What a Legendary Powerlifter Can Teach You About Nietzsche's Philosophy
Resolving the Paradox of Self-Creation
"What does your conscience say? – ‘You shall become the person you are’."(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
Nietzsche's "become who you are" is his famous call to self-creation. And no other thinker has talked about self-creation and placed as much value on it as he did. In fact, self-creation is one of his central ideas.
However, few thinkers, at least influential ones, have contradicted themselves as frequently as Nietzsche. And there is something that seems like a major contradiction, or a conflict, in Nietzsche’s idea of self-creation that I want to address and hopefully solve with the help of a man who was able to lift a total of 2,628 lbs.
How do you become who you are?
By obeying a single idea, Nietzsche says. In order to "give style to one’s character," one needs to "serve a single style." That is, one must choose a path, a direction, and stick to it. This means that one has to limit oneself to the single idea that one obeys. And that’s what weak-willed people lack, according to Nietzsche: the ability to limit themselves and impose restrictions on themselves. It’s because if they limit themselves to a single idea that they have to follow, they wouldn’t be able to mask their weakness and laziness by trying to follow multiple different paths at the same time.
However, what Nietzsche is also clear about is that, if you want to become who you are, you have to be ready to change. And not just change in terms of growth, but leave everything that you were up to that moment and become something new. And you must be willing to do that numerous times throughout your journey. As much as Nietzsche talks about obeying a single idea and being disciplined and persistent on a single path, he also despises rigidity.
So how do we reconcile being persistent and disciplined on the path that we chose with being flexible and ever-changing?
And even if you haven’t read Nietzsche but have taken some time to think about your development as an individual, I'm sure you had to ask this question.
I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and thought that I would explain it by relying solely on Nietzsche’s writing. However, due to the feedback I received on my essays about What Nietzsche and Joe Rogan Can Teach You About Finding Your Calling and What David Goggins Can Teach You About Jungian Psychology, I realized most people enjoy having the ideas I’m talking about explained through real-world examples.
So this time, the answer to Nietzsche’s contradiction of self-creation comes from a legendary powerlifter, Mark Bell.
However, if you’ve heard about Mark Bell, you don’t know him just as a legendary powerlifter. You know him as a successful entrepreneur, inventor, and co-host of one of the biggest podcasts out there, the Mark Bell’s Power Project. But perhaps most importantly, if you’ve been following his podcast, you’ve noticed that he is what I like to call an "explorer of human existence," meaning a person who is interested in continuously learning how to live this life in a better way.
I’ve been following his podcast for a long time, but it was only recently when I listened to him as a guest on another one of my favorite podcasts, Modern Wisdom, that I gained more insight into his personal philosophy of life. And it was at this point that the puzzle pieces began to fall into place and I decided that I could explain Nietzsche's contradiction with the help of Mark Bell.
Mark Bell started lifting when he was 12 years old. He didn’t go straight into powerlifting. He tried out different paths such as American football and wrestling, which didn’t work out for him. This is another point where his story aligns with what I’ve talked about in the Nietzsche and Joe Rogan essay: he kept exploring until he found his thing. And that thing was there all along: weights. He then dedicated himself to that one thing until he became a world record-setting powerlifter. You can imagine that this is a kind of pursuit where you have to, just as Nietzsche suggests, impose restrictions on yourself. You have to "obey a single idea." You cannot follow multiple different paths at the same time. And he obeyed a single idea of becoming the best in the world in his chosen discipline until he did it.
However, today, he is anything but your typical powerlifter. He has been experimenting with different styles of training for years now. And just as he was one of the main representatives of hardcore training and he changed the world of weightlifting with his invention, the slingshot, now he is educating people about training for longevity, putting emphasis on movement and being a well-rounded, physically active person. But make no mistake, this is not a story about changing one’s way of training. This is an example of one’s philosophy of life evolving. Besides these changes, you will hear Mark talk on his podcast about lessons from philosophy and psychology, using psychedelics for self-exploration and self-development, and all kinds of topics that have nothing to do with the identity of being a legendary powerlifter.
He obeyed a single idea for the majority of his life, but now that single idea is only a small part of who he is. This is a perfect example of Nietzsche’s "contradiction" of self-creation at work.
And you could say that he was able to change because he achieved what he wanted. He became the best, so it was easy for him to move on. But I would disagree, because that’s the opposite of what most people do.
When you have the discipline and persistence to obey a single idea, which already separates you from the vast majority of people, and you are able to achieve the ultimate goal of that idea, the most difficult thing is to let that go and create yourself in a new way. To let go of the identity that you’ve built with your discipline.
Just imagine. You have invested your life in this one path. Your identity is based on this idea that you have been obeying for so long. And now you are supposed to let it go and start over? How many people do you know who are able to do that? What ends up being "the natural" thing to do for most individuals is, if they achieve excellence in a certain area and base their whole identity around it, they stick to it for the rest of their lives.
Mark Bell could’ve stayed "the powerlifting guy with a total of 2,628 lbs" for the rest of his life. He achieved the highest form of success in his sport and could’ve spent the rest of his life letting his identity revolve around it, since the number of people who achieve that level of excellence in any area of life is a fraction of 1%. But today, if you started consuming his content without having any previous knowledge of him, you wouldn’t even know that he was a record-setting powerlifter until you Googled him.
And this is why I believe his example gives us an answer to Nietzsche’s contradiction of self-creation.
When is it okay to change one's path and stop obeying that single idea, that one thing? It is when changing one’s path is the more challenging thing to do. It is when changing one’s path means evolving and not giving yourself an easy way out of the path that you chose. Because, for the weak-willed, changing one’s path is always used as an excuse and an escape route from effort and commitment.
However, if you truly obey a single idea, the nature of life itself is such that you will eventually come to the point of changing direction. So we see that obeying a single idea and being an ever-changing individual are not actually two contradictory paths to take.
Because "becoming who you are" doesn’t mean becoming an athlete, or a painter, or a teacher, or an entrepreneur. It means becoming, well, yourself.
Or, as Hunter S. Thompson wrote in a letter to a friend:
"So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. We strive to be ourselves. But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t be firemen, bankers, or doctors— but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal."
Thank you for reading, and don’t forget to become who you are.
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Oh man, i don't know how to thank you. i enjoyed reading this one. I was somewhat confused at certain points, but then it started making sense. Then i became confused reading the excerpt from Hunter S. Thompson, so i decided to read the whole letter and now i am even more intoxicated.
So beautiful :)
Great work brother.