Harry 0:00

People that have the ability to create and maintain and constantly evolve continuously a strong vision that has enough distinction, enough clarity, enough of a soundtrack, it's a lot easier for them to know when they're off course.

Narrator 0:21

You're listening to Traction Heroes, digging in to get results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Jorge 0:31

Harry, it's good to see you, my friend.

Harry 0:34

Oh, excellent. Good to see you, Jorge. Thank you for making time today.

Jorge 0:38

I value our time together because I always learn something new.

Harry 0:42

Me too. And I'm often surprised it reminds me of, think something that... who was it that called out the notion of a refrigerator laugh? You don't realize something's funny and stand up comedy until you're taking milk out of the refrigerator. Is it Steve Martin who said that? And this is like refrigerator insights. It's like I don't realize that I've really learned something profound until I go to take something out of the refrigerator. I'm like, "Oh, wow. That was insightful."

Jorge 1:14

I don't know about the refrigerator bit, but I often find myself having those kinds of sparks happen when I get up and shift positions, like I walk around or something, it's like, "Oh, okay. That's what that was about. That's cool."

Harry 1:29

Yeah, and I wish it had happened at the time that the conversation was taking place, is often my response. I could have been so much smarter in that moment.

Jorge 1:41

I think we can all relate to that. Let me share with you something, I've brought a reading as usual,

Harry 1:48

Cool.

Jorge 1:48

And the challenge I'm gonna have here is that this is quite long and I'm going to have to be editing and that probably means that there's going to be some disjointed things. So let's see how it goes.

Harry 2:01

Okay.

Jorge 2:04

"So many of our best people are lost. So many of the good ones don't know what they're doing with their lives. They're unhealthy. They're unhappy. 70% of them hate their jobs. Their relationships are unrewarding. They don't smile, they don't laugh. They have no energy. They feel useless. They feel helpless, as if life were pushing them down a road to nowhere. If you know what to look for, you will see these people everywhere. Maybe even when you look in the mirror. It's okay, you're not broken. Neither are they. This is just what happens when you don't have a clear vision for your life and you've taken either whatever you can get or whatever you thought you deserved. We can fix that because everything good, all great change starts with a clear vision. Vision is the most important thing. Vision is purpose and meaning. To have a clear vision is to have a picture of what you want your life to look like and a plan for how to get there." I'm going to skip ahead a little bit. "This is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go. Does the picture you have in your mind of your ideal future get blurrier or sharper because of this thing you're about to do? The happiest and most successful people in the world do everything in their power to avoid bad decisions that confuse matters and drag them away from their goals. Instead, they focus on making choices that bring clarity to their vision and bring them closer to achieving it. It doesn't matter if they're considering a small thing or a huge thing. The decision making process is always the same. The only difference between them and us, between me and you, between any two people, is the clarity of the picture we have for our future, the strength of our plan to get there, and whether or not we have accepted that the choice to make that vision a reality is ours and ours alone."

Harry 4:33

That's impactful. I thought we were going down the downer slide, and then it picked up and really brought it into focus. I'm super curious. I don't think I've read that before. What did it come from?

Jorge 4:48

This comes from a book that came out in 2023. The title of the book is Be Useful. The subtitle is Seven Tools for Life, and the author is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Harry 5:08

Whoa. That's so cool.

Jorge 5:11

Yeah, it surprised me. I don't think we've talked about this book before in our conversations, have we?

Harry 5:17

No, I don't think so. Being that usefulness is central to how I grew up, my father was very much about... he would, there I was, I don't know, 11 years old and he'd be teaching me to set points in a 1968 Chrysler station wagon or change the oil or bleed the brake lines or do whatever it was. And I had pretty much no interest in any of that at the time. But sometimes he would say, "Don't just do something. Stand there. Be useful."

Jorge 5:52

You wanna know something funny? The title of Schwarzenegger's book comes from something his dad told him.

Harry 5:59

Oh, interesting.

