Dancing the Polka

I met Arnold Schwarzenegger almost exactly 25 years ago. It was at Heavenly – a ski resort that straddles the California-Nevada border near Lake Tahoe. 

I was spending the summer getting shot multiple times a day at a nearby cowboy-themed tourist trap, part of a crew of kids from Minnesota. The owner thought Minnesotans had a good work ethic. They do, but I’m not originally from Minnesota. Which is why the only thing I was good for was playing dead.

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Anyway, I met Schwarzenegger in a gondola. And when I say I met him, what I mean is I spent several minutes trying to get my friend, Sandee – also of the Minnesota crew – to leave him alone. He was with two of his children; his demeanor suggested, politely, that he preferred to be left alone. He wanted to be a dad hanging out with his kids.

Sandee only half picked this up and kept loudly ‘whispering’ to me: “Is that Arnold Schwarzenegger?! I think that’s Arnold Schwarzenegger!”

Finally, he glanced across to us and said firmly: “Yes, it is Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

DEFINING MY VISION

I mentioned last month that I am in the process of trying to change my life direction. Part of that has involved gleaning advice from Schwarzenegger’s book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. I can’t help feeling at least one part of it was written specifically for me. Or, at least, Sandee.

“When I go skiing,” he writes, “I use the 10 or 15 minutes in the chairlift as a kind of sacred space.”

Having that sacred space ─ on a chairlift, or on a walk, or inside your helmet as you ride a motorcycle ─ is an important part of developing a clear vision for yourself. Once you develop a broad idea of what you want to do, you then want to spend time thinking about it.

In Part 1 of this process I determined that “my vision is storytelling in a way that delivers a self-determined and sustainable income.” So, the next step, according to Schwarzenegger is: “Create time and space every day to think, to daydream, to look around, to be present in the world, to let inspiration and ideas in.”

But not too much time. You also want to be doing something.

Country music legend Joe Diffie once said: “The best advice I ever got was: do something every day toward your music.”

It’s advice that applies beyond music. Schwarzenegger would agree. He says you should “create little goals for yourself” in service of your vision – starting with small daily goals, then weekly, then monthly.

I’ve been struggling to do that consistently. In part because I’m struggling with another part of Arnie’s process: visualization. 

“You need to be able to see what you want to achieve before you do it,” Schwarzenegger says. “If you can’t fully see your vision… it becomes very hard to assess opportunities and challenges.”

So, I’ve worked out that I want to be a storyteller who’s able to support himself. Fine. But I’m a little uncertain about what I want that to look like – what form I want that storytelling to take. 

For the first quarter of my life, for example, I enjoyed telling stories in person, as a performance. This is why I wanted to be a stand-up comic. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I was (emphasis on was) a huge fan of Bill Cosby. I loved his long, narrative style. He was not a quick-fire guy; his “To Russell, My Brother” routine is 26 minutes long. I also loved the spoken word stuff of Henry Rollins. I daydreamed of somehow being a mix of those two people: funny and personal/honest but not overly intense (or rapey).

I didn’t follow through with being a stand-up because I was terrified of being heckled.

For a while I thought radio might be the way to go; I certainly have the face for it. I presented shows on college radio, then had a job at KKOH in Reno, Nevada, delivering local news and traffic. That career path also never came to fruition. Unless you’re hosting an eponymous show in a prime slot (eg, “The Chris Cope Morning Show”) you need at least three other jobs to be able to afford to work in radio.

Ultimately, I fell into written storytelling. In part, because of the diasporic nature of modern life. I don’t need an audience to be in a specific place, as I would with performance or even radio…

Additionally, there’s greater ease/accessibility. I’m able to spend days or weeks working on the stuff I publish here. So, I can fit it in around a full-time job and parenting and a bajillion other things. Blogging and writing for websites/magazines and attempting to write books (although none of my English-language books have ever been published) has been a way to tell stories across space and time.

You’ll note the “dot-dot-dot” when I referenced the location/time challenges of radio. My de facto decision to abandon the medium happened 20 years ago – before podcasting. I’ve been told by a number of people (OK, well, four people) that I should do a podcast. I’m not against the idea, but something internal puts me off. Fear of not being any good, maybe. Fear of rejection or failure has undermined a lot of my ambition in life.

I also feel overwhelmed in even trying to think of all the gear and knowledge I would need to acquire before I presented a single episode. Not to mention the low likelihood of success in a saturated medium. 

