Vince Lombardi once said, “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” Learning how to find moments to hit reset does not mean you lost or you failed. The key thing is whatever I am doing is all I am doing. When I play with my animals, I am 100% there with them, and when my kids come over, I am only engaged in talking to them and catching up. As a matter of fact, I will load up my iPad to play chess with friends from all over the world. My chess games are my favorite way to hit reset and get my mind out of a slump throughout the day. Each exercise is deliberate, and my mind is inside the muscle. I still have moments where my mind is overwhelmed, but today I have many different ways of meditating. What I am doing is all that matters until that work is done, and then I can move on to the next thing. My team can tell you that if we are getting ready for a USC Schwarzenegger Institute meeting, I won’t even get involved in discussions about movies or business. Nowadays I live by the focus principle - that whatever I’m doing is ALL I am doing. I really recommend learning to meditate, and I know there are a lot of apps and free YouTube videos out there today to help you get started. I learned to hit the bullseye and completely focus on my training before moving on to reading scripts, and to fully focus on that before moving on to researching real estate, and on and on. Meditation taught me to use a rifle approach. Training, movies, real estate, mail order - it was too many targets, and the shotgun approach just had my brain all over the place. With all of those things going on, my mind had resorted to a shotgun approach, thinking about all the different things at once. I meditated 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night for a year, and I learned that through all of that mental training, I was able to conquer one thing at a time and focus on what was in front of me in the moment. It took a lot of training and practice, but gradually I learned to quiet my mind. So I set up some classes at the transcendental meditation center. It seems strange that everything going right is a problem that has to be solved, but sometimes when everything is hitting at the same time the mind becomes frantic. At the same time, my mail order business was exploding, my real estate investments were growing, and I started to get overwhelmed. So now I had to try to get back to 240 pounds of quality muscle, not fat, by the Mr. ![]() Then George Butler and Charles Gaines came and told me I couldn’t retire from bodybuilding, like I had announced in 1974, because they wanted to follow up their successful book, Pumping Iron, with the documentary, and they told me they couldn’t raise the money unless I was in it, competing. I had just finished filming Stay Hungry in the summer of 1975, my first serious movie, and I had cut my weight to 210 pounds at the request of the director, Bob Rafelson. I learned this when I was transitioning from my bodybuilding career into my movie career. While it is extremely important to work your ass off and get your reps in, sometimes the brain or the body needs a reset. But I have learned throughout my life that balance is important, so let’s talk about that this month. Some people hear my motivational speeches where I say things like, “Sleep faster!” or “There are 24 hours in a day!” and get the idea that I never relax and never take a break. I love that I am vaccinated so I can be back in the gym - working out at home is just not the same. Here is a video of me getting a pump at Gold's Gym this past week. I spend lots of time going on bike rides and workouts with my kids or just hanging at home with them, and I really love getting to play with my granddaughter on the weekend. ![]() Of course, I’m also feeding Lulu at 6 every morning so that she doesn’t scream and wake up the whole neighborhood, after which Whiskey and all the dogs come begging for their food, so I don’t get to pouring my own coffee until 7. It has been a busy month for me! Between reading your emails, getting my workouts in, having meetings about Triplets (the sequel to Twins), FUBAR (my television spy series with Netflix – by the way, FUBAR stands for Fucked Up Beyond All Repair or Recognition), and other movie and TV projects, doing interviews to promote Superhero Kindergarten (my animated series for kids), and recording conversations about getting rid of pollution while we prepare for my Austrian World Summit in July, a lot has been going on.
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