Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Story
Arnold’s childhood leaves few things to smile about. His father was an alcoholic police officer who at one time was a member of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Clearly, without a doubt, Arnold’s brother was the favorite because he was more muscular than Arnold.
His father would make Arnold fight against his brother, whilst he watched, being self-entertained.
And when Arnold said he dreamt of being a bodybuilder, one of the most memorable ridicules was from his own father.
When his brother died in a car crash in 1971 and his father passed away the following year, Arnold was so bitter that he refused to attend both funerals.
With such a past, how would Arnold have turned out in life? He could have quit bodybuilding, believed he was a sissy and spent the rest of his life proving his weaknesses.
But Arnold chose the path that would prove his strengths; he took the road to success.
He left home with hope and maintained his bodybuilding dream with every ounce of determination in his veins.
Arnold Schwarzenegger not only became a star in America – he became a world champion.
Arnold won the Mr. Universe title five times and the Mr. Olympia crown six times.
Despite criticism from the people he had expected should have given him a shoulder to lean on – Schwarzenegger became a global success.
You can still win even when the people you expect to believe in you disappointingly doubt you.
He won as a bodybuilder, but that success was only a bank card sliding into an ATM machine. Much more still lay in store.
The Mr. Universe and Olympia titles expanded Arnold’s career into the movies. He acted in Stay Hungry (1976), Conan the Barbarian (1982), the Terminator I, II and III, all adding up to over thirty movies in all.
He made a net worth of US$300 million, married into the Kennedy family and even had the guts to divorce the Kennedy family.
That should have been enough, but it wasn’t. Arnold from Austria went on to be the Governor of California – twice.
He was determined to pursue his dreams despite the discouraging past that he had been born into.
Lesson
We all have our share of pain in one way or the other. Rich or poor, each of us is born with our own personal disadvantages.
Sometimes it is an absent father (or a present father we wished was absent), a mother in a psychiatric hospital, or an economic crisis that deprives us of laying a dinner table our soul truly desires.
We are all born into different backgrounds.
There are many people who were been born in worse conditions than you, who have gone on to achieve much greater than you ever dreamt.
In life, is it not amazing how many are hindered by the same waves that have turned others into skillful mariners?
It’s not what happens to us that matters but what we do about it.
The choice remains ours; either to be victims of our circumstances or to be victors despite our circumstances.
A hope of victory is entrapped in our souls, but like Arnold Schwarzenegger, we must gather enough determination to follow that hope of victory.
There are six moments of life that demand our determination:
i. Pains
You know you need determination when you enter a moment of pain.
Fact: pursuing a new level of life is going to prove painful. No doubt about that! All who have succeeded have gone through it. The good news is pain isn’t a barrier unless you allow it to.
You succeed when your passion for success is greater than the pain of pursuing it.
Everyone can work till it hurts, but winning belongs to those who can keep working after it starts hurting.
Growing up and going forward is like weightlifting; you start building muscles at the point of pain.
A life of ease is a life with nothing being built.
Work beyond your point of pain.
ii. Hopelessness
You know you need determination when you enter a moment of despair.
At countless moments in life, you will feel like giving up. Life can whip you so much that you will feel tempted to drop the will to go on.
You will wish life would give you a heavy blow that will silence you into deep sleep.
Literally, at one time, you will almost beg life and nature to give you an excuse for failure – a stroke, a heart attack, a credit crunch or an economic recession – any crisis good enough to explain why you would end up a failure.
In the Bible, Prophet Elijah flees from the evil Queen Jezebel who was demanding that his head be brought to her palace.
After running for ages, Elijah kneels behind a bush and calls upon God, “God, I want to die…”
If dying was really what he wanted, why did he bother running away from Jezebel who was hunting for his head? She would have killed him with pleasure!
Nope! Elijah didn’t want to die.
Elijah had met a point of despair. He wanted to quit, so he was asking for a natural excuse that would explain his failure.
He wanted heart failure, a nervous breakdown, or anything that wouldn’t show he is the one who had failed.
