Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 30 Arnold’s Rules

I ALWAYS WANTED TO be an inspiration for people, but I never set out to be a role model in everything. How could I be when I have so many contradictions and crosscurrents in my life? I’m a European who became an American leader; a Republican who loves Democrats; a businessman who makes his living as an action hero; a tremendously disciplined superachiever who hasn’t always been disciplined enough; a fitness expert who loves cigars; an environmentalist who loves Hummers; a fun-loving guy with kid-like enthusiasm who is most famous for terminating people. How would anybody know what to imitate?

People often assume I should be a role model all the same. When I ride my bicycle around Santa Monica without a helmet, there’s always someone who complains, “What kind of an example is that?” It isn’t meant to be an example!

Usually the objection to my cigars is that I’ve been on a fitness crusade for decades. But I remember once in Sacramento a reporter said, “We zoomed in with the camera on the label of your cigar. It said Cohiba. That’s a Cuban cigar. You’re the governor. How can you flout the law?”

“I smoke it because it’s a great cigar,” I said.

The same with movie violence. I kill people onscreen because, contrary to the critics, I don’t believe that violence on-screen creates violence on the street or in the home. Otherwise there would have been no murders before movies were invented, and the Bible is full of them.

I do want to set an example, of course. I want to inspire you to work out, keep yourself fit, lay off junk food, create a vision and use your will to accomplish it. I want you to throw away the mirror like Sargent Shriver said, get involved in public service and give back. I want you to protect the environment rather than mess it up. If you’re an immigrant, I want you to embrace America. In these ways, I’m very happy to take the torch and be a role model for others because I’ve always had great role models myself—Reg Park, Muhammad Ali, Sargent Shriver, Milton Berle, Nelson Mandela, and Milton Friedman. But it’s never been my goal to set an example in everything I do.

Sometimes I prefer being way out there, shocking people. Rebelliousness is part of what drove me from Austria. I didn’t want to be like everyone else. I thought of myself as special and unique and not the average Hans or Franz.

Being outrageous is a way to succeed. Bodybuilding was a nowhere sport when I was Mr. Olympia. We were struggling to get media coverage. So I started telling reporters that pumping up your muscles was better than coming. It was a crazy statement but it made news. People heard that and thought, “If working out is better than sex, I’m going to try it!”

No one could put me in a mold. When I was governor and people would say, “This is what other governors do” or “You can’t do that if you’re a Republican” or “No one smokes in the capitol, it’s not politically correct,” I’d take that as a signal to go the other way. If you conform, then people complain you’re acting like a politician. The way we ran the governor’s office was unique. How I dressed, how I talked—I always looked for my own way of doing it. People elected me to solve problems and create a vision for our state, yes, but also they wanted things to feel different. They wanted a governor and a Governator. Of course, being different was right up my alley. I didn’t have the same body as everyone else or drive the same car as everyone else.

I’ve never figured this all out. I’m sure a shrink would have a good time with it. Definitely Sigmund Freud, my fellow Austrian, would have a good time talking about the cigars—he smoked stogies too. But life is richer when we embrace the multitudes we all contain, even if we aren’t consistent and what we do doesn’t always make sense, even to us.

When I talk to graduating classes, I always tell a brief version of the story of my life and try to offer lessons everybody can use: have a vision, trust yourself, break some rules, ignore the naysayers, don’t be afraid to fail. Woven through the stories in this memoir are some of the principles of success that have worked for me:

Every time I meet a great person—and I never pass up the chance—I try to ask how they made good and to figure out the angle that has worked for them. I know that there are a thousand keys to success and I love distilling new rules from my experiences and theirs. So here are ten principles I want to pass along:

1. Never let pride get in your way. Muhammad Ali and I did a lot of talk shows together. I always admired him because he was a champion, had a great personality, and was generous and always thoughtful toward others. If all athletes could be like him, the world would be better off. He and I would meet in green rooms and joke around. Once he challenged me to shove him against the wall if I could. I think somebody in boxing must have told him he should start lifting weights like George Foreman, because Ali was more known for his speed and his use of psychology. He was thinking about adding a little “strong as a bull” to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” and he wanted to see how powerful a bodybuilder really was. I was able to shove him to the wall, and he said, “Wow, this weight-lifting stuff really works. Cool. That’s really cool.”

