Real-life resilience - Arnold Schwarzenegger

Happy Sunday and welcome to The Resilience Brief. Each weekend I share real-life resilience stories of businesses and individuals, designed to get us thinking about how we can apply these ideas to our own lives and careers. These are preventative resilience tools to help us thrive when challenges come our way.

This week’s story comes from one of my biggest heroes.

The name “Schwarzenegger” is a household name. We say it to anybody and they’ll almost certainly know we’re talking about. Even if we said “Arnold” to someone born before 1985, they’ll likely know who we mean. Whether we know him as Mr. Universe, a world-famous actor, Governor of California, or all of the above, the guy has done it all.

For someone with a resume as impressive as Arnold’s, it would appear as though his life had been almost scripted, as if he had simply been destined for greatness. But that is far from the truth. In fact, if we spend time researching him, we’d discover that the guy worked harder than anyone to get what he got.

Here’s a quick story to demonstrate the point.

In his book “Total Recall”, Arnold describes a specific moment in 2007 when he was the Governor of California. He was preparing to address an important audience. It was a United Nations event and the US President at the time, George W. Bush, would be in attendance. Arnold was given the floor and spoke to the assembly for just over six minutes. At the top of the first page of his speech, he had put down a series of dashes.

In total there were 55 little dashes and each dash represented a time that he practiced that speech.

55 times to practice a 6-min speech! See the image below.

Here was one of the most recognizable men on earth, an incredibly successful actor with at least 30 films under his belt, who invested the time to practice a 6-min speech 55 times!

But when you think about Arnold’s life, it doesn’t really surprise anyone. The guy got to where he got to by practicing. A LOT!

We gotta do the reps.

For Arnold, his whole life has been about the reps. When he was body-building he was in the gym every day for 6–8 hours, perfecting bicep curls over and over again, thousands of times. With his acting he was a workhorse with his lines and preparation for every film. And, as we can see from the above, when he was Governor, he practiced important speeches relentlessly. Everything he does is about repetition and improvement.

"There are no shortcuts - everything is reps, reps, reps." - Arnold.

It’s the way he lived his life. Constant effort over and over, with small tweaks and adjustments as he learnt how to improve every single time. This is what makes Arnold so very special.

How practice builds resilience

Anyone who knows anything about body-building or weight training understands that muscles grow when they are strained under tension.

It’s a great metaphor for life and resilience actually. Every moment of challenge or frustration is a reminder that we’re in a battle for growth. It’s our opportunity to learn something, tweak slightly and adjust. We improve a tiny bit every single time.

Since I discovered that story of Arnold and his speech, I have a rule now for every time I present. I never do a presentation, workshop or keynote without having done at least five practice runs beforehand. And each time I do a private run-through of my presentation, I catch something that would work better with a slight tweak. A joke might land better if I adjust my voice slightly, or I find a new place to insert a quick exercise to reinforce the point I’m trying to make.

Practice builds competence. Competence generates confidence. And confidence fuels our resilience when times get tough.

To see the benefits, we literally have to allocate the time it takes to do the work. Every time we have a tough challenge at the office, we need to remember one of our tools and put it into practice. I always try to remember two things when it comes to this:

1. Improvement. No matter how great we might be at something, there are always opportunities to improve or grow. Every challenge is a chance to hone our skills.

2. Patience. Any valuable change we want to make will take time and we will stumble. Results might not happen instantly, but this is because we haven’t finished putting in the necessary reps. Keep going.

Practice isn’t easy - it’s redundant and slow-burning and takes time to show any results. Even writing this article, I’ve written a few versions and it could still be improved! But it’s better than what I had originally and the next one will be even better than this one.

Practice is underrated. So let’s go get some.

Until next time friends, stay resilient.

Carre @ Resilient Marketing Minds

PS - I actually met Arnold at a hotel in LA in December 2019 and he was an absolute legend for taking the time to stop and take a pic with me. Totally surreal moment!