Jorge 6:00

So his father also taught him to be useful, and he talks about that. So this is a kind of memoir, but it's packaged as self-help. And, and I got the sense that it's packaged for a particular demographic. I don't know why, but in my mind it's like, it's probably a book that is most attractive to a young man who's starting out in the world, the sort of person who would gravitate to pumping iron or whatever. It's almost like a more pragmatic version of the sort of thing that Jordan Peterson talks about where he's that, that demographic that he appeals to. But anyway, I read this book, when it came out and, I actually listened to it as an audio book, which is really cool because it's read by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, in his very distinctive Austrian accent, right? So it felt like a few hours spent, with Uncle Arnie, talking about how he succeeded in his life.

Harry 7:10

That's so cool. And part of why I think it's so cool is I think as a society and as a general rule, I think we have done just a very poor job, we being I'll include myself, in creating conditions for young men to grow up and feel a sense of self-confidence and be good people, and having role models that are out there in the world accomplishing great things. It may not be obvious to you which way to go, but at least there's an exemplar, right? And somebody who arguably has done a lot of good in the world.

Jorge 7:44

I don't wanna over-index on the young man thing. I just brought that up because as with anything that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been involved with, this feels like very kind of high testosterone. It's like you, you remember his movies in the eighties with

Harry 8:00

Oh, totally.

Jorge 8:01

All the machine guns and stuff. And the subtitle of the book is Seven Tools. And let me just read you the titles of the tools, and you'll get a sense of why I said that. But I think that this is a book that might be useful to anyone, not just young men, is the reason why I'm giving this disclaimer. So, here are the tools. The first one is have a clear vision, which is the one that I read from, right? And it's the one that I actually wanna focus on, right? I wanna focus on this idea of vision. But I just wanna tell you what the other ones are. The second one is never think small. The third one is work your ass off. The fourth one is sell, sell, sell. The fifth one is shift gears. The sixth one is shut your mouth, open your mind. And the seventh one is break your mirrors. And we might come back to the seventh one. Anyway, so they gist here, and this is something that I don't... I'm not especially keen on people who have been super successful and then late in life they write down a bunch of lessons and and somehow Imply that you just do this and you'll be successful. As I recall, Arnold does talk about the role of luck in his life and he acknowledges that. But again, it was a couple of years since I read this. But this is him trying to reverse engineer the conditions which got him to his success. And I think that when you start looking at his life, and I'm not like an Arnold scholar by any means. I've just read this one book. And there's also a, a documentary series on Netflix that I watched, which was actually quite good, about his life. And it's based on this book, so the two are, related. But the gist of this is that he grew up in a very small town in Austria. And he was a kid with big dreams and through grit basically, made it happen. And there's a lot more to it than that obviously. And if you think about his life story where he went and became a Mr. Universe, So like the top of the bodybuilding world. Then he pivoted from that career and he became a movie star. And he was at one point, I think like the biggest movie star in the world, like one of the best paid movie stars, if not the, best paid movie star in the world. And then he pivoted from that and became the governor of California. It's incredible when somebody achieves one of those things, this guy did three of them, So, there's, something interesting there. And he did it, I would say also in spite of what some people could consider pretty insurmountable obstacles, right? So becoming a Mr. Olympia after growing up in this very small town in Austria where there wasn't really a bodybuilding culture. Then, becoming a huge movie star when, he did not have the build. If you think about who are the big movie stars in the 1970s, it was people like Robert De Niro or Al Pacino. Big bodybuilders were not becoming movie stars. Much less big bodybuilders with a strong Austrian accent, right?

Harry 11:48

Yeah.

Jorge 11:49

So he became a big star despite those two things. And then becoming a governor of California again, someone who was not born in the United States and very obviously so because of his, accent and stuff. Anyway, I, thought that the book was worthwhile, especially in audiobook format. I wrote a blog post about it at the time. But, I did want to pinch and zoom on this notion of vision because for him, that's where it started. And you notice that he listed it first: have a clear vision.

