about, from these books, about history's greatest entrepreneurs telling you to concentrate. But I think Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid, Steve Jobs hero, one of the most influential founders ever lived, someone I've done, what, five different podcasts on, he says it best. "My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn't know

• 35:29David Senra?

  they had." And I think that quote is something that we should constantly reread, constantly remind ourselves, because in this modern world, it is full of infinite distractions. Everything that we interact with is trying to get us not to concentrate. And Edwin Land is telling us, "If you have intense concentration, don't let any distraction in." And you did it hour after hour, you will tap into resources you didn't even know you had. Going back, so he flies back to Munich, and we get his mindset right after his loss. "When his friends heard I'd come in second, they were ecstatic. Their minds were blown. They picked me up because he wasn't expecting to do that well. They weren't expecting him to do that well. They picked me up at the airport and rushed me for a big victory celebration. We had

• 36:13David Senra?

  everything imaginable to drink. There was wild music and dancing. But there was just one thing in my mind. I couldn't wait to get to the gym and start working out for next year's contest." So even though he's doing well, he starts making a little bit of money. He's still struggling. He doesn't have an abundance of money. And so his family, they're still like, "When are you gonna, when are you gonna cut this out? Like, you won a competition. Okay, are we done yet?" "They were upset about me leaving home to manage a gym and refusing to go to school and prepare myself for some respectable profession. They asked me when I was gonna get a real job. When was I going to become stable? Is this what we raised, they said? A bum?" And when I got to that part, that reminded me of what Phil Knight,

• 36:53David Senra?

  founder of Nike, his dad said to him. "When are you going, how?" He asked him. He's selling, he's selling running shoes out of his parents' house. That is the very, very beginning of Nike, right? So all these runners are coming in, knocking on the door, and Phil Knight's dad's observing this. And he says, Phil Knight's nickname was Buck. Everybody called him Buck, right? So his dad says to him, "How long are you going to keep jackass-ing around with these shoes, Buck?" So I bring that to your attention. Imagine if Phil Knight listened to him. He's like, "Okay, I'll stop jackass-ing around, Dad. I'll take your advice." That would have cost Phil Knight $50 billion. Imagine if Arnold Schwarzenegger would have said, "Okay, I won one competition.

• 37:34David Senra?

  I'll go get a respectable job. I'll go to college. Go do what you want me to do." These are just perfect examples. You can't listen to anybody else but your own internal instinct, your own internal scorecard. No one else knows what you're capable of but you. "I let everything they said pass over my head. My thinking went totally beyond that, beyond jobs, beyond Austria and small-town respectability. I continued doing precisely what I knew I needed to do. In my mind, there was only one possibility for me, and that was to go to the top, to be the best. Everything else was just a means to that end." So Arnold keeps working out, she keeps entering competitions, keeps winning, and this leads him to being able to meet his idol. He winds up learning. He winds up training with Reg

• 38:16David Senra?

  Park, winds up learning with Reg Park, winds up going to Reg Park's house. He just couldn't believe it. When he first walked in, he had like this big grin on his face. He's, "I cannot believe I'm seeing this guy right now." So he says, "Working with Reg Park for a short time helped me more than anything to clear up the little confusions I had about the principles of other champions. I learned that you can't really say you must do this to get such-and-such result. You have to try out certain things and find out what is best for your own body. I collected advice from Reg the whole time. I wrote it all down to take back to Munich and use it as it seemed to serve me best." Meeting Reg Park made me become a better person. So he talks about being extremely arrogant, egotistical. He was getting into fights all the time. He was constantly trying

• 38:59David Senra?

  to prove how big and bad he was. And he gets around his idol, and his idol's, you know, just focused on work, calm, doesn't feel the need to prove himself, has already accomplished a bunch of things. He's like, "Oh, okay. This is gonna make me a better person. I'm gonna be more like..." Now, it's not just studying his pictures, not just studying his workout routines, what he eats. It's like how he conducts himself as a gentleman, as an adult, as not this egotistical kid running around trying to prove how bad he is. And so he's like, "All right, this guy made me a better person." The next part is what I referenced earlier. How bad do you want it? I think I was reading the biography of Izzy Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons. They wind up setting up a Four Seasons. And on an island in the Caribbean, the island gets hit by a hurricane.

