2/27 Monday Motivation

I turned 75 in the middle of filming FUBAR in Toronto. It was 4 months of 12-14 hour days and nights. On good days, I left my hotel at 6 in the morning and got back at 7 or 8 at night. On bad days, I left my hotel at 6 at night and got back at 7 or 8 in the morning.

On weekends and during my lunches on set, I checked in with Daniel and my team to keep up with my other projects and the work we’re doing at the Schwarzenegger Institute. I couldn’t travel to my annual anti-pollution summit, the Austrian World Summit, in Austria in June because of our filming, but Netflix and the production kindly let me use the set to deliver my speech (you can watch it here) live from Toronto to Vienna. In order to open the summit, I left my hotel at 1:30 in the morning and started speaking at 3.

My friends and family kept checking in to ask if I was doing OK. At first, I felt a little bit like they were treating me like an old man, until I sat back and looked at my schedule. It was a lot! But my answer was still: I’m not OK, I’m fantastic.

Don’t get me wrong. Whether it was 9 in the morning or 10 at night, whenever I finally got to my bed, I was exhausted and I fell asleep immediately. But it was a good exhaustion, and wonderful sleep. Even though I am at an age when some people are well into retirement (never gonna happen), I woke up every day ready to do the work. That’s because I was living two of the lessons I always share with you guys.

First, I’d done the reps. By keeping my routine of training every day in the lead up to filming, and then not giving it up once we started, whether I was shooting nights or days, my body was ready for the work of running around, jumping from explosions, and punching bad guys. As a matter of fact, there was one day that I did something I’ve never done in my life. I rehearsed an action sequence 27 times, because this director wanted it in one shot without cutting, and it involved 12 people. Rehearsing that much might seem crazy, but I loved it - it made the whole scene automatic so I wasn’t stressing about trying to remember my moves. And by relentlessly practicing my lines for 2 months before I arrived and then again every day when we drove to set, my mind was ready to do almost everything on autopilot.

I say almost everything because TV is wildly different than movies, and it becomes impossible to have everything memorized with the changes; there were times where we’d be shooting parts of 3 different episodes in one day. Those days, I didn’t know all my lines for the first time in my career (besides the time DeVito snuck pot into my cigar)! But I didn’t feel frantic or schvitzy because I had the foundation of all of the practice I’d done, so I only had to worry about the new stuff, not the old stuff that I’d already made automatic. Doing more reps meant less worries.

Second, I had my vision in front of me. I knew why I was doing all of this. This is exactly the type of project my fans have been demanding for years now. Anytime I felt a little tired, I would just think about how happy I’d make them when they finally got to see the final episodes. With my summit in Austria to terminate pollution (which kills 7 million people a year, so if that doesn’t keep me focused on solutions, what would?) and my other work, I also know exactly why I’m doing it. It sucked that I couldn’t travel to be there in person, but I wasn’t going to let that ruin my vision. I was going to do whatever it took, even it it meant waking up in the middle of the night like a lunatic, to make the people attending in person know that I’m 100% behind the conference. Knowing that all of this work was not just for its own sake, but working toward my visions, made it feel like it wasn’t work at all. When I hit my pillow every night with sore knees or shoulders, I slept easy because I knew I was fulfilling my purpose.

So that’s how this all relates to fitness and motivation. If you know your vision - the why you’re doing what you’re doing - and you do the reps ahead of time to really prepare for it so that you can minimize stress when it is time to perform, you can do almost anything. Even if you’re a 75 year old Schnitzel.