Copyright Benzinga
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a rule for approaching problems in life and it deems complaining about as a pointless step in the process unless you're ready to fix the problem. Arnie’s Discipline Rooted In Action The actor-turned-California governor frames it as a form of discipline that he's applied to disciplines ranging from politics to personal setbacks. In his 2023 book "Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life," Schwarzenegger writes, "No complaining about a situation unless you're prepared to do something to make it better." He continues that if you see a problem and don't arrive with a potential solution, he's not interested in the "whining." “It couldn't be that bad if it hasn't motivated you to try to fix it," he adds. That ethos surfaced during his recovery from an emergency open-heart surgery in 2018. "I was in the middle of a disaster," he recalled in a YouTube video he posted in 2023. But the focus quickly became getting out of bed, walking and rebuilding strength, a shift from lamenting the setback to executing a plan that involved getting out of the issue at hand. See Also: Average Americans Spends One-Third Of Their Paycheck On The Same Day They Receive It Policy Battles Over Whining In Public Life Schwarzenegger has taken the same approach in public life. A registered Republican and a long-time campaigner against partisan map-drawing, he has urged Americans to act against gerrymandering rather than ‘whining” at their televisions, backing citizen initiatives and independent commissions during and after his governorship. The former governor reprised the message at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna in June this year as well. "When people ask, ‘What do we do?' I say: Stop whining. Whining doesn't change anything. Get to work." He pointed to his administration's emissions fights with Washington and state-level clean-energy policies as examples of making progress without waiting for perfect conditions. Persona Forged From Grit And Drive The line also echoes his pop-culture persona. In the 1990 film "Kindergarten Cop," his character famously barks, "Stop whining!" a widely-meme’d catchphrase that mirrors, if playfully, the ethic he promotes in real life. Schwarzenegger's biography tracks the same arc from intention to action. The Austrian bodybuilder arrived in the United States in 1968 with little money, became a seven-time Mr. Olympia, a box-office staple and, later, a two-term governor. He has since remained a high-profile climate advocate. Read Next: Steve Jobs Said He ‘Wasn’t Always There’ for His Kids —But Called Being a Dad ‘10,000 Times Better’ Than Creating Apple’s Trillion-Dollar Legacy Photo Courtesy: Frederic Legrand – COMEO on Shutterstock.com