The next time I saw him, he had some buddies with him and he said, “Watch this. Hey, Arnold, try to push me.”

“This must be a setup,” I thought. “Nobody wants to get pushed around in front of his friends.”

I started pushing Ali and backed him up all the way to the wall again. He said, “I told you guys, I told you! This guy’s really strong. This weight stuff is really good.”

He didn’t care about losing a pushing match. He just wanted to show his friends that resistance training worked. It gave you stronger legs and hips and could be useful for boxing.

2. Don’t overthink. If you think all the time, the mind cannot relax. The key thing is to let both the mind and the body float. And then when you need to make a decision or hit a problem hard, you’re ready with all of your energy. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use your brain, but part of us needs to go through life instinctively. By not analyzing everything, you get rid of all the garbage that loads you up and bogs you down. Turning off your mind is an art. It’s a form of meditation. Knowledge is extremely important for making decisions, for a reason that’s not necessarily obvious. The more knowledge you have, the more you’re free to rely on your instincts. You don’t have to take the time to learn about a subject. Yet in most cases, people who have the knowledge get bogged down and frozen. The more you know, the more you hesitate, which is why even the smartest people blow it big-time. A boxer brings a huge amount of knowledge to the ring—when to duck, punch, counter, dance back, block. But if he were to think about any of this when a punch comes, it would be over. He has to use what he knows in a tenth of a second. When you are not confident of your decision-making process, it will slow you down.

Overthinking is why people can’t sleep at night: their mind is racing and they can’t turn it off. Overanalyzing cripples you. Back in 1980, when Al Ehringer and I wanted to develop a block at the end of Main Street in Santa Monica, the investors we were bidding against for the property let their worries hold them back. We’d done the research, too, and realized there were uncertainties that might limit the upside potential. The land was an old trolley right-of-way and wasn’t available for sale, just for long-term lease. Land nearby was contaminated with chemical waste—suppose this land had a problem too? The property straddled the border of Santa Monica and Venice, so it was unclear which local tax laws and regulations applied. We didn’t dwell on these challenges, but the rival bidders did, and after a while all they could see was red flags. So they dropped out when we raised our bid, and we got the property. Within two years, we were able to convert the lease into a purchase, and our gamble started to pay off; 3100 Main Street turned out to be a phenomenal investment. Many movie deals are made under pressure, and if you freeze, you lose. On Twins we had a deadline: Universal needed to know if Danny, Ivan, and I were all committed. There was no time for the agents to dialog. Danny and Ivan and I made the deal on a napkin at lunch. We all signed it and left the table. Danny later had it framed.

3. Forget plan B. To test yourself and grow, you have to operate without a safety net. The public opinion numbers were very low in early 2004 for my newly announced ballot initiatives, in which we were asking the voters’ permission to refinance $15 billion of debt. Our budget experts were already wringing their hands. “What are we going to do if these initiatives fail? We need a plan B.”

“Why take a defeatist attitude?” I said. “If there is no plan B, then plan A has to work. We just announced the initiatives. There’s a lot we can do to get ourselves closer to the goal.”

If you’re anxious, instead of making fallback plans, think about the worst that can happen if you fail. How bad would it be? You quickly find out it’s really nothing. If you fail at running for governor, you may be humiliated, but that is the worst that can happen. Think of all the presidential candidates who bow out. People understand that’s how it works. I thought that if I lost the election for governor, I would just go back to being in movies and making a lot of money. I’d be a free guy, eating good food, riding my motorcycle and spending more time with my family. So I did everything I could to make it happen—putting the best team together, raising the money, running an excellent campaign. If it didn’t happen, then I’d have said, “It just didn’t work out this time.” When I did lose all my ballot initiatives in 2005, it didn’t kill me. Life went on and I led a fantastic trade mission to China. And a year later I was reelected.

My standard for misery is the guys who worked in the diamond mines in South Africa when I visited in the sixties. The mines were something like 1,400 feet down and it was about 110 degrees and the workers were getting paid a dollar a day and were allowed to go home to their family only once a year. That’s being in deep shit. Anything better than that and you’re in good shape.