• 39:44David Senra?

  Like, a couple of days later, one of Izzy Sharp's, the guy that's like running his hotel, goes into the office and finds one of his employees. They're sitting at the desk in an office with no roof on it. And he's like, "What are you doing here?" And this time, this island wasn't developed. They didn't have, you know, no economic opportunity. So she got a job, she's gonna make the most of it. And she said, uh, she said something like, "Well, you told me to show up every day on time and dressed well." And so she was literally saying, she's like, "I took that advice. Okay, there's a hurricane. I can't lose this job." And he was just blown away by that level of dedication. This is, listen to what Arnold does here. "I discovered that taking measurements gave me both satisfaction and incentive. I measured my calves, arms, thighs regularly, and I'd be turned on if I saw increased, increases by an eighth inch or half inch.

• 40:29David Senra?

  On a calendar, I kept even fractional changes in measurement and weight." Now, this is, this blew my mind. "I hired a photographer to take pictures of me once a month, and I studied each picture with a magnifying glass."

• 40:45David Senra?

  Okay, moving ahead. This is "pain as fuel, avoid distractions, determined and constant, and always improving weak points." I knew I was a winner. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way. I was learning to utilize both the good and bad points of my upbringing. Because of my strict parents, I was very disciplined. However, I didn't get certain things I needed as a child, and that made me hungry for achievement, for winning in other ways, for being the best, for being recognized. If I'd gotten everything and had been well-balanced, I wouldn't have had my drive. As a result of this negative element in my childhood, I had a positive drive towards success and recognition.

• 41:28David Senra?

  I started training in an area where there were no distractions. That gave me enough time to concentrate, there's that word again, and find out what bodybuilding was really about. I was determined and constant. I never wanted to pause or stop training. Most other bodybuilders don't do that. I sacrificed a lot of things. Most bodybuilders didn't want to give up. I just didn't care. I wanted to win more than anything, and whatever it took to do it, I did. As soon as I became aware of weak points, I went all out to eliminate them. Everybody said, Arnold has no calves. One look in the mirror told me that they were right.

• 42:09David Senra?

  I trained my calves every day and twice as hard as any other muscle. Many bodybuilders refuse to do this. They keep working on their strong points because that's more gratifying. Let's go back to this visualization, this mindset that he repeats over and over again in the book. "You are a winner, Arnold. I wrote this down and put it where I could see it. I repeated it to myself dozens of times a day." Another example of just this insane dedication that he's applying. "I had lists and charts of all the things I needed to concentrate on pasted all over. I looked at them every day before I began working out. It became a 24-hour-a-day job. I had to think about it all the time."

• 42:52David Senra?

  And so this is the end result of all this dedication, this concentration, this refusing to be distracted, being hungrier than anybody else, working harder than anybody else. He wants to becoming the youngest Mr. Universe of all time. And so this is what it felt like hitting his goal. "I looked out at the audience. They were screaming. Flashbulbs were going off. I was caught up in the strange, unreal splendor of it. I thought, this is what you have been training for. This moment." There was just no way I could take it all in. It was like confronting something impossible to lift. I tried to come down, to realize what it meant. What is happening right now, now, I told myself, is the most important moment in your life.

• 43:34David Senra?

  It was what I had meant when I made up my mind at the age of 10 to be the greatest person in one field. I was 20 years old, and I was already the greatest and the best. I repeated it over to myself. I repeated it over to myself. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Universe 1967. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Universe 1967.

• 43:56David Senra?

  Okay, so at this point in his life, he still has not made it to America yet. He's still in Germany and he's working on like his, like trying to repeat to win the title again. I think he doesn't lose for like another like seven years or something like this. And so one of the things that he repeats a lot is that you have to shock your system. You should be doing things that you're not used to. That's where you grow. But you gotta make sure that you're having fun, that what you're working on, and he's talked about this even, I've watched speeches he gives, you know, when he's in his 60s and he's still talking about this, that you need to love what you do because you're gonna do it all the time. And so he sets up and he starts doing like these outdoor training sessions, which are just, I mean, just listen to what he did. It's, it's pretty wild.

• 44:39David Senra?

