Buy Arnold Body Building Products!

Part of the joys of staying up all night is that I don’t have to fight with my wife over what movies to watch. My latest guilty pleasure was the bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno and others leading up to the Mr Olympia 1975 contest. I grew up an Arnold fan (let’s just say I could recite all of Conan the Destroyer as a 7 year old) so this was an interesting look into his life before being a movie star and politician. One new thing I picked up on is how seriously he took all of his competitions. At the time of the movie, he had won 5 consecutive Mr. Olympia titles, he had been the youngest Mr Olympia ever, and he hadn’t lost a competition in 5 years. He was the undisputed king of the body building world. He knew it, and everyone else knew it.

But he wasn’t content to rely on the strength of his reputation or his preparation. He went out of his way to get in the heads of his competitors, to psych them out before they even got up on stage. On the morning of the competition, he ate breakfast with Lou Ferrigno and his family, and while he seemed friendly and jovial, he was undermining Lou with his comments. He said things like “Oh yeah, Lou’s got so much potential, he’s got a great career ahead of him.” and “Lou, this competition today will be a great learning experience for you.” He planted the thought in Lou’s head that winning wasn’t even a possibility. Now there was little chance that anyone could unseat Arnold (he won his 6th straight title that day), but he didn’t take any chances with a potential competitor.

Another (slightly disturbing) thing Arnold said was how weight lifting and the pump you get, the rush of posing on stage, was like having sex, even better than sex. So when he worked out and competed, it was like having sex all the time. It certainly made me glad I wasn’t his workout partner :). But once I got over my creeps, I realized that if that’s truly how the reward system in his brain worked, no wonder he became world class so young and stayed so long. If what you do for your job also happens to be the thing that gives you the most pleasure, then you can’t help but excel. If you have found what you love, and it’s so satisfying that you can’t stop working at it, you will be on your way to success. Great success takes years of consistent work, and you have to love something a lot to put in that effort. Arnold is just another example of that.

Lou Ferrigno, on the other hand, seemed to lack that same internal motivation. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Lou and thought his height and size made me more impressive than Arnold on the stage. I must also confess that seeing his face strain while he was working out made me think a car was about to get flipped over or a hyperbaric chamber was going to get ripped apart! But whereas Arnold tended to do his own workouts or take time to help others with their technique, Lou always had his father, brother, and friends with him. They pushed him, they told him how hard he had to work, they told him he had to beat Arnold. He would try to quit halfway through his set, saying he didn’t want it anymore, but his dad would tell him he had to finish. Now don’t get me wrong, Lou had to work his guts out to get where he did, and he was still young at the time, but he seemed like he was doing what he was told instead of doing what he loved. He had the size and build to compete, which none of his crew did, but at least the way the movie showed him, he didn’t seem like he was intrinsically motivated, even though he worked hard.

It’s simple to draw a parallel between these two and types of startup founders. One loves what he’s doing and would do anything to succeed, one is great at what he’s doing but can’t stay motivated on his own. And if I had to honestly assess myself, I’d say that right now, I’m a Lou, not an Arnold. I haven’t gotten to the point where success breeds more success, where I’ve got enough of an application that build more is intoxicating. I’m still fleshing out ideas, improving my familiarity with the tools I’m going to use, and doing infrastructure setup. I know I can get to the Arnold level of motivation once I get to the sweet spot of the work, because I’ve been there before. I can get the same way with reading, and more recently with writing.

What I don’t know if I can do is to be cutthroat with my competition. I have that horrible gene that geeks have makes them think the best product/person/team/etc should win on its merits, and that using any methods besides excellence to win is cheating. I suppose I can remove some of this cognitive dissonance by telling myself that a clearly inferior product deserves to have its weaknesses exploited. But for now, I’m so early in the process that my offering isn’t even worse.

If you lack the passion for what you’re doing or the dedication to bend the rules in your favor, you’re going to have a tough time succeeding. But if you realize it, you can change it. Change takes time, so don’t wait. It’s time to go pump some code!