Last updated: November 3, 2026

Friedrich Nietzsche believed in self-overcoming, not self-optimization, and the difference is the whole point. Self-optimization takes your goals for granted and asks how to reach them more efficiently: more output, better sleep, higher numbers. Self-overcoming, Selbstüberwindung, puts the goals themselves in question. It means outgrowing the values you were handed, often painfully, and creating new ones. Nietzsche’s famous formulas, “become who you are”, “what does not kill me makes me stronger” and the Übermensch, all belong to the second project, and most of the motivational posters that quote them belong to the first.

Nietzsche even described the end point of a society devoted to comfort, health and efficiency. He called its typical inhabitant the Last Man, and he meant it as the most contemptible figure he could imagine. Whether your morning routine makes you a Last Man is a question this post takes seriously, with the texts in hand.

Reading Nietzsche, Held Back by the Last Man

The meme uses the familiar “running away balloon” format. In the first panel a cheerful figure labelled “Reading Nietzsche” stretches out his arms towards a big yellow balloon: “Becoming the Übermensch”. In the second panel the balloon is drifting away, and the reason is clear. A smug pink blob labelled “The Last Man” has wrapped its arms around the reader’s waist, and the reader, still smiling, has begun to sweat.

It is a surprisingly accurate picture. The Last Man in Nietzsche is not an external villain but a temptation, the comfortable version of ourselves that would rather be safe than great. And the balloon is the right image for the Übermensch: not a destination you reach by following a plan, but something that floats off the moment you try to grab it with the wrong kind of ambition. The joke also contains a quieter one. The reader is “reading Nietzsche”, which is exactly what the Last Man would be happy to let him do forever, as long as nothing changes.

Self-Overcoming Is Not Self-Improvement

The idea at the centre of Nietzsche’s thought about personal growth appears in a chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra titled “On Self-Overcoming”. There Zarathustra reports a secret that life itself confided to him: “Behold, I am that which must always overcome itself.” Everything living, on this view, does not simply preserve itself but grows beyond what it was, and this drive to expand, master and surpass is what Nietzsche calls the will to power. The translator and scholar Walter Kaufmann argued that self-overcoming, rather than domination of others, is the key to understanding that much-abused phrase.

Self-overcoming is therefore not a matter of becoming a better version of what you already are according to the standards you already accept. It is the transformation of those standards. A person who overcomes himself may end up with different goals altogether, values he could not have chosen at the start because he did not yet understand them. That is why Nietzsche’s language is full of destruction, sacrifice and danger: something has to be left behind. Optimization, by contrast, needs a fixed metric. You cannot optimize towards a goal you do not yet know, which is exactly the situation Nietzsche thought every serious life would eventually face.

Economists have a modern name for one half of Nietzsche’s worry. Goodhart’s law, in the popular phrasing of the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. A step counter, a reading streak or a productivity score starts as a rough sign of something we care about, health, learning, meaningful work, and gradually replaces it. We end up serving the number. Nietzsche’s objection goes deeper, because he doubted the original goals as well as their measurement, but the mechanism is the same: the more precisely a life is optimised, the less room it leaves for asking whether it is pointed in the right direction at all. A person can be extremely good at a game that was never worth playing.

This does not mean that discipline is foreign to him. On the contrary, he praised hardness, rigour and long practice, and admired the way artists submit to severe constraints. In Beyond Good and Evil he asks whether we do not know that only the discipline of suffering, of great suffering, has created all enhancements of humanity so far. The question is not whether you are disciplined. It is what the discipline is for, and who set its terms.

The Last Man Has Invented Happiness

Zarathustra introduces the Last Man in the prologue of the book, in a speech to a crowd in a marketplace. He has just preached the Übermensch and been laughed at, so he tries something more frightening: a portrait of the most contemptible human being, the one who can no longer despise himself. “We have invented happiness,” say the Last Men, “and they blink.” They have left the regions where it was hard to live, because one needs warmth. Nobody becomes poor or rich any more; both are too much trouble. Nobody wants to rule, nobody wants to obey. A little poison now and then, for pleasant dreams. One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night, “but one has a regard for health”.

Reading the passage today is uncomfortable, because it sounds less like a prophecy than like a product description. The Last Man’s ideals are safety, comfort, moderation, health and the absence of conflict, all pursued with a wink that suggests he knows how small they are. Nietzsche’s point is not that health or comfort are bad. It is that a culture which makes them its highest goals has stopped asking what life is for. The crowd’s reaction completes the scene. “Give us this Last Man, O Zarathustra,” they shout, “make us into these Last Men, and you can keep the Übermensch.”