  "Once a week, I took a training partner and drove out into the country with the weights. We limited ourselves to one exercise for a particular body part. I remember for the first day, we carried 250 pounds out into the forest and did squats for three hours straight. We ended up doing something like 55 sets of squats each. The last hour seemed endless, but it worked. Our thighs pumped like balloons. We couldn't walk right for a week. We could barely crawl. Our legs had never experienced anything as tough as those 55 sets. We made it a regular thing. We brought girls out there. We made a fire outdoors and turned the whole thing into a little contest. We worked hard, but we had a good time. After the muscle-shocking sessions, we drank wine and beer and got drunk and carried on

• 45:23David Senra?

  like the old-time weightlifters back in the 1800s or early 1900s. Sometimes it was pure insanity. It was a great time. We cooked shish kebab, sat around the fire, and made love. We got into this trip where that we were gladiators, male animals. We swam naked out in nature, had all this food, wine, and women. We ate like animals and acted like animals. We got off on it so much it became a weekly routine, eating fresh meat and drinking wine and exercising. It's important that you like what you do, and we loved it. We had fun, but we also did astonishing workouts. We did torturous workouts in the fresh air. We challenged each other. We experienced a lot of pain.

• 46:08David Senra?

  That was the first time I knew pain could become pleasure. We were benefiting from pain. We were breaking through the pain barrier and shocking the muscle. We looked at this pain as a positive thing because we grew." Okay, so he goes back to comparing and contrasting his mentality versus the bodybuilder he was competing with. And this is just more, he just repeats this throughout the whole book about concentration and focus. They weren't mentally prepared for intensive championship training. They weren't thinking about it. I knew the secret. Concentrate while you're training. Do not allow other thoughts to enter your mind. When I went to the gym, I got rid of every alien thought in my mind. I knew that if I went in there with concern about bills or girls and let myself think

• 46:51David Senra?

  about those things, I'd only make marginal progress. It was then I started seriously analyzing what happens to the body when the mind is tuned in. How important a positive attitude is. I began looking at the difference between me and other bodybuilders. The biggest difference was that most bodybuilders did not think, "I'm going to be a winner." They never allowed themselves to think in those terms. I would hear them complaining while they were training. "Oh, no, not another set." Most of the people I observed couldn't make astonishing advances because they never had faith in themselves. They had a hazy picture of what they wanted to look like someday, but they doubted they could realize it. That destroyed them.

• 47:33David Senra?

  It's always been my belief that if you're training for nothing, you're wasting your effort. Ultimately, they didn't put out the kind of effort I did because they didn't feel they had a chance to make it. And of course, starting with that premise, they didn't make it. And here, I think the sentence kind of summarizes the point he's trying to tell us right now. You talk yourself into it. You tell yourself you are going to be the hero. Okay, so he has constant success as a result of all the work and the mindset he has, he's putting in. So he winds up getting invited to America to compete in his first pro- in, um, in his first competition. He links up with one of the greatest, like, uh, like one of the most influential early, like, fitness entrepreneurs, a guy named Joe Wheeler, Weeder. I don't know if it's Wheeler or Weeder.

• 48:17David Senra?

  He's the one, like, you'll see weights in gyms with his last name, but he had, like, a media empire too. Winds up being very important in the early days of Arnold's career. Arnold winds up studying how he does business and then takes some of the ideas he learned and applies it to his own business. But in this case, um, he didn't do as much as he could do. And so he's just expecting to win because he hasn't lost in a while, and he winds up coming in second. And this is what I meant about, like, we get to, one of the benefits is, like, we see the inner monologue that you might not share with other people as this is happening, right? I came in second. That did a little number on my mind. I went away from the auditorium overwhelmed, crushed. I remember the words that kept going through my head. I'm away from home in this strange city in America and I'm a loser.

• 49:01David Senra?

  I cried all night because of it. I had disappointed all my friends, everybody, especially myself. It was awful. I felt it was the end of the world. But I'd always, and this is the important part, okay? That's fine, happens. We talk about this all over and over again. The entrepreneurial, emotional roller coaster. Best description of that comes from Mark Andreessen. You only ever experienced two emotions, euphoria and terror. Nothing in between. The highest highs, lowest lows, nothing in between. So right now, he's experiencing terror. He's in the lowest lows. He's crying, he's feeling, I'm a loser, I let everybody down. Then he picks himself back up. He's like, alright, I got work to do. But I've always been resilient. A day later, I'd gotten myself together. I'm gonna pay them back, I thought. I'm gonna show them who really is the best. I would train in America.

