The Entrepreneur's Weekly Nietzsche A Book for Disruptors

I also talked to the venture capitalist Brad Feld on his book The Weekly Nietzsche, what Nietzsche can teach us, both Pro and Con, his connection to the stoics and of course the power of daily practice.

But the idea is one quote one essay per week from Nietzsche that would help an entrepreneur that would help an executive that would help anyone sort of on some journey to greatness if you will. And I know Nietzsche can be controversially certainly been co-opted and misrepresented by a number of groups so that's something we definitely talk about in today's episode but it's a great book. If you haven't read Nietzsche it's a nice entry point into Nietzsche.

I found that the Daily Books are a great, I mentioned Daily Drucker earlier. It's a great entry point into someone said it is picking up one of the books you know maybe it works maybe it doesn't. This is a great way to just sort of do a survey course of a certain philosopher or influencer

I think it's incredibly powerful because it's very digestible and it it creates a rhythm i mean i don't know how many times i've read the daily stoic now probably three or four you know just sort of beginning to end on a daily basis i read it all the way through once but uh that kind of a cadence niche was was different we as we played with niche we realized that niche is much less giving advice um in in his philosophy what niche is doing and his uh uh uh cliche about niche or often quoted line about him he's very misunderstood uh as a philosopher and i hope we get to spend a few minutes talking about that of course but he's he's incredibly important as a philosopher because he's really the crossover between classical and contemporary philosopher he's the bridge at least in my mind and one of the uh cliches is that he philosophizes with a hammer and he really is a the classic disruptor the subtitle of this book is a book for disruptors and you know the word disruptor is so overused in entrepreneurship to the today but but we built on it which is this notion that uh what nicha did was he challenged so much of conventional philosophy and conventional wisdom but by smashing it with a hammer he was provocative he was aggressive he was willing to contradict himself he was trying to get people to think he was not saying this is the answer he was saying think about this thing and how you relate to it and how you relate to it in the world and as a result giving each of these quotes a week felt better than a day because for a lot of these if you read the niche and you read his quote it it means nothing you can't like I have to read it out loud three or four times like reading poetry you have to read it slowly and sort of the words are beautiful and powerful and unique and it's of course you know English translation of late late 1800s German so it's it's colorful but it's chewy and so what we tried to do was take the the nicha quote we then would sort of transliterate or translate it I guess is a better word into contemporary English and then we wrote an essay and the essays we couldn't do two or three paragraphs the essays were two or three pages not saying here's how you apply this quote to entrepreneurship but here's what this quote makes us think about in the context of entrepreneurship and here's some contradictory ideas and here's some ideas that we we used to think about this and now we think about this and then for about half of them there's an essay from an entrepreneur maybe two-thirds of them and and in a few cases they're entrepreneurs whose names people will recognize but many of them are not we we chose entrepreneurs you know from our very extended network but people who are not famous entrepreneurs they're not intended to be sound bites from you know super successful rich famous people but practical stories where we gave each entrepreneur the the quote and our translation and said write an essay about what this speaks to you about and we didn't edit the essays we let them be blog posts and we fixed the commas and made sure the quotation marks and the punctuation were in the right places and stuff like that but we let them be in the person's voice rather than in our voice again to show and to try to give people the tools to reflect and in some ways be able to have a practice practicum around it you know you you're not reading to learn what you should learn from Nietzsche's quotes you're being provoked by Nietzsche and hopefully by us and stimulated maybe is a better word than provoked to reflect on your own experiences as an entrepreneur whether your super experienced or just beginning against the backdrop of this very important provocative stimulating again I'm using the same words because those are the words that we try to get through philosopher and as as it applies to entrepreneurship.