Arnold Schwarzenegger became rich — not by being confident

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Howdy rebel ideapreneurs 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

In 1952, a sixty-two-year-old man in a white suit and a thin black string tie walked into a restaurant in Salt Lake City, Utah.

He had a small pointed beard, and he introduced himself as Colonel Sanders.

He asked the owner, Pete Harman, to let him cook a pan of fried chicken.

Pete liked the chicken so much that he painted the words "Kentucky Fried Chicken" on his window
and bought eight pressure cookers to make it.

Pete agreed to pay the Colonel four cents for every chicken he sold.

It was the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant that the Colonel did not own himself.

Now back up, because the man in the white suit was not born that way.

His real name was Harland Sanders.

In 1930 he was running a gas station on a highway in Corbin, Kentucky.

Travelers kept asking him where they could get something to eat.

So he laid a cheap floor in his storeroom so it could pass for a dining room.
There he served them fried chicken, ham, mashed potatoes and biscuits.

Within a few years, that storeroom had grown into a restaurant with 142 seats.

In 1950 the governor of Kentucky named him a "Kentucky colonel."

That sounds grand, but it is just an award the state gives to people it wants to thank.
It is not a real army rank, and it comes with no job and no pay.

Thousands of people have received it, and almost all of them carried on with their lives exactly as before.

Harland did not.

He grew his beard, bought a white suit, put on the string tie, and started calling himself the Colonel.

Why?

Because he was about to go out selling.

He wanted other restaurants to cook his chicken and pay him for it.
But he was a sixty-year-old cook from a gas station, asking restaurant owners to change how they cooked.

Nobody would listen to that man.

But a man in a white suit who calls himself Colonel Sanders?
Restaurant owners were curious enough to let him in the door and cook, and once they tasted the chicken, the chicken did the rest.

Then in 1956, a new highway was built around Corbin, and the travelers stopped coming to his gas station.

He sold his restaurant at a loss.
He was sixty-five, and his only income was a government check of $105 a month.

All he had left was his recipe, and the white suit.

He drove around the country in that suit, cooking chicken for restaurant owners.

By 1964 more than 600 restaurants were selling his chicken under one name: Kentucky Fried Chicken.

That year he sold the company for $2 million.
You know it today as KFC.

Harland put on the Colonel's suit before he had a company, a franchise, or a single customer.
He dressed as the man he was about to become, and then went out and became him.

Harland put on the white suit and called himself the Colonel two years before a single restaurant paid him for his recipe.

But right now, our first newsletter issue has been sitting in drafts for a month.

It is finished, and it is good.

But every time we hover over the publish button, the same thought stops us: who are we to write this?

We have no big following, no book, no title, so putting our name on it feels like pretending to be an expert.

So the issue stays in drafts, and the people who would have loved it never find out we exist.

Harland's title was not a real one either, just a thank-you from the governor.

He put on the suit anyway, and restaurant owners treated him like the Colonel he said he was.

There is a trick for feeling like a writer before anyone has called you one, and it starts with deciding who you are that day.

A teenage soldier used it in 1965, and two years later he was Mr. Universe, so here is how he pulled it off.

In October 1965, an eighteen-year-old Austrian soldier walked out of his army base without permission.

His name was Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That weekend, in Stuttgart, Germany, there was a bodybuilding contest called Junior Mr. Europe.
Arnold had been lifting weights for three years, and he had decided he was going to compete in it, army or no army.

So he sneaked out, made his way to Stuttgart, and walked onto the stage in borrowed posing trunks, the small shorts bodybuilders wear on stage.

He forgot his routine halfway through.

He won anyway.

When he got back to the base, the army put him in a cell as punishment for leaving without permission.

Why would a teenager risk jail for a bodybuilding trophy?

Here is what was going on in Arnold's head in those years, in his own words:

"In my own mind, I was Mr. Universe; I had this absolutely clear vision of myself up on the dais with the trophy.
It was only a matter of time before the whole world would be able to see it too."

He was a teenager with no trophies when he thought that.
In his head, he was already the champion.

So the person who walked onto that stage in Stuttgart was not a scared soldier who had skipped training.

It was a man who already believed he was Mr. Universe, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Two years later, at twenty, he won Mr. Universe in London.

In 1968 he moved to America.

Then he did the same thing with money.

His training partner, Franco Columbu, was a trained bricklayer.
So the two of them put an ad in the newspaper as "European bricklayers and masonry experts," and charged more than the local bricklayers.

Arnold put the bricklaying money into a mail-order business, selling his own training courses.
He put the mail-order money into an apartment building.

Get this — in his own words, "I became a millionaire from my real estate investments.
That was before my career took off in show business and acting."

Arnold saw other actors take any movie role they were offered, even terrible ones, because they were broke and needed the money.

He did not want to be that kind of actor.
He wanted to be the kind of actor who could turn down bad roles and wait for great ones.

To do that, he needed money in the bank first.
So he became a millionaire before Hollywood had paid him a single dollar.

At eighteen, Arnold believed he was a champion, before he had won anything.
In his twenties, he made himself rich enough to pick his roles like a star, before he had made a hit movie.

In both cases, he decided who he was first.
The world caught up later.

➡️ The Alter Ego

Harland dressed as the Colonel two years before a single restaurant paid for his recipe.
Then, as the Colonel, he got 600 restaurants to sell his chicken.

Arnold saw himself as Mr. Universe two years before the judges did.
Then he made himself a millionaire before Hollywood ever paid him, so he could pick his roles like a star.

Todd Herman calls this the Alter Ego, in his book The Alter Ego Effect.

An alter ego is a character you step into for one situation, the way an actor steps into a role.
You pick the one situation that scares you, like publishing, or selling, or going on camera.
You decide who you are going to be in that situation.
You give that character a name, a look, or a signal, like the Colonel's white suit.
Then you walk in as that character, and perform not like you but like your confident alter ego.

You can borrow the character from a hero, a movie, or a person you admire.
But here is the catch: the character has to be built from things you can really do.

Harland really had the recipe, and a real colonel's title.
Arnold really had the body, and the years of training.

Harland's white suit and Arnold's picture of himself on the winner's stand did not add anything they did not have.
They just announced it early, before the world had agreed.

So neither of them was faking it.
Each one already had the skill, and simply started acting like the person who had it.

So you stop waiting to feel like an expert before you publish the newsletter.

Instead, you pick your character before you sit down: a writer who publishes every week, no matter what.
You already wrote the issue, so you already have the skill.
The only thing missing is the confidence.

That is what the alter ego is for.
The writer you picked already has the confidence, so you borrow it from the character until your own shows up.

So you press publish as that writer, this week.
After a few issues, readers start writing back to you, and one day you notice you no longer need the character.
You are simply a writer now.

Put the white suit on.

That's it, my fellow contrarians!

Yours 'proving one person with an AI sidekick can build something amazingly big' Vijay Peduru 🦸‍♂️

The prompt below builds the version of you that walks into the one moment you keep avoiding.