Schwarzenegger Be Useful Quotes

First of all, rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people.

The author of Lord of the Flies was rejected by publishers 21 times. J. K. Rowling’s original Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times.

You have 24 hours. Use them.

You need to be able to see what you want to achieve before you do it, not as you do it. That’s the difference.

If you can choose joy over jealousy, happiness over hate, love over resentment, positivity over negativity, then you have the tools to make the best of any situation, even one that feels like failure.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it – as long as you believe 100 percent.” ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

The only difference between them and us, between me and you, between any two people, is the clarity of the picture we have for our future, the strength of our plan to get there, and whether or not we have accepted that the choice to make that vision a reality is ours and ours alone.

But more importantly, I have a rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don’t come to the table with a potential solution, I don’t want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn’t be that bad if it hasn’t motivated you to try to fix it.

The beauty of pain, not only is it temporary...is it tells you when you begin to give enough of yourself in pursuit of your dreams. If the work hasn't hurt or cost you anything, or at least made you uncomfortable, then I'm sorry to be the one to tell you but you're not working hard enough, or sacrificing all that you could to be all you can be.

This life isn't a dress rehearsal, it's not a practice or a training session, it's the real thing. It's the only one you have.

Life isn't just the high points or the big moments... it's also those stretches of time in between. Life happens as much in the transitions as it does in the poses.

In German, we have a saying: Wenn schon, denn schon. Roughly translated, it means “If you’re going to do something, DO IT. Go all out.

First, create little goals for yourself. Don’t worry about the big, broad stuff for now. Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time.

The Running Man is a sci-fi action story based on a novel by Stephen King, built around a nightmare vision of America in 2017—thirty years from when we were shooting. The economy is in a depression, and the United States has become a fascist state where the government uses TV and giant screens in the neighborhoods to distract people from the fact that nobody has a job.

The day is 24 hours; 6 hours we sleep, so you have left 18 hours. So don’t ever give me this thing "I’m working 12 hours so I don’t have time to exercise and to work out." Or "I don’t have time to study another language" and all these kind of things. 18 hours; so utilize the 18 hours, that’s what I’ve always believed in, and I feel like that’s the only way you can get ahead.

When you hook your feet under a support and lift your torso up in a conventional Sit-Up, you are also using the iliopsoas muscles.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it – as long as you believe 100 percent.” ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger   There

Learn from your mistakes and say "I'll be back

The fact that I had such vivid impressions and expectations at all is the reason I got there in the first place.

Not merely bear what is necessary . . . but love it.

Your job is to bust your ass in pursuit of your vision—yours and nobody else’s—and to embrace the failure that is bound to come.

No man is more unhappy,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.

We can’t change those stories, but we can choose where we go from there.

But that is not the purpose of good advice. It’s not to tell you what to build, it’s to show you how to build and why it matters.

The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it – as long as you believe 100 percent.” ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Vision is the most important thing. Vision is purpose and meaning. To have a clear vision is to have a picture of what you want your life to look like and a plan for how to get there.

I’m sure your story is complicated too. I bet growing up was more difficult than the people around you think it was. We can’t change those stories, but we can choose where we go from there.

...what every person who gets shit done has in common is that they either find the time, make the time, or turn the time they do have into what it needs to be for them to accomplish the task in front of them.

The famous Austrian psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed that, while we can’t control many things that happen in our lives, we always have the power to control how we feel and what we do about them.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has a big one, Michael J. Fox has a small one, Madonna doesn't have one, The Pope has one but doesn't use it, Dominique Strauss-Khan uses his all the time. What is it? A last name! And shame on you for thinking it was something else.

Going for a walk, going to the gym, reading, riding your bike, taking a Jacuzzi, I don’t care what you do. If you are stuck, if you are struggling to figure out a clear vision for the life you want, then all I care about is that you make little goals for yourself to start building momentum and that you create time and space every day to think, to daydream, to look around, to be present in the world, to let inspiration and ideas in. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, at least give it a chance to find you.

It's just not an excuse to give less of yourself. Regardless of the size of your dream, if you don't push yourself, if you don't give it your all, if you don't cut the legs off your sweatpants when the situation calls for it, then you're only letting yourself down.

