Unexpectedly interesting on a few levels: a sort of unofficial history of postmodern California, a look back at the 1960s and 1970s bodybuilding scene, a discussion of Arnold's forays into real estate, politics, and of course the movie business. A surprisingly enjoyable book!
Notes/Themes:
* On being possessed by a dream: even as a 10-year-old in tiny village of Thal, Austria, Arnold was possessed by the idea of going to America and "making something of himself: "I became absolutely convinced that I was special and meant for bigger things." What's also interesting here is how this can be a self-fulfilling prophecy--or delusional grandiosity--depending on to what extent you live up to your dream.
* He has a knack for turning his liabilities into assets--starting with his preposterous accent. See also his knack for doing the non-consensus thing. Also this guy is a world-class salesman. He understands the selling and marketing aspect of everything: the little two-man bricklaying and construction business he started he advertises as "European bricklayers. Experts in marble and stone" and his commentary on the marketing and promotions elements of bodybuilding and the movie business is likewise fascinating.
* Another interesting heuristic readers can get from this book: ask for advice from experts, follow it, show results and effort, and the experts will take you under their wing. As a boy, Arnold asks other lifters in Austria for advice and suggestions, then after doing exactly what they suggested and showing progress, the guys asked him to join in and lift with them. Soon he had access to much better equipment, a posse to train with, etc. He repeats this heuristic at various stages of his life.
* I also found it hilarious to play Arnold's accent in my head as narrator while I read the book.
* Arnold's use of various mantras, self-talk and richly detailed visualization techniques that look a lot like what we'd call NLP today.
* He gets hired to run a gym in Munich, then to his dismay gets repeatedly hit on by the male owner, who makes multiple passes at him.
* He starts doing "split" workouts, two-a-days basically, letting him grind out more volume, more sets, sometimes even adding a third training session midday. He also discovers other interesting ways to defeat the body's homeostatic response (examples: his "shocking the muscle" techniques, using really unusual/unexpectedly difficult workouts so your body never knows what's coming and thus continues to grow and develop; also "weight stripping" which is now a widely used weightlifting workout format, etc.)
* Read in Arnold's voice: "The deltoids were screaming from the unexpected sequence of sets. I'd shown them who was boss. Their only option now was to heal and grow."
* He meets Franco Columbu in Munich, Columbu is only 5'5, and he was from Sardinia, with an even more "country" upbringing than Arnold had.
* He enters his first Mr. Universe contest in London, underestimating his chances, and was pleasantly surprised by coming in second... but later hated the fact that he had gone into the competition with too-low expectations and too-low standards: "It really taught me a lesson."
* He openly admits to using steroids once he discovered the training methods of East Germany and the Soviet Union; it was common among bodybuilders then and there were no rules against them; he wasn't going to go into a competition with an automatic disadvantage. "...the advantage they gave was about the same as having a good suntan" he ends up concluding. Later, drug use in the following generation of bodybuilders involves steroid doses 20 times what his generation took, which perhaps explains the absolute mutant-looking dudes in these competitions nowadays.
* He constantly raises his expectations of himself, constantly reminds himself to keep his sights set higher than he thinks they should be, he discovers early on that most of his "limits" were purely psychological. True for all of us!
* Also interesting how brutally honest he is with himself when he sees himself lacking effort or being lazy, it made him furious with himself. "I hadn't done everything in my power to prepare."
* Interesting also to hear his take on American culture, both the good and the bad, when he arrives. It upsets his sense of Teutonic order to see the littered and messy streets of Venice, California, the sidewalks are cracked with weeds growing through them, etc. But at the same time he's also blown away by the hospitality and friendliness of Americans, particularly of his neighbors as well as his fellow bodybuilders, all of whom are far more "neighborly" than anyone in Germany or Austria.
* Joe Weider (founder of Mr. Olympia as well as founder of a publishing empire built around bodybuilding) as a slick guy, a hustler, gifted at creating an image, also really good at gaming systems in a savvy way: he invented/created multiple bodybuilding "federations" and then started an "invitational" tournament where you were required to be a title-winner from one of his "federations" to qualify.
