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of the video, but for now let’s get on with how to achieve self-mastery from the philosophy
of Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher
who lived in the second half of the 19th century. He is widely famous for his critique on morality
and religion, and also on conventional philosophical ideas. He wrote several books, like “Thus Spoke
Zarathustra”, “Beyond Good and Evil”, “The Birth of Tragedy”, and “The Twilight
of the Idols”. He also considered himself a psychologist,
paving the way to the psychoanalysis of the 20th century, and he is often considered to
be among the great modern thinkers, together with Sigmund Freud & Karl Marx. But he is also considered a precursor of existentialism,
highlighting the importance of freedom and

finding meaning in an otherwise meaningless
world. Nietzsche believed that the fundamental drive
of all living things is the so-called Will to Power, which is often seen as the impulse
to overcome one’s environment, the impulse to grow, expand, and explore. But the greatest
power one can possess, in Nietzsche’s view, is not the power over other people or environment,
but the power over your own self. Mastering yourself is the foundation of all
the other skills and powers you have, and it is the one you have to focus on first in order
to achieve greatness. To help you understand the ways in which you
can achieve self-mastery, here are 7 lessons we can learn from the philosophy of Friedrich
Nietzsche: Obey yourself first. Nietzsche says, “He that cannot obey himself
shall be commanded.” By contrast with Schopenhauer, who in his
pessimistic view believed in a Will that directs our entire life and that we are incapable
of escaping it, Nietzsche also talked about

a Will, but he called it “the Will to Power”,
which is a power meant to overcome resistance. This resistance can be from other people or
from the environment. When we do not have enough willpower, it
means we are not in control, we lack self-discipline, we can’t follow our own plans that we so
carefully laid, because of some temporary urges, impulses, or emotions. When we can’t follow through with our own
plans and strategies to win in life, then the other people, more in control of their
own behavior and with a cooler mind, can take advantage of us and end up commanding
us. Nietzsche considered two types of morality:
slave morality and master morality. If you follow a slave morality, you will be
commanded by your community, by peer pressure, you will be made to doubt yourself, and you
will end up living a shadow life, just going with the flow, not having a real goal in life
for yourself, you will live your life to make

other people happy. But, if you have clear goals in life and you
can obey yourself by following through with your plans and act in the direction of your
own dreams, you will follow a master morality, meaning that you will be able to act independently
from others, in the direction of your own dreams. For example, consider that your goal in life
is to be a millionaire, but you do not have enough money to invest in your business and
you have to keep your regular job for a while. Your managers at work and your colleagues
constantly demand more and more from you, and you cannot simply ignore their demands.
You will forget in time about your initial goal, you will over-commit to your regular
job, accept new promotions and responsibilities, you will go with the flow, building a career
that you do not even want. Your work environment, the circumstances,
the people, will push you towards a destination you do not want. You are thus commanded.

By contrast, if you obey yourself, you would never stay overtime at work. You would constantly try to reach in your spare time more and more potential investors for your business. You would educate yourself everyday about the business you want to make. You would never lose sight of your entrepreneurial goal. Obeying yourself is mandatory for achieving anything great in life. Strengthen your will. To quote Nietzsche: “I want to make asceticism natural once again.” Nietzsche was firmly against the three “ascetic ideals” - poverty, humility, and chastity, and his attack on them was part of his attack on Christianity. However, in his earlier work, he saw some good practical use of so-called natural asceticism. He acknowledged that there is an advantage in one’s capability to mastering one’s own will. The less you obey your biological and emotional urges, the more free you are. By the practice of asceticism in the form of abstinence and periods of fasting of all

kinds. For example, you gain more control over your own life. You will learn how to control your biological and emotional urges, giving you a great advantage compared to other people who are just slaves of their instincts. You cannot achieve self-mastery if you cannot resist the temptations to grab that cookie on the plate, or if you can’t take alone time for a few weeks to prepare for an important exam, or if you can’t stop smoking. For example, if you are struggling to quit smoking, some self-help tips would be to try to think positively, think that you have the power to really succeed in quitting smoking, make a real plan, decide on a date from which you will stop, consider changing your diet, and think of what activities you should do to replace smoking. For example, chewing gum, or going for a run, and so on. If you are easily irritated by the demands of others, experiencing a high degree of stress.

each day and feeling incapable of going through
all the hardship at work. A method to strengthen your will can be through meditation to decrease
the stress level of everyday life. Meditation will give you the strength and
calmness to push through the hardship without stressing yourself too much. If you are struggling with maintaining concentration
at work due to wasting too much time on social media, you could, for a few weeks, temporarily
delete all the social media applications from your phone, avoid social gatherings and so
on. Instead, you can spend this time focusing
on practicing a skill or learning something new. These techniques are ways to achieve self-discipline, helping us to become stronger and more in control of our will. Master your temper.
Nietzsche teaches us: “The growth of wisdom may be gauged accurately by the decline of
ill temper.” If the growth of wisdom can be measured by
the decline of ill temper, this implies that by knowing how to control yourself, your moods,
you are proven to be a wise person.