Being busy helping customers meant that I had no time to train the way I was used to, with an intense four-or five-hour workout each day. So I adopted the idea of training twice a day, two hours before work and two hours from seven to nine in the evening, when business slacked off and only the serious lifters were left. Split workouts seemed like an annoyance at first, but I realized I was onto something when I saw the results: I was concentrating better and recovering faster while grinding out longer and harder sets. On many days I would add a third training session at lunchtime. I'd isolate a body part that I thought was weak and give it thirty or forty minutes of my full attention, blasting twenty sets of calf raises, say, or one hundred triceps extensions. I did the same thing some nights after dinner, coming back to train for an hour at eleven o'clock. As I went to sleep in my snug little room, I'd often feel one or another muscle that I'd traumatized that day jumping and twitching-just a side effect of a successful workout and every pleasing, because I knew those fibers would now recover and grow.

The body that isn't used to. maybe the ninth, tenth... eleventh, and twelfth rep with a certain weight. So that makes the body grow, then. Going through this pain barrier. Experiencing pain in your muscles and aching... and just go on and go on. And this last two or three or four repetitions... that's what makes the muscle then grow. And that divides one from a champion and one from not being a champion. lf you can go through this pain barrier, you may get to be a champion. lf you can't go through, forget it. And that's what most people lack, is having the guts. The guts to go in and just say, ''l'll go through and l don't care what happens.'' lt aches, and if l fall down.... l have no fear of fainting in a gym... because l know it could happen. l threw up many times while l was working out. But it doesn't matter, because it's all worth it.

In the past, before the physiology of abdominal training was well understood, bodybuilders used to do a lot of “conventional” abdominal exercises such as Sit-Ups and Leg Raises. Unfortunately, those are not primary abdominal exercises but instead work the iliopsoas muscles—the hip flexors.

Use it or lose it is the rule with ripe fruit, political goodwill, media attention, coupons, economic opportunity, space to pass on the highway, all sorts of things. But most importantly, it’s true of the knowledge you soak up over your lifetime. If you don’t regularly flex your mind like a muscle and put your knowledge to work, it will eventually lose its power.

I owe a lot to my upbringing. I was made for it and made by it. I wouldn’t be who I am today without each one of those experiences. The Stoics have a term for this: amor fati. Love of fate. “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to,” the great Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus said. “Rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens. Then you will be happy.

First, create little goals for yourself. Don’t worry about the big, broad stuff for now. Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time. They can be exercise goals, nutrition goals. They can be about networking or reading or getting your house organized. Start doing things you like to do or that make you proud of yourself for having completed them. Do those things every day with a little goal attached to them, and then notice how doing that changes what you pay attention to. All of a sudden you will find yourself looking at things differently.

When I was a kid, growing up during the 1970s, I used to read a lot of horror and science fiction. I graduated from comic books to paperbacks around the time I first entered my teens. And I want to say that what 99% of that stuff tells you about supposed encounters with the unknown is a formulaic convention. No one faints like a chicken-shit or else reaches for their weapon like Arnie Schwarzenegger in the face of something so utterly terrifying there isn’t even a name for it. What those writers don’t know is what happens in an encounter with the outside is this: that the moment slows down to such an extent that time itself simply stands still in your head. I suppose that fact doesn’t make for good characterisation. It’s incommunicable. I think they call it the numinous. I once did a semester in creative writing back after graduating, around the decade King was outselling every other author on the planet, but could never make the grade. Still, I read a lot of the best attempts. Maybe that’s why someone like Lovecraft, or Machen, or one of the old-school writers of that stuff I used to read had almost pulled it off. They were no good at characterisation and tended to use ciphers, presenting the phenomenon itself as the main protagonist, because it was the way things are when you encounter it. The thing empties you, draining out any semblance of normalcy, no matter what your history is, or what you think you’re all about. Real horror consists not of the worst thing in the world you can imagine happening, but in encountering some abomination you cannot possibly imagine, something even worse than fear: a shard of absolute outsideness. Human characters become shadows, just shadows.

