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Be Useful, by Arnold Schwarzenegger
“This wasn’t a fantasy. This was a memory that just hadn’t happened yet.”
Matt Karamazov
November 15, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 20 minutes
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Now, when I say that “Arnold’s book is the most Schwarzenegger thing I’ve ever read,” I mean that as a compliment.
I value my time so extremely highly (as you should value yours, too!) that I would never waste any of it talking about (let alone finishing) a bad book.
Nobody has time for that.
So the very fact that I’m writing this mini-breakdown for you means that I think you might love it as well.
And I mean hey, if you’re not enjoying a book, put it down and move on to something else!
Start more books, quit more books, and read the best ones twice.
That’s what has always worked for me, anyway.
Actually, this is a great place to plug my upcoming time management course called Time Mastery. Launching on Black Friday!
I don’t have a pre-order link for you yet, but this (short) course has all my time mastery secrets that have allowed me to read 1,200+ books in 10 years, grow my business, see my family whenever I want, etc.
My goal is to save you at least 5+ hours every single week, just by taking this fast-paced, 2-hour course and implementing what I teach.
On Black Friday through to Cyber Monday, I’ll also be running an 85% discount on the course too.
But okay, back to Arnold’s book.
I tore through this book like I was ripping a phone book in half, and I ended up with about 5 full pages of notes, highlights of which I’ll be sharing with you here in this email.
Below, I share a short summary of Be Useful, as well as my best book notes, along with some additional recommended reading.
There are lots of incredible insights and plenty of powerful motivation to be found in this book, so let’s get into it!
If you’re looking for a book that will inspire you to dream BIG and go after your dreams like an Austrian giant hungering after a juicy steak, you might want to check out…
As always, my book notes and summary of this book are available on my Patreon, as well as my personal notes from more than 1,200+ other books. Updated monthly.
The support I’ve received on Patreon over the years has been nothing less than incredible and I just want to quickly mention two of my biggest supporters by name:
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They make my days brighter, and the weights lighter.
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You can always just preview my notes here on this page though.
Now, let’s get back to today’s book!
Arnold’s book is the most Schwarzenegger thing I’ve ever read in my life. I mean that in a good way, of course. It’s full of his big personality and he doesn’t tone anything down (like he ever has), the result being this compulsively readable book, full of great life advice and inspirational passages. It’s motivating as hell, and I tore through it like I was ripping a phone book in half!
There’s a lot in the book about vision, and the supreme importance of having an overwhelmingly clear, specific idea of how you want your one and only life to unfold. Not only that, but he backed up his vision with massive action, working out twice a day for hours on end (probably overtraining, but whatever) and then going to school, to work laying bricks with Franco Columbu, or off to acting classes in the evening.
His path was not without obstacles, of course. None of us can claim that. Every single one of us will face people in our lives who either don’t believe in us or actively want us to fail. Not everyone is going to believe in your vision, no matter how strongly you believe in it. Arnold says that you can either use the naysayers you’ll inevitably meet on the path to your goals, or you can ignore them, but you can never, ever listen to them.
They are roadblocks, and you can either go around, above, or through, but you can never turn back. Not from your vision. It should be so clear and energizing - almost literally like a photograph in your mind of where you’re going, what it will look like when you get there, and how you’ll feel when you arrive - that it will inspire you to hold onto that vision and never let it go.
Arnold can also be very funny, and the Governator’s got jokes for sure. I’ve always laughed a little whenever he advises people to “sleep faster” in order to leave more time in the day for accomplishing their goals. Another thing that cracked me up a bit was when he was talking about the various kinds of training and acting classes he was taking once he got to Hollywood and how he wants his money back for his “accent removal classes.”
Be Useful was one of my standout reads from 2023 and I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would. I mean, I knew it would be good, but I didn’t expect to love it. I loved it.
It’s full of empowering, strong messages from someone that people can look up to for a whole lot of reasons, and Arnold, in my opinion, is just one of those guys who is exactly who he says he is. A hard worker - often lifting more than 40,000lbs per workout, morning and evening - who isn’t afraid to step forward and say “I am.”
“My final two and a half years in the Capitol, which I spent in the thick of the global financial crisis, felt like being stuck in a clothes dryer with a load of bricks. It was nothing but beating after beating from every direction.”
“From very early on, producers and casting directors were always trying to get me to shorten my name to Arnold Strong or some other such name, because they said Schwarzenegger is too much of a mouthful. It’s too long, they said.