Nietzsche was all for the idea of self-control,
but he did not believe that we have a complete freedom of choice or free will. Indeed, we cannot control our likes and dislikes,
we cannot change our personality so quickly. We can’t decide what to want and what not
to want, but we can control our attitude, our behaviour in our journey to reach our
goals. By mastering your temper, keeping at bay all
the destructive urges like breaking things, shouting at others, or being violent, you would
create a space for your mind to analyze the event from different perspectives before doing
anything or before opening your mouth. The more we stop ourselves and think before
acting, the more time we have to really evaluate a situation and make better decisions, and
thus, we become “wise”. For example, if you are a short-tempered person,
always reacting sharply to any injustice or what you perceive as injustice, you might
benefit from this teaching.

If you are working on a project at your job,
and you are in charge of a team, you might get particularly frustrated or angry at someone
who does not do their job properly. If you shout at that person in front of other
people for doing a lousy job, you will make them lose their self-confidence, resulting
in them making even more errors, and you would permanently damage your working relationship
with them. They may have skills and talents you don’t
know anything about, which you might be able to use in another project. But since you damaged the relationship, you
would never know about them. If you are wiser, you would have a private
conversation with that person, explain your frustration, give some suggestions on how they
can improve, or ask them to think about how to improve, make a plan together on how to
deal with the situation, and follow through. In this way, everybody would be happier, working
in a more stress-free environment and not

only will you not damage your working relationships,
you may actually improve them, and so in turn, even improve the performance of your team
in the long run. Master your decision-making process.
In the words of Nietzsche: “Acquire power over your yes and no and learn to hold and
withhold them in accordance with your higher aims.” Nietzsche wrote that “God is dead”, which
became one of the most famous sentences written by him. The death of God is metaphorical. Nietzsche
did not believe in the existence of God, and this death represents the fact that Christian
values have weakened. In his book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”,
Nietzsche described a modern society where the religious values have weakened, but, instead
of being replaced by positive and inspiring values, they were replaced by nihilism, a
belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. Thus, for Nietzsche, this death of God is
not entirely positive, because the decay of

Christian morality has put in danger the entire
moral belief system of the Western world. In a world without God, Nietzsche proposed
the concept of overman as a solution to combat the danger of a world decaying into nihilism. The Overman is a superior and ideal version
of the human being, capable of living a fulfilling life. Such a human being would be a master of himself,
capable of conducting his life in the absence of an imposed set of morals. He would be able to set goals and dreams to
follow and, when finding himself in a situation where he must choose between different options,
he is strong enough to resist the pressure of other people and of the environment and
he is capable of saying no to anything which does not serve his higher aims. Nietzsche considered that the greatness of
us is that we are a bridge between animals and overman, not an end-goal. To be more like the overman, we need to master
the way we make decisions in life as the decisions

we make often set the course of our entire
lives. We will perhaps never be strong enough to
say no all the time, as we live in an interdependent world, but we should try to care more about
our goals and learn to say no at least when the demands are outrageous. To master the skill of decision-making, it
is important to first know what your goals are in life. Let’s say, for example, you discover that
your main life goals are to have enough free time to spend with your family while still
having the financial resources to live comfortably and go on the occasional foreign holiday,
but you do not care too much about making vast fortunes. Your friend proposes that you join in a business
venture, which while potentially highly profitable, would leave you no time for leisure for several
years at least. In this case, as attractive as potential fortunes
are, it is not inline with your life goals. You need to have the strength to say no, no
matter how tempting his proposal is.

Always think of your end goal before committing to anything. Master your body. As we learn from Nietzsche: “There is more intelligence in your body than in your best wisdom.” Many philosophies and religions consider that human beings are split in two: a physical part and a spiritual part. Nietzsche was very much against such a split, considering that we do not pay enough attention to our body, that there is no such thing as “another world”; it is only this physical world that really exists. Oftentimes, philosophers fantasize of other metaphysical worlds, of a world of ideas, separated from this physical reality. Nietzsche proposed an end of these ideal worlds, separated from the physical one, and he proposed the returning to the innocence of physicality. The best figure for such a return is Dionysos, the god of wine, embodying the idea that our animal instincts are the root of any form of spirituality. Nietzsche considered himself as the last disciple of Dionysos.