On December 1, 2006, federal deputies were brawling in Mexico’s Congress hours before Felipe Calderón was due to enter the chamber to be sworn in as president. It was a fight for space. The leftist deputies claimed their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had really won the election but been robbed of his rightful victory. They were trying to gain control of the podium to stop Calderón from taking the oath and assuming office. The conservative deputies were defending the podium to allow the presidential accession. The conservatives won the scrap. There were more of them, and they seemed to be better fed. Among those attending the ceremony were former U.S. president George Bush (Bush the First) and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was covering the Congress door, snatching interviews as guests went in. The elderly Bush hobbled past with six bodyguards with bald heads and microphones at their mouths. I asked him what he thought about the ruckus in the chamber. “Well, I hope that Mexicans can resolve their differences,” he replied diplomatically. Schwarzenegger strolled past with no bodyguards at all. I asked what he thought about the fisticuffs. The Terminator turned round, stared intensely, and uttered three words: “It’s good action!” I phoned the quote back to headquarters and it went out on a wire story. Suddenly, Schwarznegger’s statement was being bounced around California TV stations. Then the BBC led their newscast with it: “It takes a lot to impress Arnold Schwarznegger but today when he was in Mexico …” I got frantic phone calls from the governor’s office in Los Angeles. Was his quote perhaps being used out of context? Well, I replied, I asked him straight and he told me straight.

That is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you, based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go. Does the picture you have in your mind of your ideal future get blurrier or sharper because of this thing you’re about to do? The happiest and most successful people in the world do everything in their power to avoid bad decisions that confuse matters and drag them away from their goals. Instead, they focus on making choices that bring clarity to their vision and bring them closer to achieving it. It doesn’t matter if they’re considering a small thing or a huge thing, the decision-making process is always the same. The only difference between them and us, between me and you, between any two people, is the clarity of the picture we have for our future, the strength of our plan to get there, and whether or not we have accepted that the choice to make that vision a reality is ours and ours alone.

Concentrate on being useful, rather than how do I feel today, otherwise the world is not going to change.

As Arnold Schwarzenegger succinctly put it, the message is “screw your freedom.”15 The message is “shut up and toe the fucking line.” The message is “show me your fucking papers.” “Use the fucking pronouns.” “Eat the fucking bugs.” “Get the fucking ‘vaccinations.’ Do not fucking ask us ‘how many.’ The answer is ‘as many as we fucking tell you.’” The message is, there will be no more unauthorized presidents, no more leaving the European Union, no more “populist” rebellions against the global hegemony of global-capitalism and its soul-crushing, valueless, “woke” ideology.

Curiosity. Hunger for information. Being open-minded. Putting your knowledge to good use. This, it turns out, is a formula for anyone to create real, meaningful change in the world, whether it’s personal, professional, or political.

Which it literally could be. Many of history’s greatest thinkers, leaders, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs found some of their greatest inspiration going for walks. Beethoven used to take walks carrying blank pages of sheet music and a pencil. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth used to write as he took walks around a lake where he lived. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle would lecture their students while taking long walks with them, often working out their ideas at the same time. Two thousand years later, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” Einstein refined many of his theories about the universe while walking around the Princeton University campus. The writer Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

First, create little goals for yourself. Don’t worry about the big, broad stuff for now. Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time. They can be exercise goals, nutrition goals. They can be about networking or reading or getting your house organized.

Once you’ve developed a rhythm with those little daily goals, create weekly and then monthly goals. Instead of zooming in from a broad place, build out your life from this small beginning and let your vision open up in front of you from there.

Sitting in the Jacuzzi is where I got the idea for my speech to the American people after the events of January 6, 2021. Like most people, I watched the riots unfold at the US Capitol on television and then in great depth on social media. And like most people, I went through a range of emotions. Disbelief. Frustration. Confusion. Anger. Then, finally, sadness. I was sad for our country, because this was a dark day. But I also felt bad for all the men and women, young and old, whom the cameras found, as television networks covered the historic moment and broadcast their angry, desperate, alienated faces across the planet. Whether they liked it or not, this was going to be the mark those people left on the world. This would be their legacy. I thought about them a lot that night as I sat in the Jacuzzi letting the jets loosen up my neck and shoulder muscles, which were tense from the stress of the day. I slowly came to the conclusion that what we all watched that day wasn’t the exercise of political speech, it wasn’t an attempt to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants, as Thomas Jefferson might say . . . it was a cry for help. And I wanted to help them. Since 2003, that has been my life’s focus. Helping people. Public service. Using the power that comes with fame and with political office to make a difference in the lives of as many people as possible. That was the direction my vision took for the third act in the movie of my life. But this was something different. Something more. I was watching all these videos and reading real-time updates on Twitter and Instagram from people who were there. Protesters. Police. Bystanders. Reporters. If they could reach me through social media, I thought, then I could reach them.

