Why is a positive mindset important for achieving your dreams? How can you get rid of negative thoughts about yourself?
To sell yourself and others on the idea of your dream, you have to truly believe it without giving in to negativity. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s story shows that adopting a positive mindset, viewing hardships as opportunities, and managing time efficiently are powerful tools for achieving your dreams.
Check out how to gain a positive mindset to make your dreams come true.
1. Reframe Your Circumstances
The road to achieving your dream is full of challenges, which is why Schwarzenegger insists that you need to learn how to gain a positive mindset. You’re bound to encounter obstacles, but it’s beneficial, if not essential, to view your struggles as opportunities to develop your skills. We all tend to focus on the negative—an instinctive remnant from our ancestors who were primarily concerned with survival. However, this instinct is less useful if we want progress instead of mere survival. Adopting an optimistic outlook helps you engage constructively with your circumstances, so next time you feel like complaining about life’s difficulties—don’t. Instead, verbalize the potential positives that might emerge from those hardships.
(Shortform note: Instead of thinking in positive and negative terms, educators and psychologists distinguish between “fixed” and “growth” perspectives. In Mindset, Carol S. Dweck explains that people with fixed mindsets believe their abilities are unchangeable—struggles are therefore a sign of weakness and persisting through difficulties is a waste of effort. What Schwarzenneger advocates is adopting a growth mindset in which you understand that the abilities you’re born with are merely a starting point that you can improve on with work and perseverance. Since many people learn a fixed mindset at an early age, it often takes deliberate effort to switch your thinking to a helpful growth mindset.)
For most people, a life-threatening medical scare like Schwarzenegger’s botched 2018 heart surgery would be a cause for despair. But Schwarzenegger recalls that after his initial wave of fear and frustration, the shock wore off and his mind shifted into its familiar “I can do this” mode. Schwarzenegger zeroed in on his next goal—making a full recovery, no matter how difficult the road ahead. He viewed his health crisis as merely another challenge to overcome, and the setback became a spark to reignite his drive to overcome whatever challenge was before him. He achieved all his recovery goals and went right back into making action movies.
(Shortform note: One might expect that Schwarzenegger’s decades of peak physical training primed his body to recover from illness, but there are other less-athletic people who’ve fought their way back from even more debilitating injuries. In My Stroke of Insight, Jill Bolte Taylor describes how she was able to recover from a stroke that destroyed much of the left side of her brain. As a scientist, Taylor understood how important it was to keep her mind active, maintain her energy, and strengthen her body after losing motor functions. Like Schwarzenegger, Bolte set goals and doggedly worked to meet them until, after several years, she’d made a full recovery.)
2. Use Your Time Wisely
Just as you need to reframe your circumstances, Schwarzenegger says it’s equally important to shift your mindset toward time. Rather than lamenting how little time you have, critically evaluate how you’re spending it. If you identify and repurpose wasted time, you can significantly increase your productivity. You can surely allocate an hour or two every day toward your aspirations—even if it means sacrificing some “down time.” Ask yourself, “What’s genuinely more important?” If your goals truly matter, you’ll have to carve out the necessary time to pursue them. If the overall time frame to fulfill your ambitions seems too intimidating at first, then break your goals down into smaller tasks that require less time commitment.
(Shortform note: If Schwarzenegger makes time management sound deceptively simple, tech industry insiders Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky approach time management as an engineering project. In Make Time, they advocate that you identify one central task as the focus of each day and arrange your time and energy to support it. Recognizing that the modern world is filled with distractions to drain your valuable time, they suggest several ways to set boundaries, such as turning off your phone, not opening your email, and blocking off time on your daily calendar when other people aren’t allowed to interrupt you.)
3. Confront Challenges and Open Your Mind
Learning to manage your time and how you frame things can help dispel the unhelpful belief that life is just something that happens to you. Life provides a myriad of circumstances—both positive and negative—and the way you choose to respond significantly shapes your personal journey. Schwarzenegger explains that you need to see failure as nothing more than a call for more improvement, which you can facilitate by always keeping your mind open to new knowledge and actively being curious about the world and people around you.
Not everything in life is under your control, but how you react certainly is—whether to a setback, a problem, or even an unexpected stroke of luck. Schwarzenegger suggests that bemoaning your past or current problems wastes time that could be spent chasing your dreams. To reclaim this lost time and learn from your hardships, you need to pause and shift your thinking to an optimistic view. Even failure doesn’t mean you’ve been wasting your efforts—instead, consider it a teaching moment on your journey. Schwarzenegger mentions weightlifting as a sport in which failure is used to measure progress every day. It’s only when a weightlifter pushes her muscles until they fail that she knows she’s putting in enough effort.
Just as pushing yourself is key to physical fitness, it’s vital for mental acuity as well. Schwarzenegger writes that your learning must extend beyond the confines of traditional education and carry on throughout your life. You can and should gain whatever knowledge you can from anyone, anywhere, and in any way. Real-world experiences—taking action, solving problems, pushing your boundaries and, yes, even failing—offer invaluable lessons that you can’t learn in a controlled academic setting. Remember that knowledge functions like a muscle—you have to apply it or you risk losing it. But if you actively maintain and make use of what you learn, you can significantly improve both your life and the world around you.