There is one more detail in the portrait that rarely gets quoted, and it may be the most modern of all. “No shepherd and one herd,” Zarathustra says of the Last Men. “Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same; whoever feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.” The Last Men are not oppressed into sameness. They choose it, and they treat dissent as a symptom. A culture in which millions of people follow the same morning routine, track the same metrics and optimise towards the same picture of a good life would not have surprised him in the least.

Here the connection to self-optimization becomes precise. Much of what is sold as personal growth, the sleep trackers, the habit stacks, the stress management, is aimed at making us more comfortable, more productive and more resilient within a life whose purpose is never examined. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han makes a similar diagnosis in The Burnout Society, arguing that the modern achievement-subject exploits himself and calls it freedom; we follow his argument in Byung-Chul Han and the Burnout Society.

Downgoing: Why Zarathustra Begins by Going Under

One word in Zarathustra rarely makes it onto motivational posters: Untergang, usually translated as “going under” or “downgoing”. The book opens with Zarathustra leaving his mountain cave after ten years of solitude, and he describes his descent to the people as a going under, like the sun that sets in the evening to bring light to the underworld. The word also means decline and ruin.

In the prologue it becomes a principle. Man, Zarathustra says, is a rope stretched between animal and Übermensch, a rope over an abyss: a dangerous crossing, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous trembling and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end; what can be loved in man is that he is a going over and a going under. Zarathustra loves those who do not know how to live except by going under, “for they are those who cross over”.

Translated into the language of personal development, this is an embarrassing thought. Growth, for Nietzsche, includes the willingness to perish in one’s present form: to let a career, an identity or a set of convictions go down so that something else can emerge. No app tracks that. It also explains why he could praise risk and danger without contradiction while living, in practice, a quiet life of walking, reading and writing. The danger he cared about most was the danger to one’s own convictions.

Become Who You Are

“Become who you are” is probably the Nietzsche line most loved by coaches, and its history is worth knowing. It comes from the Greek poet Pindar, whose second Pythian ode says, roughly, become such as you are, having learned what that is. Nietzsche used it as a motto for years. In The Gay Science he gives it as the voice of conscience: you shall become the person you are. Later in the same book he expands it: we want to become those we are, human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves. The subtitle of his autobiography Ecce Homo is “How One Becomes What One Is”.

Notice two things. First, the self in question is not discovered but created; there is no authentic inner core waiting to be found by a personality test. Second, and more surprising, Nietzsche thought that this creation cannot be planned. In Ecce Homo he writes that to become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion of what one is. Even the blunders of life, the detours and wrong turns, have their own meaning and value; the organising idea grows in the depths and only gradually takes command. It is hard to imagine a sentence more hostile to the five-year plan.

An early essay makes the point even more strikingly. In Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), Nietzsche advises the young reader to look back on what he has truly loved and admired so far, because those things reveal the fundamental law of his own self. Then comes the twist: your true nature does not lie hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you usually take to be your self. The self you are supposed to become is not a buried treasure but a height you have not yet climbed. Self-discovery, on this view, is not introspection but ascent.

So the formula that self-help reads as “find your true self and live it” means something closer to: stop trying to manage who you will become, take your life seriously enough to let it surprise you, and give yourself laws instead of borrowing them. For the larger picture of Nietzsche’s ethics, see Nietzsche on Morality.

What Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stronger?

The most quoted line of all comes from Twilight of the Idols (1889), in a list of maxims under the heading “From life’s school of war”: what does not kill me makes me stronger. The modern reading is resilience: bad things happen, and if you survive them you grow. That reading is not entirely wrong. Nietzsche suffered from severe migraines, eye trouble and stomach problems for most of his adult life, gave up his professorship in Basel at thirty-four, and wrote much of his best work in boarding houses between attacks. He knew something about surviving.

The irony of the timing is hard to miss. Twilight of the Idols appeared in January 1889, the same month Nietzsche collapsed in Turin and never recovered his mind. He spent his last eleven years in the care of his mother and sister. Whatever the maxim means, it was not a promise he could keep for himself, and readers who quote it on gym walls might at least remember that its author knew how fragile strength is.

