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Lessons from the TerminatorDate: 09.02.2007
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team India
When he robotically intoned, “I'll be back”, in the eponymous Terminator series, Arnold Schwarzenegger was perhaps echoing his inner predilection to succeed at all costs. And ever since he stepped on to his professional life, he has kept that promise thrice—first as a world bodybuilding champion, then as a highly successful action movie star, and now as the Governor of California since 2003.
More about Governor Schwarzenegger, later. Let me now take you on a different tangent: the real (and often mundane) world of senior managers in the corporate world. Many of them have had a reasonably good career growth, but interestingly, most of them find their lives to be painful.
A study by professor Ciaran O'Boyle, head of the School of Healthcare Management at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI), and Georgina Corscadden, senior specialist at the Irish Management Institute (IMI), shows that senior managers felt the quality of their lives was worse than that of entry level managers. Another surprising finding in this study was that senior management gave themselves a lower ranking than those of seriously-ill patients.
Entry level managers are only slightly better off. They rated their personal quality of lives to be lower than that of patients with peptic ulcers. Could this be one good reason why almost 26 per cent of the graduates from premier B-schools like the IIMs quit their first jobs within the first 12 months?
There is only one word that captures the dominant flavour in the lives of all corporate denizens. Pain.
Some like Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, have a strange, inhuman, attitude towards pain. “The only way to be a champion is by going through…torture and pain”, he says.
At 15, one year after he started training to build his body, Schwarzenegger also studied psychology with Dr. Karl Gerstl to learn more about the power of mind over body. He won the Mr Olympia title an unprecedented seven times, the last one at the age of 33, when he was, technically “too old”.
Arnold then, naturally, must be an inhuman automaton, living and structuring his life by the clock? His life too must be hyper-planned, moving from one super-organised moment to the next?
Wrong! A freshly released book titled, intriguingly, ‘A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder--How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place ', highlights the fact that Schwarzenegger, gasp, doesn't even keep a daily schedule . He refuses to keep appointments and meets everyone “on the fly”!
The authors, in fact, credit his “improvisational lifestyle” for his unlikely rise in politics.
“The meaning of life”, says Schwarzenegger, “is not simply to exist, to survive”. Meaningful living, he asserts, is instead to, “move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.“
Even though senior executives and managers don't have what it takes to be a Schwarzenegger, they still have considerable status, power and riches to be happy about. But the study shows they are far from it. “On an average, senior managers perceived their own QoL to be lower than that perceived by any of the terminally-ill patients," Professor Boyle points out.
But does this mean that the quality of lives of senior managers is actually lower than that of patients suffering from serious conditions. Boyle clarifies “it simply means that some senior managers … perceived their own quality of life to be low.”
But there are quite a few managers who have embraced another path to greater fulfilment.
Perception Change
Last week, I had long, deep, conversations with four different people. In terms of respective backgrounds, they couldn't be more different from each other.
The first person has had a highly successful career of more than 35 years. He has now started work on his second career with a passion that he had when he began his first career. The second person is a young entrepreneur, a graduate of a well-known business school, working tirelessly towards building a thriving business.
The third is a successful government executive who, his colleagues unanimously agree, is destined for much bigger things in the government. The fourth person is an entrepreneur with a very successful start-up under his belt; he is now moving to other challenges.
These four men are currently in transition mode: they are trying to focus on changing their perception of what matters the most to them and get to the ‘right' path. In other words, they are trying to change their frames of reference to improve their quality of life.
As the QoL study revealed, even though, unquestionably, serious illness has a significantly adverse impact on quality of life, most of those patients successfully changed their own frame of reference. They could have easily chosen to define their happiness by perfect health—something that they didn't possess. Instead they chose to focus on the things that they did have.
This change in perception helped them discover enormous meaning and quality in their own lives. “While it does not make sense to make objective comparisons of subjective findings,” O'Boyle advises, “this research suggests that some managers may need to change their frames of reference.”
But to undergo this change, one would have to embrace pain. Nobody knows it better than Schwarzenegger. As a native Austrian, he was not too comfortable with the language of his adopted country. “If there's one thing that everyone agrees on,” a commentator observed,” it's that Arnold has issues with the language of English.”
For an aspiring film star who happens to be working in the age of talkies, this is bit of a handicap. Fortunately for him, his directors found a way of getting around this problem by not giving him too many lines in the films. In ‘The Terminator', the movie that immortalised Schwarzenegger, he speaks a mere 17 lines of dialogue (sixteen different phrases, one twice).
Politics unfortunately is a place where one cannot get away with sixteen pieces of dialogue and does require considerable felicity with the language. Success in this arena, to a large extent, is dependent on the ability to talk.
But here again Schwarzenegger surprised one and all. A journalist who covered him after election as California Governor noted that “watching Schwarzenegger speak to business groups is an amazing experience. He delivers a PowerPoint presentation with the best of them.” And the ultimate accolade: “He is highly charismatic, persuasive, and inspirational.”
So what did Schwarzenegger do to improve his speaking skills? He merely applied the same discipline and focus that made him a success as a bodybuilder. “Pain makes me grow. Growing is what I want. Therefore, for me pain is pleasure,” he once said. “Experiencing this pain in my muscles and aching and going on is my challenge.”
His advice? “This area of pain divides a champion from someone who is not a champion.”
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