4. You can use outrageous humor to settle a score. In 2009 my friend Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and the longest-serving assembly speaker in California history, was hosting a fund-raiser for the California Democratic Party at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, and he and I thought it would be funny for me to drop in.

I showed up unannounced and gave Willie a big hug and a smooch in front of everybody, which freaked out half the Democrats and made the other half laugh. Then a freshman state assemblyman from San Francisco named Tom Ammiano stood up at his table and started heckling me. “Kiss my gay ass!” he yelled. The press wrote about it. Ammiano was a professional comedian besides being a politician. I didn’t make any comment. Very funny, ha ha. But in my mind I said, “There will come a time when I’m signing bills and I’m going to get one sponsored by him …”

Sure enough, a few weeks later I got one of Ammiano’s bills. It was a routine measure about the San Francisco waterfront but it meant a lot to him. I instructed my staff to put together a nice veto message.

No one picked up on the message spelled out by the first letter of each line, so a suggestion was leaked to a few reporters: “Are you sure you read the governor’s veto message the right way? Maybe you should read it vertically.” Then everybody saw it and there was a big public fuss:

Journalists asked my press secretary if the fuck-you message had been intentional and he said, “No, we had no idea. It must have been an accident.” But at the next press conference I held, a reporter raised his hand and said, “We gave this message to a mathematician. He said the odds of it being accidental are more than two billion to one.”

“Okay,” I answered. “Why don’t you go back to that same expert and ask what the odds are for an Austrian farm boy to come to America and become the greatest bodybuilding champion of all time, to get in the movie business, marry a Kennedy, and then get elected governor of the biggest state of the United States. Come back to me at the next press conference and tell me those odds.”

The reporters laughed. Meanwhile Tom Ammiano was quoted as saying in effect, “I was a schmuck so he has a right to be a schmuck too.” It defused the whole thing. (A year later, after signing into law another bill he’d sponsored, I issued a statement about it which read vertically, “Y-o-u-r-e W-e-l-c-o-m-e.”)

5. The day has twenty-four hours. I once gave a talk in a University of California classroom, and afterward a student raised his hand and complained, “Governor, since the budget crisis hit us, my tuition has gone up twice. Now it’s too high. I need more financial aid.”

“I understand, it’s difficult,” I said. “But what do you mean, too high?”

“I mean now I have to work part-time.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I have to study!”

So I said, “Let’s figure this out. How many hours do you go to class?”

“I’ve got two hours one day and three hours another day.”

“And how much studying do you have to do?”

“Well, each day, three hours.”

“Okay. So far I see six hours one day and seven hours the other day, counting your commute. What do you do with the rest of the time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the day is twenty-four hours. Have you ever thought about working more? Maybe even taking more classes? Rather than wasting your life away?”

The class was shocked to hear me say this. “I’m not wasting my life away!” said the student.

“Yes, you are. You’re talking about six hours a day. The day is twenty-four hours, so you have eighteen hours left. Maybe you need six hours for sleeping. So if your part-time job takes four hours, you still have time for dating and dancing and drinking and going out. Why are you complaining?”

I explained how as a student I’d trained five hours a day, gone to acting classes four hours a day, worked in construction several hours a day, and gone to college and done my homework. And I was not the only one. In my classes at Santa Monica College and at UCLA Extension there were people who were also working full-time jobs. It’s natural to hope for someone else to foot the bill. And government should be there to help if there is genuine need and provide education. But if government is not taking in enough revenue because of an economic slowdown, then everyone should chip in and sacrifice.

6. Reps, reps, reps. When you walked into the Athletic Union in Graz where I lifted weights as a kid, to the left was a long plywood wall covered with chalk marks. That was where we wrote down our training program each day. Each of us had his own little section on the wall, and before you undressed you’d make a list:

DEAD LIFT: 5 SETS OF 6 REPS / / / / /

CLEAN AND JERK: 6 SETS OF 4 TO 6 REPS / / / / / /

SHOULDER PRESS: 5 SETS OF 15 REPS / / / / /

BENCH PRESS: 5 SETS OF 10 REPS / / / / /

DUMBBELL FLYS: 5 SETS OF 10 REPS / / / / /

And so on, for a total of maybe sixty sets. Even though you didn’t know how strong you were going to be that day, you’d also write down the weight. After each line would be a row of hash marks, one for each set you had planned. If you’d written down five sets of bench press, you would put five lines on the wall.

