Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

Impossible was a word I loved to ignore when I was governor. They said it would be impossible to convince Californians to build a million solar roofs, and to reform health care, and to do something decisive about global warming. Tackling these challenges appealed to me because no one had been able to do them before. The only way to make the possible possible is to try the impossible. If you fail, so what? That’s what everybody expects. But if you succeed, you make the world a much better place.

• Never follow the crowd. Go where it’s empty.

As they say in LA, avoid the freeway at rush hour—take the streets. Avoid the movie theater on a Saturday night—go to the matinee. If you know the restaurant will be impossible to get into at nine, why not have an early dinner? People apply this kind of common sense all the time, and yet they forget when it comes to their careers. When every immigrant I knew was saving up to buy a house, I bought an apartment building instead. When every aspiring actor was trying to land bit parts in movies, I held out to be a leading man. When every politician tries to work his or her way up from local office, I went straight for the governorship. It’s easier to stand out when you aim straight for the top.

• No matter what you do in life, selling is part of it.

Achieving my goal of becoming Mr. Olympia was not enough. I had to make people aware there was such a thing as a competition for the most muscular man in the world. I had to make them aware of what training does, besides creating a muscular body—I had to make them aware that fitness promotes health and enhances the quality of life. This was about selling. People can be great poets, great writers, geniuses in the lab. But you can do the finest work and if people don’t know, you have nothing! In politics it’s the same: no matter whether you’re working on environmental policy or education or economic growth, the most important thing is to make people aware.

Every time I meet a great person—and I never pass up the chance—I try to ask how they made good and to figure out the angle that has worked for them. I know that there are a thousand keys to success and I love distilling new rules from my experiences and theirs. So here are ten principles I want to pass along:

1. Never let pride get in your way. Muhammad Ali and I did a lot of talk shows together. I always admired him because he was a champion, had a great personality, and was generous and always thoughtful toward others. If all athletes could be like him, the world would be better off. He and I would meet in green rooms and joke around. Once he challenged me to shove him against the wall if I could. I think somebody in boxing must have told him he should start lifting weights like George Foreman, because Ali was more known for his speed and his use of psychology. He was thinking about adding a little “strong as a bull” to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” and he wanted to see how powerful a bodybuilder really was. I was able to shove him to the wall, and he said, “Wow, this weight-lifting stuff really works. Cool. That’s really cool.”

The next time I saw him, he had some buddies with him and he said, “Watch this. Hey, Arnold, try to push me.”

“This must be a setup,” I thought. “Nobody wants to get pushed around in front of his friends.”

I started pushing Ali and backed him up all the way to the wall again. He said, “I told you guys, I told you! This guy’s really strong. This weight stuff is really good.”

He didn’t care about losing a pushing match. He just wanted to show his friends that resistance training worked. It gave you stronger legs and hips and could be useful for boxing.

2. Don’t overthink. If you think all the time, the mind cannot relax. The key thing is to let both the mind and the body float. And then when you need to make a decision or hit a problem hard, you’re ready with all of your energy. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use your brain, but part of us needs to go through life instinctively. By not analyzing everything, you get rid of all the garbage that loads you up and bogs you down. Turning off your mind is an art. It’s a form of meditation. Knowledge is extremely important for making decisions, for a reason that’s not necessarily obvious. The more knowledge you have, the more you’re free to rely on your instincts. You don’t have to take the time to learn about a subject. Yet in most cases, people who have the knowledge get bogged down and frozen. The more you know, the more you hesitate, which is why even the smartest people blow it big-time. A boxer brings a huge amount of knowledge to the ring—when to duck, punch, counter, dance back, block. But if he were to think about any of this when a punch comes, it would be over. He has to use what he knows in a tenth of a second. When you are not confident of your decision-making process, it will slow you down.

Overthinking is why people can’t sleep at night: their mind is racing and they can’t turn it off. Overanalyzing cripples you. Back in 1980, when Al Ehringer and I wanted to develop a block at the end of Main Street in Santa Monica, the investors we were bidding against for the property let their worries hold them back. We’d done the research, too, and realized there were uncertainties that might limit the upside potential. The land was an old trolley right-of-way and wasn’t available for sale, just for long-term lease. Land nearby was contaminated with chemical waste—suppose this land had a problem too? The property straddled the border of Santa Monica and Venice, so it was unclear which local tax laws and regulations applied. We didn’t dwell on these challenges, but the rival bidders did, and after a while all they could see was red flags. So they dropped out when we raised our bid, and we got the property. Within two years, we were able to convert the lease into a purchase, and our gamble started to pay off; 3100 Main Street turned out to be a phenomenal investment. Many movie deals are made under pressure, and if you freeze, you lose. On Twins we had a deadline: Universal needed to know if Danny, Ivan, and I were all committed. There was no time for the agents to dialog. Danny and Ivan and I made the deal on a napkin at lunch. We all signed it and left the table. Danny later had it framed.

3. Forget plan B. To test yourself and grow, you have to operate without a safety net. The public opinion numbers were very low in early 2004 for my newly announced ballot initiatives, in which we were asking the voters’ permission to refinance $15 billion of debt. Our budget experts were already wringing their hands. “What are we going to do if these initiatives fail? We need a plan B.”

“Why take a defeatist attitude?” I said. “If there is no plan B, then plan A has to work. We just announced the initiatives. There’s a lot we can do to get ourselves closer to the goal.”

If you’re anxious, instead of making fallback plans, think about the worst that can happen if you fail. How bad would it be? You quickly find out it’s really nothing. If you fail at running for governor, you may be humiliated, but that is the worst that can happen. Think of all the presidential candidates who bow out. People understand that’s how it works. I thought that if I lost the election for governor, I would just go back to being in movies and making a lot of money. I’d be a free guy, eating good food, riding my motorcycle and spending more time with my family. So I did everything I could to make it happen—putting the best team together, raising the money, running an excellent campaign. If it didn’t happen, then I’d have said, “It just didn’t work out this time.” When I did lose all my ballot initiatives in 2005, it didn’t kill me. Life went on and I led a fantastic trade mission to China. And a year later I was reelected.

My standard for misery is the guys who worked in the diamond mines in South Africa when I visited in the sixties. The mines were something like 1,400 feet down and it was about 110 degrees and the workers were getting paid a dollar a day and were allowed to go home to their family only once a year. That’s being in deep shit. Anything better than that and you’re in good shape.

4. You can use outrageous humor to settle a score. In 2009 my friend Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco and the longest-serving assembly speaker in California history, was hosting a fund-raiser for the California Democratic Party at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, and he and I thought it would be funny for me to drop in.

I showed up unannounced and gave Willie a big hug and a smooch in front of everybody, which freaked out half the Democrats and made the other half laugh. Then a freshman state assemblyman from San Francisco named Tom Ammiano stood up at his table and started heckling me. “Kiss my gay ass!” he yelled. The press wrote about it. Ammiano was a professional comedian besides being a politician. I didn’t make any comment. Very funny, ha ha. But in my mind I said, “There will come a time when I’m signing bills and I’m going to get one sponsored by him …”

Sure enough, a few weeks later I got one of Ammiano’s bills. It was a routine measure about the San Francisco waterfront but it meant a lot to him. I instructed my staff to put together a nice veto message.

No one picked up on the message spelled out by the first letter of each line, so a suggestion was leaked to a few reporters: “Are you sure you read the governor’s veto message the right way? Maybe you should read it