What they didn’t know, but that I could see plain as day, was that Schwarzenegger looks fucking great all by itself in BIG letters above the title of a movie.”
“If you want your vision to stick, if you want to increase the chances of success looking exactly like you hoped it would when you first figured out what you wanted your life to look like, then you need to get crystal clear on that vision and tattoo it to the inside of your eyelids. You need to SEE IT.”
“If you only go for the smaller goal, the big goal is automatically out of reach.”
“You have a choice with the naysayers you face on the road to achieving your goals. You can ignore them or you can use them, you just can’t ever believe them.”
“If you don’t get to experience what it feels like to push yourself, to do more than you thought you were capable of, and to know that the pain you put yourself through will lead to growth that you alone are responsible for creating, then you will never appreciate what you have the way that same thing is appreciated by someone who earned it, who worked for it.
Work works. That’s the bottom line. No matter what you do. No matter who you are. My entire life has been shaped by that single idea.”
“And while I was definitely physically exhausted, mentally I was totally switched on. I was excited and energized, because I’d just spent two hours moving closer to achieving my vision. How could you possibly expect me to sleep at a moment like that?”
“It’s not hours in the day you lack, it’s a vision for your life that makes time irrelevant.”
“After all this stuff in a typical daily life is accounted for, there are still two hours left in the day to make progress toward your vision. I can already hear the question coming from a bunch of you: What about time for rest and relaxation?
First of all, rest is for babies and relaxation is for retired people. Which one are you? If you want to do something special, if you have a big dream that you want to achieve, I believe you’re going to have to put relaxation aside for a while.
But fine, you want some relaxation, take half of the remaining time for your little nap. That still gives you an hour each day to work toward your goal. Do you have any idea how powerful an hour a day is?
If you want to write a novel, sit down and write for an hour every day, and aim for just one page. At the end of the year, you will have a 365-page manuscript. That’s a book!
If you want to get in shape, burn five hundred more calories each day than you consume. In one week, that’s a pound you will have lost. In a year, that could be fifty pounds!
How can you burn more than you eat? Try using that leftover hour to ride your bike. Even at a moderate pace, even just five days a week, by the end of a year you will have ridden farther than the distance between Los Angeles and Boston. You will have ridden across the country!
These are fantastic accomplishments that require a lot of hard work. But it’s work that you are more than capable of doing when you’ve planned it out and broken it down into little, daily goals that shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to complete.
Hell, you can even be crazy like me, and it’s still only five hours of work each day. That leaves nineteen hours to do everything else.
Eat a little quicker, hit the brakes on your commute a little less, and sleep a little faster, and you’ll have found the hours you need.
So don’t tell me you don’t have time to train, or to study, or to write, or to network, or to do whatever you need to do to achieve your vision.
Turn your TV off. Throw your machines out the window. Save your excuses for someone who cares. Get to work.”
“Before you can achieve your goals, I think you need to express them. Share them. I think you need to admit to yourself, and communicate to others, that this thing that started in your mind as a little idea has exploded into a massive dream with huge potential to benefit your life and theirs.”
“I have a rule: no complaining about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don’t come to the table with a potential solution, I don’t want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn’t be that bad if it hasn’t motivated you to try to fix it.”
“Failure has never killed a dream; quitting kills every dream it touches.”
“The world needs more sponges. It needs more smart, hopeful, driven, useful people with vision. It needs people who can dream up the world of tomorrow, which only happens when people are first able to soak up the knowledge of the world from today.”
“The first thing to realize is that at the simplest, most basic level, you don’t have to rearrange your life to help other people. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open and be engaged with the world around you.
When you see someone struggling - with a bag of groceries or a difficult emotion - stop and give them a hand or a hug. If a friend you haven’t talked to for years calls in the middle of the night, answer the phone. If there is someone who looks like they might need help, answer the call, whether they asked for help or not. Lighten their burden, even if it’s only for five minutes or fifty feet.
Helping others is a simple practice that requires nothing more than awareness, willingness, and a little bit of effort. Without actively seeking it out, just by being connected to your environment, you will have opportunities every day to help someone else.
And trust me when I tell you, it will make you feel great when you do.”
Currently, I don’t have a complete breakdown of Be Useful published on the Stairway to Wisdom (my library of expert book breakdowns), but below I’ve listed some similar breakdowns that you may enjoy instead.
When you become a member of the Stairway to Wisdom, you’ll gain access to more than 100+ book breakdowns like these ones here, as well as a premium weekly newsletter that will help you build the kind of life for yourself that you’ll love living.
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All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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