But two qualifications matter. The maxim is about what illness and hardship can do for a strong constitution, not a promise that they make everyone stronger, and Nietzsche was perfectly aware that suffering breaks people too. And in context, the emphasis falls less on endurance than on interpretation: the person who can turn suffering into knowledge, art or a new way of living grows from it; the person who merely copes does not. His exhortation in The Gay Science to “live dangerously”, to build cities on the slopes of Vesuvius and send ships into uncharted seas, is addressed to “preparatory human beings” who will make knowledge heroic. It is a call to intellectual daring and to a life that risks something for an idea, not an endorsement of extreme sports. The popular version, “every setback is a setup for a comeback”, keeps the slogan and loses the interpretation.

Philosophy and Self-Help Are Not Friends

The second meme makes the relationship explicit. A woman asks two men: “Are you two friends?” The one labelled “Philosophy” answers “No.” The one labelled “Self-help literature”, at the same moment, answers “Yes.” It is the oldest joke about the two genres: one thinks they are close relatives, the other would rather not be seen with it.

Nietzsche would have been on philosophy’s side, and he even wrote a chapter about it. In Twilight of the Idols he attacks the “improvers” of mankind, the priests and moralists who claimed to make people better and, in his view, merely made them tamer, weaker and sicker. His suspicion was not of change but of improvement programmes designed by someone else, according to values nobody had examined. Self-help literature, which tells millions of readers to become the same kind of better at the same time, would have struck him as the herd with a hashtag.

Yet honesty requires a qualification. Nietzsche was not against routines as such. He paid obsessive attention to diet, climate and daily walks, and claimed that only thoughts reached by walking have value. In Ecce Homo he gives advice on these “small things” that sounds almost like a wellness column: sit as little as possible and trust no idea not born in the open air while moving freely. The difference is purpose. His walks served a philosophy that turned everything upside down. A routine that serves your own questions is one thing; a routine that replaces them is the Last Man’s.

The Übermensch Is Not Your Best Self

Finally, the Übermensch. Zarathustra announces him in the same prologue: “I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?” The figure is notoriously underdetermined; Nietzsche gives no checklist. What is clear is that the Übermensch is defined by creating values rather than meeting them, by affirming life without needing a heaven, and by being able to will the eternal recurrence of his own life. He is not a superhero, not a biological type and not a more efficient human. Our full account is in Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

That makes him a poor model for personal branding. Your “best self” is a projection of current values onto a slightly better-performing you. The Übermensch is a challenge to the values themselves. Treating him as a productivity ideal is like reading Zarathustra’s line, “man is something that shall be overcome”, and deciding to overcome your inbox.

Eternal Recurrence: The Real Productivity Test

If Nietzsche had designed a test for your routine, it would not measure output. It would be the thought experiment from section 341 of The Gay Science. Suppose a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness and said: this life as you now live it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more, with nothing new in it, every pain and joy and every thought and sigh in the same order. Would you throw yourself down and curse the demon? Or have you once experienced a moment so tremendous that you would answer: you are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine?

The test cuts straight through the logic of optimization. Optimization lives in the future: today is a means to a better tomorrow, a stage in a curve that is supposed to point upwards. Eternal recurrence abolishes that escape. If this exact day will return forever, it cannot be justified by what it leads to; it has to be worth willing for its own sake. Nietzsche called the attitude that passes the test amor fati, love of fate, and in Ecce Homo named it his formula for greatness: not merely to bear what is necessary, still less to conceal it, but to love it.

Applied to a routine, the question is simple and merciless. Would you want to live this morning again, endlessly, exactly as it is? Not because it raises your numbers, but because it is a good way to spend a life. If the answer is yes, keep it. If it only makes sense as a sacrifice to a future self who never quite arrives, the demon has a point. For the cosmic version of the thought, see Cosmic Nihilism and Entropy.

So Would Nietzsche Hate Your Routine?

Not necessarily. He would ask what it is for. If it protects time for work you care about, for thinking, risking and creating, he would recognise a fellow walker. If it exists to keep you calm, productive and agreeable inside a life you have never questioned, he would recognise the blink. The Last Man is not lazy; he is efficient, healthy and content, and that is precisely what makes him frightening.

The useful test is not whether you are improving, but whether anything you value is up for revision. Nietzsche’s dynamite, as he called himself in Ecce Homo with typical modesty, was aimed at that question. If the answer is no, the balloon is drifting away, however good your sleep score. If you want the misreadings of Nietzsche at the other extreme, among billionaires rather than coaches, read Misreading Nietzsche. The quotations from Zarathustra follow Thomas Common’s and Kaufmann’s translations; a public-domain version is available in J. M. Kennedy’s translation on Project Gutenberg.