There is a lot of evidence for the power of taking a walk to increase creativity, inspire new ideas, and change people’s lives, whoever they are. A 2014 study by researchers at Stanford University showed that walking increased the creative thinking of 100 percent of the study participants who were asked to walk while completing a series of creative tasks. There is a ton of anecdotal evidence as well. Do a quick Google search for the words “walk” and “change,” and you will see an avalanche of articles with titles like “How Taking a Walk Changed My Life.” They’re written by all sorts of people: men and women, young and old, fit and out of shape, students and professionals, American, Indian, African, European, Asian, you name it. Going for a walk helped them change their routines and their habits; it helped them shake loose solutions to tricky problems; it helped them to process trauma and make big life decisions.

It’s that way with bicycling too. No one can bother you on a bike, so you’re free to let your thoughts go wherever they go.

I create space for inspiration by taking a Jacuzzi every night. There’s something about the hot water and the steam, about the hum of the jets and the rush of the bubbles. The feeling of floating, of not being able to feel the weight of my own body, sharpens all my other senses and opens me up to everything around me. The Jacuzzi gives me twenty to thirty minutes of mental clarity. It’s where I do some of my best thinking.

Plan B is to succeed at plan A.

Be a Sponge Being curious and being a good listener are a big part of how to effectively utilize your relationships with other people in pursuit of your goals. I don’t mean that in a manipulative way, only practically. When it comes down to it, people are resources. But it’s only when you learn to soak up what those people tell you—not just let it go in one ear, out the other—that you truly begin to make yourself useful to others and become a resource yourself.

my journey through the previous three acts of my life. It was the very same one I reached for more

Do you know how many times people tell me they don't have time to work out, and then I ask them to take out their phones and show me their screen time stats and it says they spent three and a half hours on social media? It's not hours in the day you lack, it's a vision for your life that makes time irrelevant.

Turn your TV off. Throw your machines out the win-dow. Save your excuses for someone who cares. Get to work.

...the one thing I tell them that they should be doing more of is promoting. Communicating. selling. Sell, sell, sell! You can have the most amazing idea, the most fantastic plan, the best in class of virtually anything, but if nobody knows that it exists or knows what it is, then it's a waste of time and effort. It might as well not exist at all.

This is something you should think about. What is the value of trying to be someone you're not? Of hiding from your true story and letting someone else tell it? Where do you think that gets you in the end? I promise you, it's nowhere good. Embrace who you are! Own your story! Even if you don't like it. Even if it's bad, and you're ashamed. If you run away and hide from your past, if you deny your story and try to sell a different one, even if you mean well, it just makes you seem like a con artist. Or worse, a politician.

If you see a problem and you don't come to the table with a potential solution, I don't want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn't be that bad ifit hasn't motivated you to try to fix it.

Learn from your mistakes and then say, "I'll be back.

If anything, when you look at it with the right perspective, failure is actually the beginning of measurable success, because failure is only possible in situations where you've tried to accomplish something difficult and worth-while. You can't fail when you don't try. In that sense, failure is kind of like a progress report on your path to purpose. It shows you how far you've come, and it reminds you how far you still have to go and what you have to work on to get there. It's an opportunity to learn from your mistakes, to evolve your approach, and to come back better than ever.

But that assumes I cared what anyone thought about the goals I wanted to achieve with my life. It assumes that I wanted or needed the approval of some group of people to go after my dreams. The only approval I ever sought was from the judges at bodybuilding competitions, moviegoers at the box office, and voters at the ballot box. And if I didn't get it, if I lost or failed, I didn't complain. Instead, I used it as a learning experience. I went back to the gym or to the drawing board or to the briefing books, and I did the work to get better and smarter and to come back stronger the next time.

