I agree with him, essentially, 100 percent. One has to devote oneself to a particular pursuit. To be successful at anything, you have to make a total commitment to it. We so often see students who would love to play baseball like one of their heroes, or would love to be on the basketball court or the football field. They don’t see the 99 percent effort that went into practicing making baskets, or practicing hitting the baseball, or practicing catching a pass on the football field. It takes a tremendous amount of perspiration, a tremendous amount of hard work that you don’t always see or appreciate in the end result. You will find this over and over. Most achievers I know are people who have made a strong and deep dedication to pursuing a particular goal. That dedication took a tremendous amount of effort. That is certainly true in my case. It took a tremendous amount of work to get from point A to point B.

One day you write nothing, the next you write eight pages. It’s not in your hands.

It's just, I would say, faith. I had very clear visions of me being a champion. When I saw this picture of Reg Park on a cover, standing there like - as Hercules, from the Hercules movies, I looked at that, and then I looked at the inside and I read the story, and I immediately started creating visions of me standing there on the pedestal at the Mr. Universe contest and me being Hercules and me doing movies and so on. And that created such unbelievable drive and such unbelievable will and discipline, that there was absolutely no stopping me. I mean, I went to the gym two hours every day lifting weights. When I came home afterwards, I lifted an extra hour and a half and did bodybuilding training, and it was just relentless.

We didn’t research the product. We didn’t launch a focus group or field a study. We had an idea, and we acted. The results informed our thinking.

My father was a great educator for me. He taught me so many things. He named me Carlos after a brother he lost — a very brilliant young man who died at 21 in Mexico. He had written very good poems. He was an intellectual. I think my father wanted to see his brother in me, so he put books into my hands at a very early age. He fostered my literary and artistic inclinations. So he was my best teacher.

Not that important. I seem to rewrite in my head a great deal. I write in these English ruled notebooks. So I write on the right, and then I correct on the left. Then, when it’s typed out, I even make another correction, and then maybe in the typed sheets also. But not that much. I seem to have a great facility to go right into what I want to say. I do correct, but not like Balzac, who went crazy over the printing presses. He was correcting at the last minute.