Arnold Schwarzenegger stressed the importance of discomfort and failure as a means to an end of personal growth Wednesday, saying it was a founding principle that made the U.S. strong while warning that too many of today’s youth live sheltered lives.
Schwarzenegger, talking to Howard Stern on his SiriusXM radio show, shot into an extended, interruption-free monologue on the subject. In it, he cautioned Americans against “creating a generation of wimps and weak people” by pampering their younger generations.
“Anybody that tries to baby themselves, and pamper themselves and protect themselves — ‘Oh, I don’t want to feel bad, I don’t really want to go through any discomfort’ — It’s over! You’re never going to get there,” Schwarzenegger said. “It’s just the way it is. You have to be able to struggle.”
Schwarzenegger said learning how to “accept pain, misery and discomfort — all of the things that you don’t like” was inherent to a solid personal foundation.
“Because the more you experience the things you really don’t like, the more you can grow and the tougher you can get, the more you can handle,” he said. “It’s just that simple. So many young kids today have shied away from that. But you have to be attracted to that.”
Schwarzenegger, 76, appeared on the show to promote his new self-help book, “Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life,” which comes out Tuesday (Oct. 10). As indicated on the Amazon page for the book, it is already a best-seller among “personal transformation self-help” books, presumably from the release’s presales.
Schwarzenegger, an Austrian immigrant, first rose to fame as the world’s top body builder in the 1970s, during which he won six Mr. Olympia titles before claiming a seventh in 1980. Continuing his take, he referred to the work ethic of the first generations of migrant Americans — “what built this country.”
“Is it people that slept in? Is it people that were wimping out? This, ‘Oh, I want to feel good. Oh, I want to be comfortable.’ No. This is where ballsy women and men that went out there at 5 in the morning and got up and they struggled and they fought, and they worked their butts off. That’s what made this country great. And so now let’s continue this way. Don’t start creating a generation of wimps and weak people and stuff like that where we go and we’re concerned about, ‘How are you feeling today? Oh, I don’t want to hurt your feelings,’ and all that.
“It’s nice to be considerate, yes. I totally agree with that. But let’s not overbaby the kids, and let’s not overbaby, kind of, the people. Let’s go and teach kids to be tough, to go out and do sports, to study, to struggle, you know, to go through these kind of painful moments sometimes.”
Stern and Schwarzenegger broached the subject after the shock jock mentioned the weight-loss drug Ozempic, saying using it is “avoiding the big issue.”
Schwarzenegger seemed to agree, replying that to him it was “all about hard work.”
“Because there’s no shortcut,” Schwarzenegger said. “And you kind of have to put the work in.”
“The Terminator” star compared it to making weight-lifting progress with the biceps muscle.
“The more resistance you give it, the more pain there is, the more it grows,” he said. “The same is for us with a human mind. The human mind can only really grow through resistance. You can only strengthen your character, become a really strong person inside, if you have resistance — if you fail, if you get up again and if you work hard, you work our ass off and if you struggle. The more you struggle, the further you’re going to go, the stronger you’re going to get. So it’s just the way the world works.”
