Interpreting Success: Insights from Schwarzenegger and Plitt

Success is a very personalized term. It can be defined in many different ways and like itself there are also many ways to achieve it. Success is a term that everyone has a different opinion on but one thing remains the same: we all want to be successful. We all want to be good at the things we desire most. Two great activists for the cause of success are Arnold Schwarzenegger and Greg Plitt. Both are men who demand great respect. Not only for being at the top of their classes but for also going beyond that and topping many of the ranks for things they are passionate about. Their success not only was noticed but radiated into the minds of people and children everywhere inspiring them to be great. Though they may have their differences both men

He is a man of great stature. A bodybuilder, an actor and the governor of California. He has proven time and time again that to be the best, it takes hard work. This is a lot of what he bases his USC Commencement Address on. In the speech itself he focuses on what he likes to call “Dr. Schwarzenegger’s six rules of success. These rules include: 1) Trust yourself, 2) Break some rules, 3) Don’t be afraid to fail, 4) Ignore the naysayers, 5) Work like hell, 6) Give something back. His first rule is to believe in yourself. He says no matter what your parents, your teachers, your role models or whatever anyone else says, you need to believe in your own vision. His second rule is fairly ironic. He uses humor by saying that rule number two is to break the rules. All people in this world do the exact same thing so he believes you must break them. You must be an outlier. The people who get remembered in the future are never the ones who played it safe. It is always the people who are a little bit crazy who get noticed, the people who are

Plitt lived a fast lifestyle and was envied by most. He was an army ranger at one of the highest rankings, an actor, a fitness model, and a top physique competitor. His motto for success was somewhat a condensed version of Schwarzenegger’s; you must work hard and never give up to become successful. In his “Own Your Success”, he goes in to a passionate plea to the people watching, just hoping to inspire his audience to be better. He says to never give up over and over to really make the audience understand that to win, they must fail. He goes to give several examples of how several different people do things. How a champion does things and how a runner up does things. He talks about how the hours a runner up spends partying, the hours the runner up slept in, the hours the runner up spends on nothing can add up. He also talks about what champions do in those hours. The hours where the runner up has given up for the day are the same hours that the champion spends in pursuit of their goals. Those are the extra hours that the champion spends training, spends reading or spends improving themselves. He says that it is how you hold yourself in the small things in life is how you build the person you are. Two of his standout examples from the speech include one about washing a car and one about dusting a home. In his example about washing a car, Plitt starts his example by stating how you’ve just spent hours washing the