He wanted something like, “I really had a good business running, but the political situation ruined everything…”
“That was love. We really had something going on, but the long distance pulled us apart…”
Or “It’s not like I have always been the player you see. Once upon a time, I was a good guy too. It’s how she cheated on me that turned me into a monster…”
All these are examples of people who found perfect excuses for failing to live the life they desired or becoming the persons they wanted to be.
Their good excuses are perfectly believable, but insufficient to turn their failures into success.
They met an accidental crisis that threatened to blow their hope of progress.
It was at such a time that they had to sing songs of determination. They had to refuse to find an excuse to quit.
At a point of despair, decide to remain determined.
If your determination stays then your circumstances shall depart.
If your circumstances stay it would be because you allowed your determination to depart.
You cannot have both.
You cannot be ill-determined and have the life of your dreams; and you cannot lose the life of your dreams if you are strongly determined.
Every time you choose to be determined you would have picked the right tool that sculpts life into the image entrapped in your soul.
Sculpt your life into the image entrapped in your soul.
Humans are born endowed with the power for a higher life.
Unlike other natural species, humans are born with the power to dream a life beyond their status quo.
We get fed up with repetition. The only exciting repetition is the repetition of change.
History also shows us that mankind has the power to make a change in his own life.
We built flying machines, we made vaccines against diseases, we have been to the moon and back, and now we have sent robots to find life on other planets.
We have discovered other continents, and other planets and who knows we might one day move to another planets.
Actually, as I write this book, the Cable News Network (CNN) has announced the discovery of another sun. I say more about it in my book Manpower to Mindpower.
God has made the human species so powerful that any limitation you predict on them will one day be totally proven wrong.
There is this power at work inside of us; it is proving able to make our craziest fantasies be our everyday realities.
The Bible calls it a “power at work in us,” “able to do exceeding abundantly above what we may ask, think or imagine.” We humans are more powerful than we think.
There is a power for life in us. That power does not need to be created, it only needs to be discovered.
Latent power is discovered at the point of pain and despair.
When you work till it’s hard, keep working and you will find what was once hard is now simple.
You would have entered a new level of effort, higher than the one this world is used to.
An extraordinary effort will introduce you to extraordinary power.
You will discover capabilities that you never imagined human bodies could be endowed with.
Keep moving forward in your season of hopelessness and you will find a new ability (power) that makes you hope in hopeless situations.
The dark tunnel of your life is only a temporary path joining together the former light you once knew with the future light yet to come.
A moment of hopelessness is like a dark night that joins yesterday’s sunset with today’s sunrise.
All nights, no matter how dark, will always be temporary.
Victory begins at the point of giving up.
“Fight one more round.
.
When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to the center of the ring, fight one more round.
.
When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round.
.
When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round – remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped.”
– James Coban
Keep marching beyond the point of despair. That’s determination.
iii. Weakness
You Know you need Determination when You Reach Your point of Weakness
Sometimes you may feel like you do not have what it takes to be the person you wish to be.
You may think you are not intelligent enough, or it might seem like your background was too backward to give you any top advantages.
Some people even believe the lie that they started too low at the bottom to ever reach the top.
Yet most of the successful people in life are self-made.
Those at the top started at the bottom.
Neither wise men nor fools were born learned.
The wise had to, at one point in their lives, decide to take off their foolishness and put on the noble garment of wisdom.
They had to decide to learn, unlearn and relearn till they had amassed enough understanding to create the personal lifestyles they desired.
They understood that all skills are learnable.
If you practice something hard enough, finally you will become an expert at it no matter how tough it feels at the beginning.
In life, the impossible becomes possible not really by a stroke of genius, but mostly by determination.
The main reason behind your past failures is not a lack of skill or resources, it was a lack of determination.
You wanted victory, but the problem is you didn’t want it bad enough.
When you want something bad enough, you will weight lift your weak points into iron muscles and study your ignorance into wisdom.
This question is simple to swallow, but bitter to digest: How bad do you want the life that you want?
Never quit simply because you feel weak.
