Arnold’s 7 Heuristics

In October 2023, Arnold was a guest on The Tim Ferriss Show. His stories and lessons serve as prospect behaviors for your Slow Velocity list. Some behaviors on your Slow Velocity list will be specific & tactical (i.e. meditate with the Waking Up app). But some should be more vague and aspirational (i.e. take a risk). It gives you wiggle room to think bigger and be creative. Below I’ve captured 7 amorphous behaviors from Arnold’s stories. Note: I've cleaned the transcript sightly so it's easier to read.

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Did I try my best to be useful?

Arnold attributes a large part of his ‘be useful’ philosophy to his father. Often you can find ways to blend working toward your goals while helping others, too.

Whatever you do, try to serve the people. Try to do something good for your community or for your family. Don’t just think about yourself. That’s why my father was so heavily against body building, because he felt like it was Selbstfrönung, which means you are kind of glorifying yourself rather than worrying about others. So he says, “Instead of lifting for yourself, why don’t you go out and chop some wood? Why don’t you go and shovel some coal? This way, you help some older person that has coal delivered. Shovel coal into their basement so they have coal in the winter and they have wood in the winter, and you help an older person that is not able to do those things anymore. That’s what you should do. Then you get also muscles. Then you also get strong. Then you also can look good.

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Did I try my best to be brave?

We are all afraid of something. Even Arnold.

When [my brother] was 11 years old and he was going to school in Graz, outside the village, and he had to take the bus, they had to be picked up at the bus station a half an hour away from our house. And it was night in the winter, in the fall, and then he was afraid to go home. He would say, “I’m afraid to go home by myself.” So my father would turn to me, he says, “Well, Arnold, can you pick him up? I’ll give you a shilling every night that you pick him up.” So I’m going to end of the week, five shilling.

So I said to him, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll pick him up. No problem.” He says, “You’re not afraid?” I said, “You’re kidding me. No.” But in the meantime, I was also scared shitless. So I appeared tougher than my brother, but I was also afraid. But I was not afraid enough not to go.

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Did I try my best to thrive on punishment?

This sounds crazy and masochistic, but we all have setbacks. Arnold saw his father’s punishment as a setback, using his emotions as fuel to create his vision and his plan.

When I look back, each time our father punished us, it made my brother more and more vulnerable and weaker and it made me strong. I thrived on that — my mind started gearing up to, “I’m going to get back at him. I’m going to leave this house as soon as I can. I’m going to be out of here at the age of 18. I’m going to go to the military and then I’m going to go and get my passport. And then I’m going to go to Germany and then I’m going to go to America and I’m going to be out of here. This is it. I’m not going to take this any longer. And it will make me stronger and really set a program and set a goal and a vision of what I’m going to do in life.”

Whereas my brother crumbled. He got weaker. He started drinking. He started getting involved in alcohol. And I could see in his behavior that he didn’t behave well. He was abusive.

And eventually, he died because of a car accident, drunk driving with the age of — he was I think 24 and I was 23 when that happened. I was already in America at that time. But it was really sad. I could see that he just could not handle anymore the punishment. And I could. I was thriving on it. And I used it to my big plus and as a support system. And it was all about gave me the motivation, it created the fire in the belly. It made me a creative vision, a necessary vision.

In 2001, rock climbing legend-in-the-making Tommy Caldwell sawed off his finger at work. Doctor’s couldn’t save it with full functionality. This setback could have been the end of Tommy’s rock climbing career. But it got him working even harder, and he became an even better climber. 

When you face a setback, will you use it as an excuse or will you use it as fuel?

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Did I try my best to think bigger?

I trained just as hard as everyone else in the gym. Their goal was just smaller. They said, “I want to be Mr. Austria. And I said, “I want to be Mr. Europe, so I’m going to start with Junior Mr. Europe, the best built man of Europe. I’m going to go to this competition.” And I was thinking bigger and I was training as hard as they were. Everything was the same. But then when I won that competition because I had a very clear vision, that’s what I want to win, that immediately launched me into getting a job to become a trainer in Munich in a bodybuilding gymnasium. 

That was like absolute Heaven. At 19, I started training to become the trainer in the gym. Now I had the opportunity to train day and night. When I wake up, because I was sleeping in the gym. I was waking up and I was training. I was taking a nap in the afternoon. I was training. I was going to sleep before going to sleep at night, after dinner, I was training. I was training day and night. This is a dream. But it was all because I thought big.

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Did I try my best to take a risk?

Arnold talks about making the movie Twins with Danny DeVito, and the financial risk he took on himself.

Then when we finally formed a partnership, Danny DeVito, Ivan Reitman and myself, we got together and I said, “I can sympathize with the studio. Why would they take the risk? For what? Why don’t we all take a risk? Why don’t we go to them and say, instead of us getting the big salaries, why don’t we just say we do the movie for nothing? Just give us a backend. You don’t have to pay us any salary whatsoever. If the production costs 16 and a half million dollars, that’s all you use. Not one penny more for us. Fuck us. Don’t worry about us at all. We have plenty of money. And if the movie goes in the toilet, we all go in the toilet. Everyone takes the risks. Not just you, the studio. That would be fair, would it not?” 

They said, “Hey, this is my thinking. What do you want in return?” We said, “All we want is just you give us three 37.5 percent of ownership of the movie, and then we all go to the bank together. If the movie goes through the roof, we all make money. The movie goes in the toilet, none of us make money.” They said, “We are in.”

That’s exactly what we did. And it happened to be with Ivan Reitman’s genius directing. And with Danny DeVito, great, great acting, and everyone else around us, Kelly Preston and everyone else, and me being involved, we made the movie a huge hit. As a matter of fact, that movie made more money than any action movie made up until that point for me.

My action movie made always to 70, $80 million. And that movie made $128 million domestically and worldwide, $250 million. Now imagine the budget being 16 and half million dollars, and your box office is 250 million. Now we own 37 and a half, almost 40 percent of that chunk. We all cleaned house.  

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Did I try my best to sell myself?

When I was being painted in [Andy Warhol's] warehouse down in Soho. And Andy always said that the most important thing is that you don’t just sell the art, but you sell yourself. You have to sell yourself. You have to become an interesting person with what parties you go to, who you hang out with, the photos that you take, the recordings that you make, the magazine that you publish. All of this together makes me a character and makes people fascinated to write about me, and therefore they write about my art.

Sure enough, it worked because in no time Andy Warhol’s art became worth millions and millions of dollars. I used to buy it for $50,000, $30,000. I have the big Indian that is hanging in my office that is now $10, $15 million. I bought for $30,000. Imagine the value that Andy Warhol gained by being just a different character, and being just strange.

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Did I try my best to tear down the mirror?

"There are so many people out there that need help,” like my father-in-law said. Sargent Shriver, who created the Peace Corps, Head Start, Job Corps, and all of these great programs, in his 60s, he said to a bunch of Yale students at the graduation class, he said, “Tear down this mirror that you always look at yourself. Tear down this mirror, and you will be able to look beyond that mirror. And you will see the millions of people that need your help."

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This is a podcast episode worth listening to multiple times. You can find it here on youtube (or on any podcast player). Add one of these items to your Slow Velocity list and use Arnold's voice to help you get just a step closer to your limits this week.