Harry 12:22

First off, I love where you're going with this. Let's just start there. Next is, it's an unassailable example, whether you're an Arnold fan or not. His life story sort of lays out the supporting points that make it clear that, at least for him, these were strong drivers. The idea behind the vision, I've I spent a lot of time thinking about this in part because one of my business partners doesn't actually make pictures in his head. It's a phenomena that I didn't even know existed. But he is so purpose-driven. He's very clear about why he does what he does, even if he doesn't have an image that he's heading toward, or a movie that he's heading toward in his mind, or an image or moving that he's trying to get away from, right? You think about the NLP meta-pattern of away and towards. A vision can be either, and maybe some combination of those things. The reason I think this is so interesting and plays directly into what we want to talk to people about is, I put a proposal out, a business proposal last week. It was well received. Looks like the work is gonna happen. And I put an a line item on that proposal that I called optional. Can you guess what that line item was? The CEO's vision. And the reason for that is that in almost any consulting or executive coaching environment that I go into, what I find is that if a person doesn't have a pretty well-developed sense of their vision or as a proxy, their purpose, there's a very good chance that many of the things that they don't want to have happen are happening underneath their leadership because they assume that other people can just read them or understand what it is they have in their head. And it's a little bit like you're, you may be familiar with Gallup StrengthsFinder. I think there's a StrengthsFinder 2.0 and it as part of the definition of a strength, a management strength, it's a mental or physical behavior that you do naturally and you undervalue it in yourself and you assume other people can do it. And the, result of that is it's easy for you, it's hard for most other people. And vision is a lot like that. I think people that have the ability to create and maintain and constantly evolve continuously a strong vision that has enough distinction, enough clarity, enough of a soundtrack, it's a lot easier for them to know when they're off course. I have a strong vision for myself and what I'm doing in my life, and I'm also very strongly oriented toward the purpose why I do what I do. I think it makes it very easy to know when something's going on that is off-path for me. It's taken a lifetime of work to get to this point, but When I think about the seven lessons, parlay your winds is probably number eight. you kinda missed that one. I grew up down there. I grew up rioting on the beach in Venice, in Santa Monica. Most people are highly entertained to learn that I used to own a penny farthing, which is one of those bikes with a big giant front wheel and a little tiny rear wheel. And when I was in high school, I used to get paid by the bicycle shop cafe to ride along the boardwalk and down on the Santa Monica Pier and throughout Santa Monica in a top hat and tails with a big cardboard sign in that front wheel that said Bicycle Shop Cafe. And I would go down to Venice and I would see the bodybuilders. So this is very real for me. And I would get attention, and it was fun. And I was making a fortune, right? I was making like 20 bucks an hour when I was in high school. And I've never been like a ginormous Arnold fan, but I've never not been either. And I'm definitely definitely gonna go read that book because I'd like to understand how he talks about vision and how much of that is a vision toward versus how much of it's a vision away from, and how much of that is the actual movie that he plays in his head or whether it's static pictures or whether it's a vision board. There are lots of different ways to express vision

Jorge 17:10

Yeah. He talks about it primarily, as I recall, as something to aspire towards rather than something to avoid. And the example he uses and he has some suggestions on how to do it, which we can get into. But I remember that he talks about starting big picture and then honing in on the details,

Harry 17:36

Hmm.

Jorge 17:37

Like he says, for example, that for him, the vision when he was very, young, started with just wanting to get to the U.S.

Harry 17:48

Hmm.

