#141 Arnold Schwarzenegger (My Unbelievably True Life Story)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
I always wanted to be an inspiration for people, but I never set out to be a role model in everything.
How could I be when I have so many contradictions in my life?
I'm a European who became an American leader, a businessman who makes his living as an action hero, a tremendously disciplined super achiever who hasn't always been disciplined enough, a fitness expert who loves cigars, an environmentalist who loves hummers, a fun-loving guy with kid-like enthusiasm who is most famous for terminating people.
How would anybody know what to imitate? I do want to set an example, of course. I want to inspire you to work out, to keep yourself fit, to create a vision and use your will to accomplish it. In these ways, I'm very happy to take the torch and be a role model for others, because I've always had great role models myself. But it's never been my goal to set an example in everything I do.
Sometimes I prefer being way out there, shocking people.
Rebelliousness is part of what drove me from Austria.
I didn't want to be like everyone else. I thought of myself as special and unique and not average.
No one could put me in a mold.
Being different was right up my alley. But life is richer when we embrace the multitudes we all contain, even if we aren't consistent. And what we do doesn't always make sense, even to us.
When I talk to graduating classes, I always tell a brief version of the story of my life and try to offer lessons everybody can use. Have a vision, trust yourself, break some rules, ignore the naysayers, don't be afraid to fail.
Woven through the stories in this memoir are some of the principles of success that have worked for me. That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Total Recall, My Unbelievably True Life Story, and it was written by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is a giant book. It's over 600 pages. And I have an obscene amount of highlights. So let's go ahead and I'm going to go right to his early life. And part of what makes Arnold's life story so unique is not only the multitude of accomplishments he has, but where he started out was. So his early life was a struggle, and he's going to tell us a little bit about that now. He says, I was born in a year of famine. It was 1947 And Austria was occupied by the allied armies that had defeated Hitler's Third Reich.
Two months before I was born, there were hunger riots in Vienna. And in the province where we lived, the food shortages were just as bad. Years later, if my mother wanted to remind me about how much she and my father sacrificed to bring me up, she'd tell me how she'd foraged across the countryside, making her way from farm to farm to collect a little butter, some sugar, and some grain. She'd be away three days sometimes. Hamstern, that's the, I think, the German word. Hamstern, they called it, like a hamster gathering nuts, scrounging for food was so common. And in this next section, he describes his house, what he lived in. He says, My boyhood home was a very simple stone and brick building. There was no plumbing, no shower, and no flushing toilet, just a kind of chamber pot. The nearest well was almost a quarter mile away, and even when it was raining hard or snowing, one of us had to go. So in that case, when I was reading that section, it reminded me of early childhood of, say, somebody like Chung Ju-Yong, the founder of Hyundai, who's living, no plumbing, no electricity, eating tree bark in the winter.