I could very easily have allowed myself to get wrapped up in all that, but I chose to look at the positive. I have always made that choice—to recognize that on the vast majority of days my father was a good dad and my mother was the best mom. That life wasn't exciting or particularly comfortable, not by modern standards anyway, but it was a good life. A life where I learned a lot and I found my passion, my purpose, and my first mentors.

And when exactly has complaining ever gotten someone closer to achieving their goals? You work to make a dream come true, you don't whine it into existence. Plus, problems and adversity are a normal part of every person's journey. Whatever your vision is, there is going to be struggle. Tough times. Things that bug the shit out of you. You have to learn how to manage those moments. Lou have to get good at shifting gears and finding the positive in things. You have to know how to reframe the failure you experience and understand the risks you're under-taking. Confronting problems instead of complaining about them gives you the chance to practice all these skills.

If you see a problem and you don't come to the table with a potential solution, I don't want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn't be that bad if it hasn't motivated you to try to fix it.

We can fix that. Because everything good, all great change, starts with a clear vision.

They'll even argue with you: "I hate this, why would I have chosen it?" Except no one forced that ring on their finger or put that second cheeseburger in their hands. No one made them take that dead-end job. No one made them skip class, or miss workouts, or stop going to church. No one made them stay up late every night playing video games instead of getting eight hours of sleep. No one made them drink that last beer or spend their last dollar. Yet they fully believe what they're saying.

That is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you, based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go. Does the picture you have in your mind of your ideal future get blurrier or sharper because of this thing you're about to do? The happiest and most successful people in the world do everything in their power to avoid bad decisions that confuse matters and drag them away from their goals.

They thought I would just give up and move on to something else, to other priorities. This was their second mistake. When something like redistricting reform snaps into focus in my mind, when it becomes a goal for me, I don't let it go. I don't move on. I don't quit. And I don't compromise. There is no plan B. Plan B is to succeed at plan A.

This is what can happen when you think big with your goals. When you go all in. When you ignore the naysay-ers. When you stick to your guns. Good things can happen for you and all the people you care about at a level that others never thought possible.

Let me tell you something: Nothing good has ever come from having a plan B. Nothing important or life-changing, anyway. Plan B is dangerous to every big dream. It is a plan for failure. If plan A is the road less traveled, if it's you carving your own path toward the vision you've created for your life, then plan B is the path of least resis-tance. And once you know that path is there, once you've accepted that it's an option, it becomes so, so easy to take it whenever things get difficult. [Screw] plan B! The second you create a backup plan, not only are you giving a voice to all the naysayers, but you are shrinking your own dream by acknowledging the validity of their doubts. Worse, you become your own naysayer. There are enough of them out there already; you don't need to add to their ranks.

The only thing that bothered them more than my willingness to make waves was the fact that I didn't listen to their complaints, and I didn't care that it bothered them.

When a concept from one of my business classes clicked for me in my studies, I immediately wanted to go deeper. When I could hear my English getting better, I wanted to talk to people and practice more. In the gym, when I felt the pump, I knew progress was happening, and it made me want to lift until my arms fell off. Sometimes I would. I'd lift until I felt the pump, then I'd keep going until I really felt the pain, like Ali talked about, and then I'd keep going some more until I couldn't move. There were some days that this was the only way you were going to get me out of the gym.

When it comes to realizing your dreams, you cannot allow that to happen. In fact, it should never happen, because no one is better equipped or motivated than you to sell your vision to the world. It doesn't matter if you want to move your family to a different country or your football team to a new town, if you want to make movies or make a difference, if you want to build a business, buy a farm, join the military, or create an empire. No matter the size of your dream, you have to know how to sell it and who to sell it to.

As you think about this thing you want to do, or the mark you want to make in this world, remember that your job is neither to avoid failure nor to seek it out. Your job is to bust your ass in pursuit of your vision-yours and nobody else's-and to embrace the failure that is bound to come.

Important, interesting, powerful people are drawn to those who ask good questions and listen well. When you're curious and you're humble enough to admit that you don't know everything, people like that want to talk to you. They want to help you. Your curiosity and humility show them you don't have too much of an ego to listen to them. When you're closed-minded, they know there's no reason to waste their breath. What's the point of trying to each you something if you're already so sure you've got it all figured out?

