What do you obey and command?

tl;dr: Nietzsche and the choice of obey and command.

I have been Nietzsche’s work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Or I should actually say…I have been trying to read it.

I’ve found the prose to be exceedingly difficult to comprehend, but fortunately, the book is arranged as a series of very short (1-2 page) essays so it’s the kind of thing that you can pick up, dig in, and then put down.

Kind of like a mental workout.

Most of the time, I’m clueless, but I’ve found that as I keep at it, some of the ideas become a bit more comprehensible to me.

Last night, I was reading the essay “Of Self-Overcoming” and I was struck by one part in particular.

“But wherever I found living creatures, there too I heard the language of obedience. All living creatures are obeying creatures.

And this is the second thing: he who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.

But this is the third thing I heard: that command is more difficult than obeying. And not only because the commander bears the burden of all who obey, and that this burden can easily crush him.”

I’ve struggled for a while now with various forms of addiction and though there plenty of areas of my life where I obey myself, I am also well aware that when I cannot obey myself, I am commanded by my addictions.

Nietzsche lays it out starkly.

It’s either one or the other, man.

Simultaneously, I’ve been dealing with the burden of command.

I’m the CMO at Gtmhub and since we raised $30 million a few months ago, my team has grown 200%. The part of the job that I am enjoying the most is developing the people on the team. I’m not saying I’m good at it, I’m just saying that I enjoy it, but I am in awe of one fact.

All of these people have, in one way or another, made a career bet of their own…that I can help them develop into the kind of professionals they want to be.

That’s the burden of command.

I think what Nietzsche has done is helped raised my awareness as to the process that is going on.

Obey or command. It’s the yin and the yang of existence.