Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

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:

When I wanted to star in movies, the Hollywood agents I talked to told me to forget it—my body and my name and my accent were all too weird. Instead, I worked hard on my accent and my acting, as hard as I’d worked at bodybuilding, to transform myself into a leading man. With Conan and The Terminator , I broke through: the things that the agents said would be a detriment and make it impossible for me to get a job, all of a sudden made me an action hero. Or as John Milius said when he directed Conan the Barbarian, “If we didn’t have Schwarzenegger, we would have to build one.”

Impossible was a word I loved to ignore when I was governor. They said it would be impossible to convince Californians to build a million solar roofs, and to reform health care, and to do something decisive about global warming. Tackling these challenges appealed to me because no one had been able to do them before. The only way to make the possible possible is to try the impossible. If you fail, so what? That’s what everybody expects. But if you succeed, you make the world a much better place.

As they say in LA, avoid the freeway at rush hour—take the streets. Avoid the movie theater on a Saturday night—go to the matinee. If you know the restaurant will be impossible to get into at nine, why not have an early dinner? People apply this kind of common sense all the time, and yet they forget when it comes to their careers. When every immigrant I knew was saving up to buy a house, I bought an apartment building instead. When every aspiring actor was trying to land bit parts in movies, I held out to be a leading man. When every politician tries to work his or her way up from local office, I went straight for the governorship. It’s easier to stand out when you aim straight for the top.

Achieving my goal of becoming Mr. Olympia was not enough. I had to make people aware there was such a thing as a competition for the most muscular man in the world. I had to make them aware of what training does, besides creating a muscular body—I had to make them aware that fitness promotes health and enhances the quality of life. This was about selling. People can be great poets, great writers, geniuses in the lab. But you can do the finest work and if people don’t know, you have nothing! In politics it’s the same: no matter whether you’re working on environmental policy or education or economic growth, the most important thing is to make people aware.

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.”