Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life Book Review: A heady dose of inspiration

How did Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man who is still remembered for playing a cybernetic assassin in The Terminator (1984), end up becoming the governor of California? What enabled him to transition from a career in bodybuilding to acting, and then from Hollywood to public service? Going back further in time, why did he choose to get out of Austria – the country that he was born in – and move to the United States of America in the first place?

If you want to get answers to these questions straight from the horse’s mouth, read Schwarzenegger’s latest book titled Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life (2023), published by Penguin Random House. Unlike his autobiography Total Recall (2012), which might satiate your curiosity about his love life, the new book is less of a memoir and fits more tidily into the self-help genre. Schwarzenegger believes that the “tools”, which helped him craft his success story, can be used by others to achieve the goals that they have set for themselves.

He lists them out as follows: 1. Have a clear vision. 2. Never think small. 3. Work your ass off. 4. Sell, sell, sell. 5. Shift gears. 6. Shut your mouth, open your mind. 7. Break your mirrors. If you are a Schwarzenegger fan, you would certainly not want to miss this book. However, if you aren’t one, it could still help you think seriously about the life choices that you can make going forward, regardless of what you may or may not have done in the past.

“This book is called Be Useful because that is the best piece of advice my father ever gave me,” writes Schwarzenegger. “It has stuck in my brain and never left, and my hope is that the advice I am offering you in the pages to follow will do the same thing.” He is not being pompous here; he is merely stating the intention behind writing this book. Given his experiences in showbiz, philanthropy and politics, the 76-year-old has a lot to share.

Moreover, he seems to be acutely aware of the market and his own place in it. He writes, for instance, about being surprised that people were willing to pay him “as much as former presidents to show up and give motivational speeches to their clients and their workforces” and that others were recording videos of those speeches and sharing them on social media. This book is catering to that market, and it does a pretty good job of selling inspiration.

That said, there is nothing earthshakingly new in terms of insight. You have probably heard that persistence pays even if it seems pointless. You know that you must be willing to take feedback in order to grow. You must have read somewhere that you need to be your own cheerleader if you have no one rooting for you. This book is about time-honoured principles. It is worth reading because the author writes about how he put those principles into practice.

According to Schwarzenegger, having a clear vision is important because it gives you “a picture of what you want your life to look like and a plan for how to get there”. This advice is directed particularly at people who think that they do not have much of a role to play in determining their own future because they have always had other people making decisions on their behalf. A clear vision is supposed to help you figure out whether a particular decision is beneficial or not, whether it will get you closer to or further away from where you want to be.

Growing up in a small village in Austria at the beginning of the Cold War, Schwarzenegger’s mother was loving and his father was strict and physically abusive. He loved both of them but his relationship with his father was complicated. The specific details are not that significant. What matters here is that he chose not to be stuck in this story. He realized that he could not change where he came from but where to go from there and how was in his own hands.

This kind of confidence might seem difficult to summon up and hold on to because we have so many people around us trying to make us believe that we are not good enough for our own dreams. This is where the author’s advice comes in. It is inspiring to read how he dealt with naysayers – people who laughed at the idea of pursuing bodybuilding as a career, people who could not imagine him as an actor, people who recommended sticking to action movies and not venturing into comedy, and people who told him that he was not cut out for governance.

He refused to let them have a say in how he led his life. “They’re just not very useful to someone like you. They’re scared of the unfamiliar and the unknown. They’re afraid of taking risks and putting themselves out there,” he writes. “They’ve never had the courage to do what you’re trying to do. They’ve never crafted a huge vision for the life they want and then put a plan together to make it a reality. They’ve never gone all in on anything.”

Just as he needed training to excel as a bodybuilder, he needed to prepare for other fields too. When he wanted to become a leading man in the movies, he took acting classes and speech lessons. When he decided to enter politics, he devoured writing by experts on topics like microstamping on gun ammunition and nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in hospitals, which seemed obscure at first but he needed to understand those issues in order to govern well. He had to learn that taking responsibility for failure is as important as owning your success.

If your life seems like a drag because paying bills has taken precedence over all the things that you were passionate about in your childhood and adolescence, this book might offer an opportunity to pause and reset. Reading it, however, is not a substitute for therapy, spiritual practice or any kind of immersive long-term process geared towards self-knowledge and transformation. What it offers is a handy framework to examine what might be holding you back and how you could move past that. After all, human beings often find a moment of connection in other people’s stories, no matter how different their life circumstances are.

What does not work in this book is Schwarzenegger’s glorification of a relentless go-getter lifestyle that makes little or no room for rest. He writes, “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.” This might sound heroic but also comes across as patronizing, somewhat ableist, and unmindful of how lack of rest can impact physical and mental health.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer who is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).