Jorge 17:48

He had idealized America through his exposure to the movies and stuff like that. And he just wanted to get out of the place where he grew up and where he was going to school in Austria. And he didn't really know what he wanted to do when he got there, but he knew that he wanted to be there, right? And as I recall, he offers that as an example of starting very broad and fuzzy, but that's a start, right? But he also talks about something that I think your friend who cannot form mental pictures would have a hard time with, which is visualizing the effects of having achieved the vision. I don't know if I read this in the book or if it was in the documentary, but he talks about imagining what it would be like to walk up to receive the Mr. Universe prize and all the cameras going off. And like he had it in his mind, like he had that vision in his mind of what it would feel like to be standing there, being recognized as the top person in his field. And this is something that I've read other athletes in other fields doing, where they can very... I was gonna say graphically, but like in detail kind of imagine what it would not just look like, but feel like, what, do you hear? What do, what are the smells? What are the, what does it feel like to be, in that situation? I'm just revisiting my notes from when I read this, I have this note here that some of the advice might sound close to kinda woozy metaphysics, and I put in parenthesis here, for example, the law of attraction, right? But he acknowledges this and he says that, that, yeah, I know that this sounds a little weird, but from personal experience I think that, being able to have such a clear idea of where you want to go that you can visualize it internally for yourself, does give you an edge.

Harry 20:06

A hundred percent. And once again, as a probably spend 50% or more of my time working with people who are trying to get better as an executive coach, either with high performers or with senior-level operational leaders or CEOs or whatnot, and having a clear vision and being able to step into that vision and not have it be a thing of the future or not have it be a thing of possibility but have it be an experience that you are playing out as if it is true is a very powerful device. Because the mind... and this does get to the kind of woowoo stuff, right? the mind doesn't really distinguish between what we're experiencing now and what we could be experiencing in the future if we made it an experience that we were having now, like a dream. And this sort of hearkens back to some of the conversation that we had about self-deception and about the positive and negative sides of self-deception and how you could say that Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field was the master of self-deception. And that ability to deceive himself and to believe, to step into that world, and communicate what he saw to other people effectively and line up a large organization in an ecosystem to support all of that is would that have happened without a vision? Maybe. Maybe not.

Jorge 21:37

It's funny you should mention that one. Of the sections in this chapter in the Schwarzenegger book, it's actually the closing section in this chapter, is called Look In the Mirror. And what he's basically advocating for there is being honest with yourself and not that you're going to keep yourself from developing a vision, but you're not gonna effectively move towards the vision if you can't have a good read on where you are.

Harry 22:07

Yes, that's right. And we may have talked about this before, some of the ideas that Jocko Willink and Leif Babin talk about in their work with Extreme Ownership is it is far more important to know where you are on the battlefield than to know where your enemy is.

Jorge 22:25

Right. And we talked about the Lincoln thing, right? The speech from the Spielberg Lincoln movie, where he talks about the compass, right? The vision part here is, "I'm heading south," right? Now, you may find a swamp in the way, which will cause you to have to move west for a little while. But you know in your mind that what you wanna do is you wanna head south. You have to have both the clear vision of where you want to be heading but also you have to have your senses attuned to conditions on the ground, if you are to make it there.

Harry 23:02

We could talk about this topic for a long, long time. And I've written down a number of other books and things that we could be talking about, but I know we're running short on time and usually I outsource to you the how do we... what are the tire chains to get traction? What do we leave people with? And it seems pretty clear to me that the absence of having a vision is gonna take you somewhere else. And if you have a vision, whether it's a compelling vision of the future and that you can step in and really, breathe life into, or whether it is grainy, but it's still, maybe it's a grainy static picture, that's better than nothing. And making the investment to get clear about that future state, that compelling future state, there's a lot of leverage there.

Jorge 24:00

Yeah, absolutely. I'm, and I'm gonna close by again, quoting from the Schwarzenegger thing, the lack of a vision, you've taken this is now in the book, right? Like, "You've taken either whatever you can get or whatever you thought you deserved." So it's like, yeah, if you don't have a clarity around where you're heading, you're just gonna be buffeted by whatever comes along and that's no way to go about it.

Harry 24:30

It's one way. It's just probably not the preferred way.

Jorge 24:33

right. Anyway, I wanted to share it with you. Maybe we'll return to some of the other tools because I really found value in this book. And it's a fun listen especially if watched, Arnie movies in the eighties.

Harry 24:47

Yeah, I'm gonna go get myself some more audiobook credits and spool it up and take it on a walk. It sounds great. Thank you.

Jorge 24:54

Alright, thank you Harry.

Narrator 24:57

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.