• 49:46David Senra?

  I would make it in America too. Something that he said in his autobiography, it's not in this book, but the thought, like the premise behind the statement is still there. He said that to him, being a businessman, being an entrepreneur was the ultimate, better than anything else. And so he says, "Business fascinates me. I get caught up in the whole idea that it's a game to make money and to make money, make more money. Joe Weider is a wizard at it and I like being able to watch him operate." So this is, Joe's the one that sponsors him. First, it was only going to be for a year and then Arnold never, like he just stays in California. So, but originally it was only supposed to be for a year and Joe was the one that was making that happen because he agreed to pay the bills, pay Arnold's bills, help him, let him just focus only on training.

• 50:28David Senra?

  And in return, Arnold had to like make appearances with him and let him be photographed for Joe's magazines. Another smart thing that Arnold did is that, I would summarize this, the note I left myself is, "Find what others in your field aren't doing and do that." And so Arnold realizes that, one, that bodybuilding is show business, right? You're putting on a show, literally thousands of people are paying tickets to watch these events. And so he's one of the first people, first bodybuilders. He winds up going to UCLA and hiring a ballet dancer and taking ballet lessons. Because his idea was like the pose off, the posing at the end of these competitions, like, some of these are like, they're just, they're these big awkward monsters.

• 51:12David Senra?

  And he's like, I want to be graceful and fluid. And then he starts doing it to music. It's almost like this dance, he realizes. And like, it's just a lot more appealing to, not only the customer, the paying customer's eyes, but the judges as well. And so he winds up, he says, "I went to hire a dancer at UCLA and started taking ballet lessons to further improve my posing." So it says, you know, the dancer's showing him how to move gracefully, how the different position in your hands should be in, like, all the things that no other bodybuilders are doing. I've seen this before. I was listening to an interview one time with Kobe Bryant. He talks about like, he was having issues with his ankles. And so, part of his offseason work, he says, "I took tap dancing lessons." And he says, like, everybody was laughing at him. He's like, the only basketball player playing tap dancing. But he's like, if you're good at tap dancing, you have a, like, you have the ability to

• 51:56David Senra?

  move your ankles and your feet in ways that people that don't tap dance don't have that ability. And then I could take that ability and apply it to my craft, back to basketball. I was like, wow, that's a really interesting idea. Arnold's essentially doing the same thing here. So Arnold winds up, I'm skipping over a bunch of these competitions and stuff, because I want to focus on, like, how he thought about, I want to get to the point where he starts applying the same principles to other aspects of his life. Now we're closer to where, wrapping up to where he is when the book is published. So he's, I think, 30 years old. And I think he's won like, six or seven different times. And the movie, the documentary Pumping Irons come out, so he's become famous, he's starting to do movies already, like, smaller movies.

• 52:38David Senra?

  And so now he talks about looking at bodybuilding. He says, "And really, the note I left myself is, expand the market through education, build your empire." And says, "I began to look at bodybuilding as a kind of vehicle. The question always comes up, okay, how can you use that," meaning bodybuilding, "to make money?" I had been increasingly more involved in business since the year I bought the gym. I no longer had to prove I was the greatest bodybuilder of all time. Now, I had, and he talks about like the, it's, the, the sport is a lot more popular seven years into this than it was when he first started. But he's like, the, the, and that's what the second half of the book is about, is the fact that like physical education, uh, physical fitness is like the, the, the market, they,

• 53:22David Senra?

  it benefits everybody to have a physically fit body, not to be an Arnold kind of body, obviously. Um, but the fact that you should be exercising and pushing yourself and getting in the best health possible, like that applies to so much more than the small cult following of people that like bodybuilding. And so his whole thing is like, okay, I have an initial market, now let's expand it. He was, it's funny, he put these words, again, think about that, that is, let's see, eighty seven, ninety seven, what is this? Forty something years later, forty five years later, I don't know the exact number. Like, he wind up being right about this. Let me just read this to you. "Now I had to reach out to the general public, to people who knew nothing about bodybuilding, and educate them to the benefits of weight training." So he just constantly, that's what his empire, the foundation of his empire is before he