Then, as soon as you were done with the first set, you went to the wall and crossed off the first line so it became an X. All five lines would have to be turned into Xs before that exercise was done.

This practice had a huge impact on my motivation. I always had the visual feedback of “Wow, an accomplishment. I did what I said I had to do. Now I will go for the next set, and the next set.” Writing out my goals became second nature, and so did the conviction that there are no shortcuts. It took hundreds and even thousands of repetitions for me to learn to hit a great three-quarter back pose, deliver a punch line, dance the tango in True Lies, paint a beautiful birthday card, and say “I’ll be back” just the right way.

If you look at the script of my first address to the United Nations in 2007 on how to fight global warming, here is what you will see:

Each stick at the top of the page represents one time I rehearsed delivering the speech. Whether you’re doing a bicep curl in a chilly gym or talking to world leaders, there are no shortcuts—everything is reps, reps, reps.

No matter what you do in life, it’s either reps or mileage. If you want to be good at skiing, you have to get out on the slopes all the time. If you play chess, you have to play tens of thousands of games. On the movie set, the only way to have your act together is to do the reps. If you’ve done the reps, you don’t have to worry, you can enjoy the moment when the cameras roll. Filming The Tomb in New Orleans recently, we shot a scene with seventy-five people in a prison brawl. The choreography was so complicated, with dozens of fistfights and wrestling matches and prison guards coming in clubbing people, that just the rehearsals took half the day. By the time we shot, everyone was tired but at the same time really pumped. The take was a success. The moves had become second nature to us and it really felt like a fight.

7. Don’t blame your parents. They’ve done their best for you, and if they’ve left you with problems, those problems are now yours to solve. Maybe your parents were too supportive and protective and now you feel needy and vulnerable in the world—don’t blame them for that. Or maybe they were too harsh.

I loved my father when I was little and wanted to be like him. I admired his uniform and his gun and the fact that he was a policeman. But then later on I hated the pressure he put on my brother and me. “You have to set an example in the village because you’re the children of the inspector,” he would say. We had to be the perfect kids, which of course we were not.

He was exacting, which was his nature. He was also brutal at times but I don’t think that was his fault. It was the war. If he had lived in a more normal way, he’d have been different.

So I’ve often wondered: What if he’d been warmer and nicer? Would I have left Austria? Probably not. And that is my great fear!

I became Arnold because of what he did to me. I recognized that I could channel my upbringing in a positive way rather than complain. I could use it to have a vision, set goals, find joy. His harshness drove me from home. It made me come to America, and work for success, and I’m happy it did. I don’t have to lick my wounds.

There’s a passage near the end of Conan the Barbarian that has always stuck with me. The lines are said not by Conan but by Thulsa Doom, the sorcerer who makes Conan as a young boy watch his father be devoured by dogs and who slaughters Conan’s mother before his eyes. As Conan is about to kill him and avenge his parents, Thulsa Doom says, “Who is your father if it is not me? Who gave you the will to live? I am the wellspring from which you flow.”

So it’s not always obvious what you should celebrate. Sometimes you have to appreciate the very people and circumstances that traumatized you. Today I hail the strictness of my father, and my whole upbringing, and the fact that I didn’t have anything that I wanted in Austria, because those were the very factors that made me hungry. Every time he hit me. Every time he said my weight training was garbage, that I should do something useful and go out and chop wood. Every time he disapproved of me or embarrassed me, it put fuel on the fire in my belly. It drove me and motivated me.

8. Change takes big balls. While on a trade mission to Moscow during my last year as governor, I took a little time out to visit former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev at his home. We’d become friends over the years and I’d given a speech for him and sat with him at his eightieth birthday party in London a few months before. Gorbachev’s daughter Irina made lunch for us and several friends from the Gorbachev Institute. We ate for at least two and a half hours.

