Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

vertically.” Then everybody saw it and there was a big public fuss:

Journalists asked my press secretary if the fuck-you message had been intentional and he said, “No, we had no idea. It must have been an accident.” But at the next press conference I held, a reporter raised his hand and said, “We gave this message to a mathematician. He said the odds of it being accidental are more than two billion to one.”

“Okay,” I answered. “Why don’t you go back to that same expert and ask what the odds are for an Austrian farm boy to come to America and become the greatest bodybuilding champion of all time, to get in the movie business, marry a Kennedy, and then get elected governor of the biggest state of the United States. Come back to me at the next press conference and tell me those odds.”

The reporters laughed. Meanwhile Tom Ammiano was quoted as saying in effect, “I was a schmuck so he has a right to be a schmuck too.” It defused the whole thing. (A year later, after signing into law another bill he’d sponsored, I issued a statement about it which read vertically, “Y-o-u-r-e W-e-l-c-o-m-e.”)

5. The day has twenty-four hours. I once gave a talk in a University of California classroom, and afterward a student raised his hand and complained, “Governor, since the budget crisis hit us, my tuition has gone up twice. Now it’s too high. I need more financial aid.”

“I understand, it’s difficult,” I said. “But what do you mean, too high?”

“I mean now I have to work part-time.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“I have to study!”

So I said, “Let’s figure this out. How many hours do you go to class?”

“I’ve got two hours one day and three hours another day.”

“And how much studying do you have to do?”

“Well, each day, three hours.”

“Okay. So far I see six hours one day and seven hours the other day, counting your commute. What do you do with the rest of the time?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the day is twenty-four hours. Have you ever thought about working more? Maybe even taking more classes? Rather than wasting your life away?”

The class was shocked to hear me say this. “I’m not wasting my life away!” said the student.

“Yes, you are. You’re talking about six hours a day. The day is twenty-four hours, so you have eighteen hours left. Maybe you need six hours for sleeping. So if your part-time job takes four hours, you still have time for dating and dancing and drinking and going out. Why are you complaining?”

I explained how as a student I’d trained five hours a day, gone to acting classes four hours a day, worked in construction several hours a day, and gone to college and done my homework. And I was not the only one. In my classes at Santa Monica College and at UCLA Extension there were people who were also working full-time jobs. It’s natural to hope for someone else to foot the bill. And government should be there to help if there is genuine need and provide education. But if government is not taking in enough revenue because of an economic slowdown, then everyone should chip in and sacrifice.

6. Reps, reps, reps. When you walked into the Athletic Union in Graz where I lifted weights as a kid, to the left was a long plywood wall covered with chalk marks. That was where we wrote down our training program each day. Each of us had his own little section on the wall, and before you undressed you’d make a list:

DEAD LIFT: 5 SETS OF 6 REPS / / / / /
CLEAN AND JERK: 6 SETS OF 4 TO 6 REPS / / / / / /
SHOULDER PRESS: 5 SETS OF 15 REPS / / / / /
BENCH PRESS: 5 SETS OF 10 REPS / / / / /
DUMBBELL FLYS: 5 SETS OF 10 REPS / / / / /

And so on, for a total of maybe sixty sets. Even though you didn’t know how strong you were going to be that day, you’d also write down the weight. After each line would be a row of hash marks, one for each set you had planned. If you’d written down five sets of bench press, you would put five lines on the wall.

Then, as soon as you were done with the first set, you went to the wall and crossed off the first line so it became an X. All five lines would have to be turned into Xs before that exercise was done.

This practice had a huge impact on my motivation. I always had the visual feedback of “Wow, an accomplishment. I did what I said I had to do. Now I will go for the next set, and the next set.” Writing out my goals became second nature, and so did the conviction that there are no shortcuts. It took hundreds and even thousands of repetitions for me to learn to hit a great three-quarter back pose, deliver a punch line, dance the tango in True Lies, paint a beautiful birthday card, and say “I’ll be back” just the right way.

If you look at the script of my first address to the United Nations in 2007 on how to fight global warming, here is what you will see:

Each stick at the top of the page represents one time I rehearsed delivering the speech. Whether you’re doing a bicep curl in a chilly gym or talking to world leaders, there are no shortcuts—everything is reps, reps, reps.

No matter what you do in life, it’s either reps or mileage. If you want to be good at skiing, you have to get out on the slopes all the time. If you play chess, you have to play tens of thousands of games. On the movie set, the only way to have your act together is to do the reps. If you’ve done the reps, you don’t have to worry, you can enjoy the moment when the cameras roll. Filming The Tomb in New Orleans recently, we shot a scene with seventy-five people in a prison brawl. The choreography was so complicated, with dozens of fistfights and wrestling matches and prison guards coming in clubbing people, that just the rehearsals took half the day. By the time we shot, everyone was tired but at the same time really pumped. The take was a success. The moves had become second nature to us and it really felt like a fight.

7. Don’t blame your parents. They’ve done their best for you, and if they’ve left you with problems, those problems are now yours to solve. Maybe your parents were too supportive and protective and now you feel needy and vulnerable in the world—don’t blame them for that. Or maybe they were too harsh.

I loved my father when I was little and wanted to be like him. I admired his uniform and his gun and the fact that he was a policeman. But then later on I hated the pressure he put on my brother and me. “You have to set an example in the village because you’re the children of the inspector,” he would say. We had to be the perfect kids, which of course we were not.

He was exacting, which was his nature. He was also brutal at times but I don’t think that was his fault. It was the war. If he had lived in a more normal way, he’d have been different.

So I’ve often wondered: What if he’d been warmer and nicer? Would I have left Austria? Probably not. And that is my great fear!

I became Arnold because of what he did to me. I recognized that I could channel my upbringing in a positive way rather than complain. I could use it to have a vision, set goals, find joy. His harshness drove me from home. It made me come to America, and work for success, and I’m happy it did. I don’t have to lick my wounds.

There’s a passage near the end of Conan the Barbarian that has always stuck with me. The lines are said not by Conan but by Thulsa Doom, the sorcerer who makes Conan as a young boy watch his father be devoured by dogs and who slaughters Conan’s mother before his eyes. As Conan is about to kill him and avenge his parents, Thulsa Doom says, “Who is your father if it is not me? Who gave you the will to live? I am the wellspring from which you flow.”

So it’s not always obvious what you should celebrate. Sometimes you have to appreciate the very people and circumstances that traumatized you. Today I hail the strictness of my father, and my whole upbringing, and the fact that I didn’t have anything that I wanted in Austria, because those were the very factors that made me hungry. Every time he hit me. Every time he said my weight training was garbage, that I should do something useful and go out and chop wood. Every time he disapproved of me or embarrassed me, it put fuel on the fire in my belly. It drove me and motivated me.

8. Change takes big balls. While on a trade mission to Moscow