Life is will to power

This week I came across a TikTok that captured how I think better than I’ve managed to put it myself. In a short, grainy scene, Plato and Friedrich Nietzsche stand face to face, and Nietzsche gets the last word:

“Leben ist Wille zur Macht. Life is will to power.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Plato against Nietzsche

The two make a good pair, because they disagree about almost everything. For Plato, what’s truly real never changes. Behind the messy world we see are perfect, eternal forms, and the goal of life is to find them. Being comes first, and change is only a shadow of it.

Nietzsche turns that upside down. There’s no perfect world behind this one, only this one, and it never stands still. Everything alive wants to grow, to push outwards, to become more than it is. That’s what he means by will to power. It isn’t mainly about ruling over other people. It’s the drive to overcome, and above all to overcome yourself. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra he lets life itself say it:

“I am that which must always overcome itself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Point that drive at yourself, and you get the line Nietzsche kept coming back to: become who you are. It sounds like a poster on a classroom wall. But the more I thought about it, the less it sounded like “be yourself” and the more it sounded like a plan.

Becoming your potential

For me, that plan is easy to say and hard to do: become your potential. Through that, you gain power. Not power over other people, but over yourself and what you’re able to do. In a strange way, the TikTok confirmed most of how I already think.

Overcoming yourself

Overcoming yourself sounds grand, but for me it’s mostly small things. Being able to speak with anyone you want to. Walking up to someone and shaking their hand. Raising your hand and asking the question, even the dumb one.

What stops you in those moments is almost always what others might think. Those are outside factors. You can’t control them, so there’s no reason to let them decide for you. Just go for it.

Every wall has another side

My education and my firms have been a bumpy ride. There have been plenty of moments where I thought: this isn’t scalable enough, or maybe this isn’t the right path. But every time, I’ve found a new path or a new way.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson calls it a back-to-the-wall philosophy:

“When your back is to the wall, every moment in life you have one place to go, and that’s forward.” — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

Donald Trump told graduates something similar in 2004:

“If there’s a concrete wall in front of you, go through it. Go over it. Go around it. But get to the other side of that wall.” — Donald Trump

To me, that’s will to power in practice. It’s the willingness to take the next step. You go over the wall, under it, around it, or you break it. Either way, you get to the other side.

Why take the next step?

This is where resistance comes in. Why push forward at all, when stopping would be easier and plenty of people would tell you to? Sometimes the only honest answer is that you want to. You have to be true to yourself, say “forget everybody else, I want to do this”, and go.

But you can’t do it on your own. You need people in your life who believe in you and help you when the wall gets too high. Overcoming yourself isn’t the same as doing everything by yourself.

Me and my brother on 17 May, Norway’s Constitution Day, in Oslo.

More than survival

Charles Darwin made “survival of the fittest” famous. I see Nietzsche’s idea as an addition to it, and so did he. In the same section where he says life is will to power, he argues that staying alive isn’t the main drive at all:

“A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength. Life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Surviving is the minimum. Growing is the point.

A different time

Plato imagined a society where everyone has a fixed place: rulers, guardians and workers, each doing the job they’re suited for. We live in a different time, and the power dynamics have shifted. You can start a firm from a laptop, publish your thinking on your own site and reach almost anyone. Where you start matters less than how far you’re willing to push.

Still becoming

I have an idea of what I want to become, and of the life I want. Whether it happens, time will tell. But I’ll do what it takes to get there.

That’s what the TikTok captured for me. Life isn’t about finding a truth that was always there, the way Plato thought. It’s about taking the next step, getting past the next wall, and becoming more than you were.

Sources: Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), §13, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), part II, “On Self-Overcoming”. Quotes from the translations by Walter Kaufmann. Dwayne Johnson’s quote as it’s widely cited. Donald Trump’s commencement speech at Wagner College, 2004, as reported by The Washington Post.