If I'd focused completely on the end result or tried to swallow the elephant in one bite, as the saying goes, I absolutely would have choked. I would have failed. The only way to achieve the kind of sustainable, life-changing success that I wanted was to do the hard, incremental work day in and day out. I had to focus on doing the reps and executing well. I had to listen to the pain and build on the growth that would eventually come. I had to follow through, every day, on the plan I'd created in pursuit of my larger vision.

None of us has a choice about where we come from... We can't change those stories, but we can choose where we go from there.

And when exactly has complaining ever gotten someone closer to achieving their goals? You work to make a dream come true, you don't whine it into existence. Plus, problems and adversity are a normal part of every person's journey. Whatever your vision is, there is going to be struggle. Tough times. Things that bug the shit out of you. You have to learn how to manage those moments. You have to get good at shifting gears and finding the positive in things. You have to know how to reframe the failure you experience and understand the risks you're under-taking. Confronting problems instead of complaining about them gives you the chance to practice all these skills.

When failure is a positive part of the game you play, it's much less scary to search for the limits of your ability— whether that's speaking English, acting in big movies, or tackling big social problems— and then once you've found those limits, to grow beyond them. The only way to do that, though, is to constantly test yourself in a manner that risks repeated failure.

The reality is, when you want something bad enough, and it means enough to you, at some point you have to be willing to reach for the brass ring and not give a fuck about risk anymore. You have to embrace that sometimes the cliché is true: the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.

Do not let your ego win. Don't correct them. If you can stay focused on winning and on achieving your goals, you can use their doubts and underestimation against them to effortlessly bridge the conversation, or the interview, or the negotiation to whatever you want to talk about.

Fredi told all of us boys that training our minds was just as important as training our bodies. He taught us that we can't just be hungry for success and money and fame and muscles. We have to be hungry for knowledge as well.

A big part of selling your vision is seeing how the world around you reacts to what you're trying to do. It's how you figure out who wants to say yes and who you need to say yes. If you can do that, you will know who all your customers are before they even know that you're selling to them.

You have a choice with the naysayers you face on the road to achieving your goals. You can ignore them or you can use them, you just can't ever believe them.

And ever since then, I have turned any kind of negativity directed my way into motivation. The quickest way to get me to bench press five hundred pounds is to tell me it can't be done. The easiest way to ensure that I would become a movie star was to laugh when I told you my plan and then to tell me I couldn't do it.

Watching someone with a crazy goal give it everything they've got and then succeed is so powerful. It's like magic, because it unlocks potential we didn't even know we had. It shows us what is possible if we put our mind to something and then back that up with effort.

If Reg Park, a kid from a small factory town in En-gland, can become Mr. Universe and then a movie star, why couldn't I? If millions of European immigrants can come to America with nothing but a suitcase and a dream and make a life for themselves, why couldn't I' If Ronald Reagan, an actor, can become governor of California, why couldn't I? And if I can do what I did, why can't you?

But the bigger part, the more important part, is the one that so many people miss. When you're chasing a vision and working toward a big goal, there is nothing more energizing than making progress.

This is why failure is worth the risk and important to embrace: it teaches you what doesn't work and points you toward the things that do.

The world needs more sponges. It needs more smart, hopeful, driven, useful people with vision. It needs people who can dream up the world of tomorrow, which only happens when people are first able to soak up the knowledge of the world from today.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, at least give it a chance to find you.

Embrace who you are! Own your story! Even if you don’t like it. Even if it’s bad, and you’re ashamed. If you run away and hide from your past, if you deny your story and try to sell a different one, even if you mean well, it just makes you seem like a con artist. Or worse, a politician.

In fact, I relish the challenge of haivng to climb back up. It's the struggle that makes success, when you achieve it, taste so sweet.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different. It’s accepting the past for what it was and using this moment and this time to help yourself move forward.

I taught myself discipline, the strictest kind of discipline. How to be totally in control of my body, how to control each individual muscle. I could apply that discipline to everyday life. I used it in acting, in 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.

To everybody else, I said get on board or get out of the way, and if you do neither, expect to get worked around or run over.

The Stoics have a term for this: amor fati. Love of fate. “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to,” the great Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus said. “Rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens. Then you will be happy.

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.

feel and what we do about them.