Interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger

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Joel Holland: So, looking back on your journey to success from where you are today, what would you advise teens to insure that they have a prosperous future?

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Well, I think the first and most important thing is to work on your foundation and on your intelligence, because knowledge is power. If you are smart it opens up all kinds of doors.  Also if you are fit, if you keep your body in shape, it opens up a lot of doors.  Once you have that basic foundation of being physically and mentally in shape, you can go and do anything you want. 

Now lets assume that you choose to become a great basketball player.  What did it take Michael Jordan to get where he was at the height of his career? You will read that he spent five hours a day training for basketball, participating in games, traveling all over his state and all over the country early on as a kid. Besides just studying and going to school, you have to spend many hours, while other kids are out there playing, having fun, going to parties, going dancing and doing all those kinds of things, you have to go and put the five hours in to get better. 

When I was fifteen years old and I started with weight training, my goal was to be a world champion in bodybuilding.  Those were my heros: the guys that were in the Hercules movies and were flexing their muscles.  So I read all the materials, the magazines and the books, and I saw very clearly that those guys were training five hours a day, lifting huge amounts of weight, eating well and staying away from the bad stuff; that is how they won. So, keep focused on the goals and just go for it.

JH: What would you say has been your key to success over the years? You mentioned self-discipline, but what other traits of skills are important for becoming a successful person.

AS: The most important thing is that you see your goal in front of you.  You always have to see it in front of you, because that will become the motivating force for you.  If you want to be a champion in something, or lets say that your goal is to be the police chief of your town, you should always have that in front of you, because at every move you make throughout the day, you can ask yourself, ‘Will this get me to my goal, or will it deviate from the plan?’

So that is the key: keep your goals in mind, look at them all the time, see them in front of you all the time, and make the moves to get there. Then it will become more fun when you read and when you study, because you won’t say ‘why do I have to do all this work,’ because you know this is what will get you there. 

Every set that I did in the gym, every repetition I did on chin-ups or on squats with 500 pounds, I never said to myself, ‘Oh my God, another rep.’ I said, ‘Yes! Another rep, another rep,’ because that will make my dream turn into reality.

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