Be determined to keep trying above your frailties. Keep fighting beyond the point of your weakness.
Only then shall you find in you lies more strength yet undiscovered than all already discovered.
iv. Distraction
You Know you Need Determination when you are Beginning to Feel Distracted.
The easiest way to kill your dream is not discouragement, the easiest way to kill your dream is trying to find a different dream.
“If you want to kill a man’s dream, give him another one.”
– Mike Murdock
Determination is a single-hearted specie, it has enough heart to love only one thing at a time. Concentrate on one thing.
If you find yourself torn between two things then know your heart has been losing its determination.
By nature, the human mind is a monkey mind. It chatters, it springs from one tree and lands with its tail on another.
But though monkeys look human, they have never built anything of significance.
The monkey mind is not a creative mind. It takes discipline to pursue one idea at a time till you create it into a reality.
You can’t be everywhere. You can’t see all things. And you can’t do everything. You will impact more ground when you understand the limitation of your strength.
Napoleon, the self-made Emperor of France, started with a poor army but he conquered great nations.
Napoleon’s greatest victories were not made by greatness of strength, but by focusing that little strength on one problem at a time.
Live a focused life. When you can’t increase your strength, concentration will increase the impact of that little strength that you still have.
Remember how the human mind is a monkey mind. Versatile, easily distracted.
At a point of distraction, quickly call your mind back to attention.
Concentration is a source of power.
Tame the Monkey Mind!
v. Failure
At a Point of Failure, only Determination gets You Beyond
Studies show that for everything we succeed at in life, we first fail at it nine to ten times.
The sure way to reduce the frequency of failure is by increasing the frequency of practice. That means, you reduce failure by failing many times.
The difference between practice and performance is mainly that practice interprets failure as feedback while performance interprets failure as a loss.
Some people take life too seriously, but you must learn to take life as a practice session. Life is a reality show, you watch it as it happens.
Failure simply means this is the way that does not work, try again to find another way that works or another way that doesn’t (both kinds of ways are important to know).
When you are at the bottom, failure’s teachings don’t seem that necessary. It is when you get to the top that you thank heaven you learned what doesn’t work much earlier.
Trying to learn what doesn’t work while at the top means you will be risking losing everything.
This is why at a point of mistake you should keep going forward – failure’s lessons are just as precious as success’ celebrations.
Simply put – when you fail and do it again – that’s determination.
Staying determined is when you fail again, again and again and stand up again, again and again…and again.
Determination will always be the pivotal secret to your success.
vi. Lack
When you think you have too Little Resources or Capital – know that what you really have little of is determination.
Whether what your heart wants is starting a business, falling in love, keeping a marriage, or serving in a church – at one time you are going to feel like you have too few resources to achieve what you want.
These are the moments when you will wish there was a way to make it in life through an easier path.
However, your success in life lies in your ability to do much with little. You have to learn from the principle of the tree seed.
People see a tree seed in three different ways, depending on their level of foresight. (Foresight is how far you judge what you see today in relation to its results in the future).
Some people see a tree seed as just a seed. Some see a tree seed as a thing that will grow into a tree, and produce fruit they will eat and enjoy.
And the best sighted of all, they see a seed as something that will become a fruit tree, whose fruits will release more seeds, and the seeds will make more trees – thus we end up with a forest.
They see further than the seed, further than its fruit and further than the one tree it can produce.
The shortsighted merely see a seed in a seed. The midsighted see fruit in a seed. But the longsighted see a forest in a seed.
Likewise, your success in life will be heavily determined by how much greatness you can see in a small idea; how much potential you see in a simple person; and how much more you can do with less.
You are like a seed, so small, yet you have a forest trapped in you. You are more than a single being, you are a nation. Can you see a forest in a seed?
Even the queen’s wedding gown, no matter how big, is sewn using a small needle. Little things can create big things.
When you find something that you want and want it bad enough, you will also find a way to make it – even if your resources are limited.
Go for the life you have always desired.
You have to live for your dreams before you live your dreams.
Start small. Start without. Start where you are.