“I think if you’re starting something out now and you’re not a celebrity [it’s going to be very difficult to succeed in podcasting],” James of ‘The Weekly Planet‘ podcast observed recently. “We had it way easier than we should have. That’s not saying it’s impossible. If you want to do it, you should absolutely do it. It is possible, but it’s different now.”

SO, ANYWAY, HERE’S THE PLAN:

In the book Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, at least one piece of advice shows up multiple times: “Never go with your first idea.”

Fortunately, The Motorcycle Obsession was not my first idea; I tried getting books published years before that. And, hey, even if TMO had been my first idea, Dancing the Polka is totally different.

In other words, I want to try again to build a financially viable website: a magazine (but digital, because print is all but dead) that’s sort of like Texas Monthly but with motorcycles. That is, an entity with a core theme but which allows broad interpretation of the theme. 

So, for example, is a story about three guys bumbling across Europe via plane, train, and automobile a story about motorcycles? No, it is not. But, also, it sorta is.

Basically, I want to develop the thing I was trying to develop six years ago, but more clearly and without all the boneheaded financial decisions and impatience that resulted in its failure. TMO was a good idea; it was simply executed poorly.

So, I’ve been following Schwarzenegger’s advice, creating time and space to think about this idea: what it will look like, how it will work, how long I expect it to take before I’m earning money, etc. There are a lot of unanswered questions and, as stated above, doubts. But I’m trying.

TIME, SPACE, AND MIRRORS

“Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time,” Schwarzenegger says. “Make little goals for yourself to start building momentum.”

At present, my goals are limited to building consistency. I write a little every day after work, and with that I’ve been able to reliably publish once a week, every week, since late March. That’s not much, I know. But take it within context; as I pointed out back in January, I published only three articles in the whole of 2023.

Beyond the act of giving yourself time to think, Schwarzenegger offers two more bits of advice for getting on track:  1) “Really see it;” and 2) “Look in the mirror.”

Really seeing your vision is what he’s talking about when he says that you need to be able to see what you want to achieve before you do it. It’s the athlete’s thing of visualization.

“I recognize that this sounds like a lot of woo-woo manifestation mumbo jumbo, like The Secret, and all those law of attraction books being peddled by bullshit artists,” Schwarzenegger says. “This isn’t that.”

Being able to clearly picture a thing in your mind won’t make it happen, but having a strong sense of what success is – and what it isn’t – makes it a hell of a lot easier to pursue. But even with that knowledge you still “have to plan and work and learn and fail and then learn and work and fail some more,” he says.

I’ve been trying to do this, trying to get ever more granular about exactly what kind of content I’d want to be delivering, as well as all the boring stuff like content calendars and finance and even the  font and colors of the website. I get easily distracted; a lot of work is needed on this aspect.

As far as looking at yourself in the mirror is concerned, Schwarzenegger seems to mean it literally. As in, stand in front of a mirror and stare yourself down. It’s advice borne of his bodybuilding experience.

“You have to make sure that the person looking back at you is the same one you see when you close your eyes and visualize the person you are trying to become,” he says. “You need to know whether or not your vision aligns with the reality of your choices.”

I have not really been doing that. It feels silly to me, and reminds me of Al Franken’s Stuart Smalley character: “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and, doggone it, people like you.”

That said, I understand the thinking behind staring at yourself. If you’re visualizing a goal it definitely helps if you’re visualizing the real and actual you achieving that goal. 

My friend, Donal, once joked that he hadn’t written a novel yet because he didn’t have an antique oak desk or a cardigan with leather elbow patches. In other words, he was unable to accomplish that goal because he felt a different version of him needed to exist before he could start.

So, if I were to look in the mirror, I would need to look squarely at a man in his 40s who is a new father, works full time, and has a history of struggling with mental health . And I’d have to say: “This is the guy who is going to have to make this ambition a reality. This is the guy who is going to have to do all the work, who is going to have to figure out how to do everything and then going to have to be the one to do it. Not a magical, happier, younger, more focused, more energetic version of me with fewer life attachments – this guy that I’m looking at. If this is ever going to happen, it’s only going to happen because the actual and imperfect me is doing it.”

Ouch. Schwarzenegger’s right; looking at yourself is hard. But, he says, it’s necessary. 

“You can’t grow unless you watch yourself do the work,” Schwarzenegger says. “You can’t get better unless you judge your effort against what you know it should look like, in your heart and mind.”

So, as I say: there’s a lot to work on. There are six more chapters in Schwarzenegger’s book, containing such incredible life advice as: “If you want to be great, you’ve got to deal with your calves.” 

I’ll delve into those at some point in the future. For the time being, though, I should get back to writing about motorcycles.