Lifestyle

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Simple Approach to Achieving Huge Goals Is the Success Mindset You Should Adopt Today

One of the chapters in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new book, Be Useful: 7 Tools for Life, is “Sell, Sell, Sell.”

That’s why, to promote the book, Schwarzenegger currently seems to be everywhere. Podcasts. Television. Magazines. He sees selling as a vital part of every success story. (That’s especially true for entrepreneurs; no matter what your formal role, every startup founder is also in sales.) Communicating, pitching, and marketing Convincing others. Convincing yourself.

Schwarzenegger, who long ago mastered the art of sales, sees this book as his legacy.

And maybe it is, but to me, this is his legacy.

To Succeed, You Have to Love the Reps

It’s not enough to want to start a successful business. You also have to want the work: constant planning, implementing, selling, and learning. It’s not enough to want to be a great leader. You have to also want the work—the daily tasks involved in motivating, developing, and coaching other people.

You have to want your goal—Arnold would call it your vision—but you also have to want the work.

Better yet, you have to look forward to the work.

As Arnold says:

People always came up to me and said, “Why are you smiling? You’re working out five hours a day. You’re doing the same as the other guys, but the other guys have a sour face, they’re pissed off they have to do another set, another rep …

I looked forward to another thousand sets of situps. I looked forward to doing another 500 pounds of leg press or squat. I looked forward to doing more and more curls until my arms fell off. Why? Because I knew that with every rep that I did and every set that I did, I got one rep closer to turning my vision into a reality.

So I was excited. I couldn’t wait to get to the gym.

Arnold embraced probabilistic thinking, seeing success as, at least in part, a game of numbers. The more reps he did, the closer he got to his goal. The more reps he did, the better he got at performing those reps.

That’s how great salespeople overachieve. That’s how great investors succeed. That’s how great writers, great inventors, great entrepreneurs, and great “everything” succeed. Their success is based on skill, but it’s also based on numbers. They put in the reps.

They look forward to the reps, partly because it brings them closer to their goal but also because putting in the repetitions while striving to increase the quality of every repetition is fundamental to steady and lasting improvement.

And makes their success even more likely.

While I’m not a great anything, many things I do reasonably well are based on reps. I know if I write, say, 5,000 words, 4,000 of them will be pretty good, and the other 1,000 can be shaped or discarded. That makes it relatively easy to look forward to writing; each word puts me one step closer to something good.

The same is true for cycling. I know if I want to ride a 100-mile, 13,000-feet-of-climbing gran fondo, I’ll need to put 2,500 or so miles into my legs. That makes it relatively easy to look forward to going for a ride; each mile puts me one step closer.

The same is true for construction projects. I wanted to be good at working with tile, but going into my first bathroom project, I was nervous and unsure. So I put it off. Then I realized that if I tiled that bathroom, and then another bathroom, and then another bathroom … with enough reps, I would surely gain skill and experience.

Shifting my perspective — seeing reps as the path to the goal — made a huge difference.

That, to me, is Arnold’s legacy. Want to be the best bodybuilder in the world? Love the reps. Want to be a movie star? You have to love the reps — not just the acting reps, but the production and financing and promotion reps. Want to be a politician? You have to love the reps.

Want to be whatever you want to be? Don’t see the reps as a grind. Don’t see the reps as drudgery. Don’t see the reps as dues that, once paid, never have to be paid again.

See each rep as a step that moves you ever closer to your ultimate goal.

Then you’ll love the journey and the destination.

Which in itself is a perfect definition for “success.”

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Inc.

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