* Arnold loves the hard work involved in his bricklaying business with Franco Columbu: "We loved bricklaying and felt very productive. We also had a lot of fun."
* On breaking out of homeostasis in his workouts: "Once each week we would choose an unfamiliar exercise and each do sets and reps until we couldn't do anymore. Then we'd analyze the next day which muscles and sections of muscles were sore, and note it down. Working this way, we spent an entire year making a systematic survey of our bodies and building an inventory of hundreds of exercises and techniques." [This is the kind of stuff that can really show you that you should be raising your game, no matter what your level: for example it really makes me realize I need to raise my game still more with my investing, I can still do way, way more.]
* "I always wrote down my goals." Another unexpected surprise from this book: it offers an excellent review of the fundamentals of goal-setting. Arnold does everything correctly: his goals are quantifiable, he writes them down, they are specific, he visualizes them in rich detail, and his goals are aggressive, even outlandish/BHAG-level.
* His parents see him at a competition for the first time and are blown away, shocked at the world he's joined. Arnold's brother dies at age 25 in a solo drunk driving accident, Arnold then becomes increasingly unable to relate to his parents and to his earlier life; then his father dies from a stroke, and then he just separates himself (almost to the degree of "splitting" in the psychiatric sense) from that whole era of his life, he just moves on psychologically.
* The few pages on how he got his start in real estate is like getting the key bullet points from an entire Carleton Sheets course.
* Arnold is also sort of like the Forrest Gump of the 70s and 80s: his life seemed to intersect with everybody, from Wilt Chamberlain to Rudolph Nureyev; somehow he even bumbled into the controversy between painter Andrew Wyeth and his lover/neighbor Helga Testorf who secretly modeled for him for hundreds of paintings--a story that didn't come out until many years later, but Arnold just happened to collide with it when it happened, long before it became widely known.
* More on Arnold's deep understanding of the sales and marketing aspect of anything and everything: "It always blew my mind that some of the greatest artists, from Michelangelo to Van Gogh, never sold much because they didn't know how. They had to rely on some schmuck--some agent or manager or gallery owner--to do it for them. Picasso would go into a restaurant and do a drawing or paint a plate for a meal. Now you go to these restaurants in Madrid, and the Picassos are hanging on the walls, worth millions of dollars. That wasn't going to happen to my movies. Same with bodybuilding, same with politics--no matter what I did in life, I was aware that you had to sell it."
* Note his poor decision (in retrospect) to get his aortic valve replaced, the surgery goes poorly and needs to be redone, and he never lifts heavy again, it hurts his film career for a long time (producers were worried about his ability do rigorous actions scenes), etc. Wow. Unfortunate.
* Note also the rise and later collapse of Planet Hollywood.
* Also his politics are interesting, especially when viewed through the lens of this era: I'd tentatively argue he's what moderns would today call a cuckservative, a monoparty member through and through.
* He's inspiringly good at flipping it, inverting disappointments and setbacks, and finding a way to derive motivation from them. After being dismissed by Karl Rove: "Actually this is good! This is one of those situations where someone dismisses you, and you come from behind and surprise the shit out of them."
* Also a famous quip from Arnold's first major press conference after declaring for California governor, while flanked by George Shultz and Warren Buffett, the question of CA Prop 13 came up: "First of all, I told Warren if he mentions Prop 13 one more time, he has to do five hundred sit-ups."
* Arnold is shocked as much as anybody else by the seriousness of the great financial crisis in 2008, particularly shocked by shortfalls in tax revenues month by month in the California budget as the country entered the first few innings of the crisis. "I was still willing to describe the problem as a 'hiccup'"... it's interesting that despite his perch as both governor and as the owner of a tremendously large real estate business, Arnold failed to see the GFC coming and wasn't ready for it on any level, particularly the political level. It gives you slightly more sympathy for many of the financial institutions also blindsided by the crisis.
To Read:
Frank Zane's books:
The Zane Body Training Manual
Frank Zane Mind, Body, Spirit: The Personal Training Diaries
The Mind in Body Building
Charles Gaines: Stay Hungry