USING history to GET INTO history books

For Nietzsche, there are 3 types of people in the world: the strivers, the preservers, and the sufferers. The strivers are high-agency difference makers who look to history for examples of greatness. The preservers want to keep the status quo while the sufferers want to flip it.

The ambitious look to history for great men they can mimic. Nietzsche: "History belongs above all to the man of deeds and power, to him who fights a great fight, who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries."

There is a class of high energy and high energy people who want to know historical examples to "imitate or do better." They dislike people who approach history like "inquisitive tourists or pedantic micrologists" - people who are studying history, sorting it, deadening it.

There is a force of greatness that expands and beautifies the very concept of man. Bannister became the first man to run the mile in under 4 minutes, then a dozen people did it the next year. Till Bannister it was considered impossible. The ambitious seek such models in history.

With his concept of "monumental history" Nietzsche argues that great men, randomly distributed across time, actually constitute a "chain" - and for each other, they are "still living." For them, history is an expanse of time that allows for and demands monumental tasks.

Greatness will always find resistance: "All that is base and petty, filling every corner of the earth, casts itself across the path that greatness has to tread on its way to immortality and retards, deceives, suffocates and stifles it." Herd rejects the possibility of greatness.

We become great not to stroke our ego but to enter the most sacred brotherhood there is. Nietzsche thought of history as a "relay race" where the torch of excellence is passed on from the select few of one generation to the select few of the next. A timeless cult of greatness.

Nietzsche's fiery career advice: do work that contains the "monogram" of your "most essential being." Birth "a piece of rare enlightenment," conquer and map a new frontier, produce something that "posterity" cannot do without. Get into history books, not the C-Suites.

Nietzsche believed that history should be mythologized, realistic heroes turned to Demi-Gods, poetic license taken, narrative structure imposed on chaotic events - history should be tampered with and restructured so it may be beautified, so it may become stimulus for greatness.

But occasionally people try to shoot down contemporary great men via unfair and out-of-context comparisons with past Greats. This is the dark side of "monumental history."

For more, check out my collection: Nietzsche on History.