Today, science has demonstrated how important
it is to have a healthy body and a healthy lifestyle in order to have a healthy mind. We need to feed ourselves well, to have a
normal sexual life, to exercise regularly, to spend more time in the sun and fresh air. Our animal nature needs care and consideration. The more we listen to our body, to its needs
and desires, the more balanced we can be in life, and our mind would function much better
when given the best physical conditions. We need to schedule enough time for taking
care of our body. For example, we can decide to exercise 30 minutes every day, to take
a short walk in your neighbourhood once every couple of days, to eat fresh fruits and vegetables,
spend more time connecting with our partner, go for a hiking at least once a month, and
so on. Your body is your temple. It is your delicate
machine, which must be properly taken care of every day.

It is the base of your entire life and, according
to Nietzsche, even the base of your intelligence and spiritual life. Master your heart.
Nietzsche advises us that... “One ought to hold on to one's heart; for
if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.” Nietzsche was one of the smartest men of his
time. He was a well-known professor at Basel and the youngest one ever to take such a position.
He was a prodigy, a great intellectual. However, his romantic life was not so happy. Nietzsche had never married or had a known
relationship with any woman, and at the age of 44, he went mad after allegedly seeing
a horse being whipped in the Italian city of Turin, saying to it “I understand you”. His collapse in Turin might have been a consequence
of his contracting syphilis. The only things we know for sure about his
love life is that he was infatuated with Lou.

Salome, the young and brilliant Russian woman,
who later became a known figure of feminism and of psychoanalysis, and also with Cosima
Wagner, the wife of Richard Wagner. In spite of his failures, he constantly thought
about love and marriage, but ultimately he gave more consideration to his work, to his
legacy in the field of philosophy. We might never know if he could have had another
destiny if he would have gotten married and had a more balanced lifestyle, with not so
much solitude. Perhaps syphilis would not have struck him in such a severe way. One has to hold on to his heart not to lose
his head, and Nietzsche’s life might serve as a counter-example. We can have great ambitious plans for our
career, but it is important to give enough attention to our sentimental life too. Human affection is transformative and can
heal us. If we encounter setbacks in our professional
or financial lives, we can replenish our soul.

with the love of our spouse, of our family
and close friends. Otherwise, if we choose a life of absolute
solitude, we would not have enough love to protect us when we need it the most. Therefore, it is important to make time to
find the right people to join you in your journey, people who respect you and give you
love and encourage you to have confidence in yourself. Make a list of all the attributes a partner
should have to fulfill your needs for love and affection, and make sure the people who
enter your life have these attributes. Mastering your heart means managing your love
life and close friendships. It is as important - perhaps even more important
- than mastering your finances or mastering the skills needed for your profession. If one loses one’s heart, one might lose
one’s “head,” too. Emotional health sustains the mental health
of a person. Find happiness in self-mastery
In our final quote from Nietzsche for this

video, he says: “The most spiritual human
beings, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction.” Nietzsche’s philosophy is considered to
have a psychological, but also somehow mystical side, encouraging some severe practices of
self-constraint, followed by creating a new self. Nietzsche imagined this new self as an entirely
new being, an overman, someone who can overcome his human nature, achieving true freedom. In Nietzsche’s view, there are three stages
of becoming an overman: camel, lion, and child. The camel phase is a symbol of self-control
or self-mastery. Before becoming an overman, you need to find
the strength to search for the truth, to learn and develop yourself. In other words, you need to experience things,
to say Yes to learning and self-control. The camel does not endure hardship only to
reach an end goal, but also it can find happiness in the journey towards it.

These 3 metamorphoses can also be applied
on a smaller scale. For example, consider you grew up in a poor
family, in a poor country, and you wish to become financially wealthy one day. People around you have 9-to-5 jobs, working
in factories, watching a lot of television, and meeting in bars. In order to reach your goals, you need to
doubt this kind of lifestyle, and you need to find other role models. For example, you
can read the biographies of the most successful people, and you can find role models on the
internet - people who came up from poor backgrounds to achieve high level success. You can
start working on yourself, copying their strategies. You might give up your free time, give up
watching T.V. or meeting with friends. You might enroll in online courses to learn business
skills and join networks of successful people. Others would probably think that you are too
hard on yourself when you wake up at 5 am.

to workout, or when you turn down the offer
to hang out with friends, and instead stay in to follow an online course. But there is
satisfaction in the hardship that drives you towards your goals. And one day, when you complete your learning,
you can become the lion who will break their chains, who says No to their previous lifestyle,
and who will find their freedom in a completely new one, in achieving their goal, becoming
a new person in the end - the child. Becoming a better person requires you to be
able to endure the hardship. But as long as you have a clear vision over
the end goal, you will enjoy the process, and you will be able to find happiness in self-mastery. As we said at the beginning, this video was
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How To Achieve Self Mastery - Friedrich Nietzsche (Existentialism)

Philosophies for Life is all about giving ancient wisdom for modern living.
We are dedicated towards giving out life-changing philosophical ideas that will help you improve all the aspects of your life - spirituality, finance, relationships, mental and emotional. 

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