Weekly Advice from Arnold Schwarzenegger

Take any of these tips from today’s email and put them into action:

I’ve been loving the World Cup, and it’s disappointing that the US and Austria both lost, but I can’t stop watching. There is something about a big Tournament that pulls you in even when your own Team is already sitting at home.

This week I got my Team together, and we all just sat at my house, watched the Belgium vs Spain game, and did no work.

Nobody even pretended to be sorry about it.

Watching soccer reminds me so much of all of the lessons we share here.

I saw the same guy for Spain take shot after shot. Some sailed high. Some went just to the right. He kept getting the ball back and firing again. You knew he would eventually make it because he didn’t stop. And when it finally went in, the whole stadium lost its mind.

That’s every soccer game. It’s why my fellow Americans have a hard time with it. All of that effort, for maybe 2 or 3 goals. They try, and they fail, and they try, and they fail until they succeed.

They definitely fail more than they succeed.

But they just keep attacking.

The attacking is what got me thinking.

If you only watch the highlights, you just see the big plays. The goal. The celebration. The perfect strike into the top corner.

You miss that 90% of the game is failure. The shots that sailed high. The passes that got cut off. The runs that went nowhere.

But that failure is the whole point. That is what gives the game its suspense. Will he score? Will they come back? You don’t know.

And not knowing is the joy of the whole thing.

Take away the failure, and there is no drama. There is no game. There is just a highlight, and a highlight is boring after about ten seconds.

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Imagine a movie where the hero faces no challenges, no worthy opponents, no setbacks, and just cruises to victory. You’d be bored in 10 minutes. When I read scripts, I always pay attention to the stakes. If the stakes aren’t high, the movie won’t work. There’s no drama with low-stakes.

So many people want high stakes in their movies and no stakes in their lives — it doesn’t make any sense.

The stakes are the joy, not the highlights.

Now think about your phone.

Social media is just a highlight reel. Nobody shows you the whole game. They show you the ball hitting the net, and they cut everything else out.

You see the finished body. You don’t see the years of bad workouts and missed alarms.

You see the new business. You don’t see the four businesses that failed before it.

You see the wedding photo. You don’t see the arguments and the work it took to get there.

Everybody is posting their goals and hiding their misses. And then some of you sit there feeling like you are the only ones who ever miss.

Imagine if everyone started the process of changing their lives with a soccer mentality instead.

In life, unlike soccer, failure seems to freeze people.

They try, and they fail, and they stop.

They think that the people who succeed are different. Better genetics. Better connections. Better something.

They only see the success. They don’t see that the people who succeeded failed over and over, too, and all that set them apart was that they just kept attacking.

I know this because I lived it. When I came to America, I immediately lost my first contest and cried all night. 

Then, when I had established myself in bodybuilding and moved on, people told me my body was too big for the movies. My accent was too thick. My name was too long, and nobody could pronounce Schwarzenegger anyway. 

It seemed like every door was closed on me. I heard no more times than I can count. If I had stopped at the first no, or the tenth, or the hundredth, you would have never heard of me. I just kept attacking.

Michael Jordan understood this, too. He loved to point out how he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career. He lost more than 300 games. And 26 times his team trusted him to take the shot that would win it, and he missed.

Most people would bury those numbers.

Jordan put them in a commercial for the whole world to see. And at the end of listing every failure, he said, “That’s why I succeed.”

Not despite the misses. Because of them. Every miss taught him something a make never could. He kept attacking.

Here is what I love most about a soccer player. When he misses, he doesn’t hang his head and walk off the field. He resets for the next play. The miss is already behind him. His eyes are already back on the goal.

That is the mentality. Not never missing.

Missing, and lining up the next shot anyway.

All of you are going to run into challenges or hardships or disasters.

All of you are going to fail. Hopefully, many times, because it means you are trying enough to really succeed.

The only real failure is the one where you try once, miss, and freeze. That is the one that ends the game.

So stop watching your own life like it’s a highlight reel. Play it like a soccer match.

Take the shot. Miss. Get the ball back. Take another one. Miss again. Keep your feet moving and keep attacking the goal.

Because the suspense is not the problem.

The suspense is the joy.

Just keep attacking.