• 54:06David Senra?

  gets into movies, or before, he's already in movies, but before he becomes like the, the A-list actor, one of the highest scoring actors of all time, is this idea, okay, my empire is going to be built on spreading, evangelizing, um, bodybuilding. The, the, this section of the book ends, the last sentence is, whatever else I do, I want to try to always be kind of an ambassador, a preacher for bodybuilding. So, let's go back to the empire building that he starts to do. "Working the saint," and this is why, again, this is, this is towards the end of the book, it's gonna wrap up, it's gonna kind of tie in everything that we've been talking about today, which is like, this mindset applies to so much more than just bodybuilding. It applies to anything. "Working in the same way I had to build my body, I wanted to create an empire. Because of my business education and the practical aspects of business I learned from

• 54:49David Senra?

  Joe Weider, I felt I was equipped to go ahead with my own enterprises. I established a series of mail order training courses which enabled me to help educate thousands of bodybuilders all over the world. I sold photo albums, t-shirts, posing trunks, personalized programs. I worked out seminar, I worked out..." I worked out seminars all over the world. Japan, Australia, South Africa, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Finland, Spain, Canada, Mexico and the United States. I began, let me actually pause there. There's something, there's another, that just, that section just made me think of, there's a line that he has in his autobiography where he talks about like Joe would take him everywhere and he would never say no. He's like, yep, let's go do it. Cause he, it starts off, you know, only making maybe like 500 bucks at these seminars,

• 55:34David Senra?

  but he starts making a lot of money at this. And he says, other bodybuilders that were offered, that Joe offered the same opportunity to would say no. They had to focus on training or they wanted to hang out at the beach. And Arnold has a line where he's like lazy bastards, wouldn't want to work every day. I, I was in a rush to get rich or something like that. But I was just reading all these different countries he went to and just the amount of, you know, travel and work he had to do. I began promoting bodybuilding competitions in America. In order to keep my name and make it grow, I continued to defend my titles. Eventually I wanted every single person who touched a weight to equate the feeling of the barbell with my name. The moment he got hold of it, I wanted him to think Arnold. That's, that's pretty wild.

• 56:17David Senra?

  I think the most important things I developed through bodybuilding was my personality, confidence and character. When I was young, I suffered from the same insecurity every kid did. But as I transformed myself into something strong and unique, discovering I could do one thing well, confidence came to me naturally and that gave me a great deal of security. I've come to realize that almost anything difficult, this is so important. I've come to realize that almost anything difficult, any challenge, takes time, patience and hard work, just like I needed to build up a 300 pound bench press. Learning that gave me plenty of positive energy to use later on. I taught myself discipline. I could apply that discipline to everyday life.

• 57:01David Senra?

  I used it in acting and going to school. Whenever I didn't want to study, I would just think back and remember what it took to be Mr. Universe, the sacrifice, the hard work, and I would plunge myself into studying.

• 57:16David Senra?

  And then he wraps up here and I'll close on this with that mindset applying it. He's saying, this is my, remember, he's 32-year-old Arnold, saying, this is, I'm going to take this mindset in the middle of what I'm reading to you, and I'm going to apply it to acting and to making millions of dollars. He hadn't done it yet. And we know from our vantage point that he had no idea, the guy writing these words, had no idea how right he was. With acting now, I am determined to work as hard on removing my accent as I was on improving my poor calves. The same with business. I'm so determined to make millions of dollars that I cannot fail. In my mind, I've already made the millions. Now it's just a matter of going through the motions.

• 58:00David Senra?

  And that is where I'll leave it. I highly recommend reading the book. That section I just worked from, the first book, the whole, the book is split into two, like I said before. The first one is 120, 130 pages. It's a no-brainer to read this. I'll leave my notes, my personal highlights. There's a link in the show notes. This, I'm definitely going to be rereading these highlights from time to time. I found it super motivating, super energizing. I think there's just a ton of good principles I don't want to forget in this book. So, highly recommend reading the book. If you want the full story, read the book, buy the link, buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast player and you're supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 193? I think 193 books down, 1,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.