I’ve always idolized Gorbachev because of the courage it took him to dismantle the political system that he grew up under. Yes, the USSR had financial troubles, and yes, Reagan outspent them, and they were backed into a corner. But for Gorbachev to have the guts to embrace change rather than further oppress his people or pick fights with the West has always amazed me. I asked how he did it. How could he change the system after being indoctrinated from childhood to view Communism as the solution to every problem, and after rising to leadership in the party, where you had to show passion for the system all the time? How could he be so open minded? “My whole life I worked to perfect our system,” he told me. “I couldn’t wait to get to the most powerful position, because I thought then I would be able to fix problems that only the leader can fix. But when I got there, I realized we needed revolutionary change. The only way things got done was if you knew somebody or you paid somebody under the table. So what system did we have? It was time to dismantle the whole thing.” Maybe it’ll take fifty years for people to understand his achievement. Scholars will always be debating whether he did it the right way. I’m not going to debate it; I just thought it was great that he did it. I’m amazed by the courage it took to not go for immediate gratification but to look for the best direction for the country in the long run.

To me Gorbachev is a hero, at the same level as Nelson Mandela, who overcame the anger and despair of twenty-seven years in prison. When given the power to shake the world, both of them chose to build rather than destroy.

9. Take care of your body and your mind. Some of the earliest advice that stuck in my head was Fredi Gerstl channeling Plato. “The Greeks started the Olympics, but they also gave us the great philosophers,” he would say. “You have to build the ultimate physical machine but also the ultimate of the mind.” Focusing on the body was no problem for me, and later on, I became really curious to develop my mind. I realized that the mind is a muscle and we should train it too. So I was determined to train my brain and get smart. I became like a sponge, absorbing everything around me. The world became my university, I developed such a need to learn and read and take it all in.

For people who are successful with their intelligence, the opposite applies. They need to exercise the body every day. Clint Eastwood exercises even when he’s directing and starring in a movie. Dmitri Medvedev worked endless hours when he was president of Russia, but he had a gym at home and worked out two hours each day. If world leaders have time to work out, so do you.

Many years after hearing it from Fredi Gerstl, I heard the same idea of balance from the Pope. I visited the Vatican with Maria and her parents in 1983 for a private audience with John Paul II. Sarge was talking spiritual talk because he was an expert in that. Eunice asked the Holy Father about what kids should do to become better people and he said, “Just pray. Just pray.”

I talked to him about his workouts. Just before we went, I’d read a magazine story that described how athletic the pope was and what good shape he was in. To him, besides religion, life was about taking care of both your mind and your body. So we talked about that. He was known for getting up at five in the morning and reading newspapers in six different languages and doing two hundred push-ups and three hundred sit-ups, all before breakfast and before his workday began. He was a skier too, and he skied even after he became pope.

And he was already in his sixties, twenty-seven years older than me. I said to myself, “If that guy can do it, I’ve got to get up even earlier!”

10. Stay hungry. Be hungry for success, hungry to make your mark, hungry to be seen and to be heard and to have an effect. And as you move up and become successful, make sure also to be hungry for helping others.

Don’t rest on your laurels. Too many former athletes spend their lives talking about how great they were twenty years ago. But someone like Ted Turner goes from running his father’s outdoor advertising business to founding CNN, to organizing the Goodwill Games, to raising bison and supplying bison meat, to having forty-seven honorary degrees. That’s what I call staying hungry. Bono starts as a musician, then buys others’ music, then works to combat AIDS and to create jobs. Anthony Quinn was not happy just being a movie star. He wanted to do more. He became a painter whose canvases sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Donald Trump turned his inheritance into a fortune ten times as big, then had a network TV show. Sarge traveled the world till he died, always hungry for new projects.

So many accomplished people just coast. They wish they could still be somebody and not just talk about the past. There is much more to life than being the greatest at one thing. We learn so much when we’re successful, so why not use what you’ve learned, use your connections and do more with them?

My father always told me, “Be useful. Do something.” He was right. If you have a talent or skill that makes you happy, use it to improve your neighborhood. And if you feel a desire to do more, then go all out. You’ll have plenty of time to rest when you’re in the grave. Live a risky life and a spicy life and like Eleanor Roosevelt said, every day do something that scares you.

We should all stay hungry!