Arnold Schwarzenegger

“Arnold does exactly what I think if you're this driven monomaniacal maniac. What you should do, clear communication with the people in your life. About what is important to you.”

“Many people have potential. What separates the champion from the guy that is the second best or the loser is the person who really has the psychological advantage. Everything is in the mind.”

“My parents sent me to a farm and took Meinard, that's his brother, on vacation. I was sent to my godmother's farm, 50 miles away, when they took my brother to Vienna and Salzburg and all these other places. I was 10. I was left there for two months.”

“So he has five exact goals that he wants to accomplish immediately. He wants to rent a one-bedroom apartment near Gold's gym. He wants to acquire a motivating training partner. He needs to find a freelance writer to help him write his required articles for Joe…”

“Arnold is a high agency person. The world does not happen to high agency individuals. High agency individuals happen to the world.”

“If you think about the people that you and I said in the podcast, they are much more similar to each other. Than they are to, like, the random person on the street. To the average person, Arnold and people like him, most of the people that you and I said in th…”

“For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but it is to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, and to conquer.”

“In the early seventies, each new medium, a form of, like, mass media, was expanding, and Arnold was able to navigate through every medium with remarkable dexterity. A cover story here, a documentary here, an interview after that. This importance and emphasis o…”

“His mind was focused on his body, yet he never lacked the vision and foresight to establish public relations with those who could profit him. He had unlimited imagination and ambition, and he believed in strategically setting up a firm network through written …”

“Arnold's father pitted his two sons against each other. He made them compete in every activity. Because his brother was older, his brother would usually be the one to win.”

“Champions behave like champions before they're champions. They have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.”

“Arnold became a millionaire in real estate. Making his first fortune in real estate actually gave him the independence to let him pick the movie roles”

“If you're constantly putting your time and effort into your own personal development and those around you are not, they're going to resent you. This is inevitable.”

“LBJ has one of my favorite maxims. He said, if you do everything, you will win.”

“Arnold was inspired to learn that Reg had earned a lucrative income through his physique and had made his way into movies. Arnold instantly resonated with Reg Park's path and chose to replicate his professional life.”

“You have to promote, promote, promote, or it all goes away.”

“I think when you find one singular thing that you could focus on to the exclusion of everything else, Arnold talks about in interviews and in books and everything else, he didn't believe in plan B. He believed you picked what you want to do and you burn the bo…”

“These guys gave Arnold a twelve million dollar Gulfstream jet to close the deal.”

“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.”

“He essentially goes AWOL during basic training so he could take part in his first competition. And as a result, he has to spend a week in military prison.”

“Normal people can be happy with a regular life. I was different. I felt there was more to life than just plotting through an average existence.”

“I remember the first day we carried 250 pounds out into the forest and we did squats For three hours straight. We ended up doing something like 55 sets of squats each.”

“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.”

“I knew that if I went in and I was concerned about bills or girls or let myself think about any other thing, I'd only make marginal progress.”

“And Arnold does a really good job of essentially just shutting out this negativity. If you say negative things about him, if you have a, you know, pessimistic attitude, he just cuts you out of his life.”

“I also began to understand that bodybuilding was just show business. If I expected it to make it big in this field or any other, cause he applies this in for all future endeavors, I had to become a showman.”

“What separates the champion from the guy that is second best, or the loser, is the person who really has the psychological advantage. Everything is in the mind.”

“The exercises he named were not different than the ones that I was doing, but he did them in a different way. His number of repetitions was higher. I had thought perhaps he had some special exercises, but that wasn't true. He concentrated on the standard exerc…”

“I learned that you can't really say You must do this to get such and such a result. You have to try out certain things and find out what is best for you.”

“If I had gotten everything I needed, meaning emotionally as a kid, and been well balanced, I wouldn't have had my drive.”

“I trained 12 months of the year, so most other bodybuilders at the time would take like a month or two off. Arnold went straight through the entire year with no let-up. Most of the other bodybuilders didn't do that.”

“It might seem like I was handcuffing myself by setting such specific goals, but it was the opposite. I found it liberating knowing exactly where I wanted to end up freed me totally to improvise how to get there.”

“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.”

“On a calendar, I kept even fractional changes in measurements and weight. I had a photographer take pictures at least once a month. I studied each shot with a magnifying glass.”

“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.”

“Once I was over the initial disappointment of losing, I began to try to understand exactly why I had lost. I tried to be honest. I tried to analyze it fairly. I still had some serious weaknesses. For me, this was a real turning point. I decided I had to go bac…”

“Whereas most people were satisfied to train two or three times a week, I quickly escalated my program to six workouts a week.”

“The only time I really felt rewarded was when I was singled out as being the best, so I decided to try individual sports.”

“Arnold lays out what he learned to get to the top of this very unusual And frankly, widely ridiculed sport of bodybuilding back then and says, Hey, wait, the same principles I used to get to the top of this sport, I'm going to use to become a movie star and bu…”