The Ubermensch workbook

By Marco Borgia

How to use this book

This is not a book you read. This is a book you do.

Every chapter ends with an exercise. The exercises are not optional. They are the book. The prose between them exists only to give you enough anger and clarity to pick up the pen.

If you read this cover to cover without writing a single answer, you wasted your money and my time. Put it down. Go buy another self-help book that tells you to visualize your best life. This one requires work.

The structure is simple. Seven chapters. Seven exercises. Each chapter dismantles one lie you were told. Each exercise forces you to confront what that lie cost you. At the end, you will have a document. Not a journal. Not a vision board. A manual for the life you are going to build, written in your handwriting, with your evidence.

I wrote this because I fell for every lie in this book. I spent years doing what I was told: go to college, get the degree, climb the ladder, be polite, save for retirement, and wait for the satisfaction that never arrived. In 2019, I looked at my life on paper. Financially stable. Professionally credentialed. Two undergraduate degrees and an MBA. An executive title in New York City. And I was strategically trapped, with zero agency over my own time and decisions.

The paper was perfect. The life was not mine.

If that sentence hits you in the chest, keep reading. If it does not, this book is not for you.

Chapter 1: The three powers

There are three forces that govern how you think, what you want, and how you spend your time. They are religion, politics, and marketing. Every institution you interact with answers to one of these three. They do not compete with each other. They cooperate.

Religion tells you what to believe. Politics tells you what to obey. Marketing tells you what to buy. Between the three of them, your entire life is accounted for. Your morality, your behavior, your desires. None of it is yours. You inherited it.

I am not making a conspiracy argument. Conspiracy requires coordination and secrecy. This is neither. It is an open system. The priest tells you to be humble. The politician tells you to be patient. The advertiser tells you to be hungry. Each one benefits from the other two. The humble citizen does not revolt. The patient citizen does not demand. The hungry citizen keeps spending. Nobody sat in a room and planned this. The system maintains itself because each power reinforces the others without trying.

Nietzsche saw this in 1882. In Die frohliche Wissenschaft, section 125, the madman announces that God is dead. The line everyone quotes. The line almost nobody finishes. The madman does not celebrate. He is terrified. He says: “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” He understood that killing the old authority does not free you. It leaves you falling in every direction at once.

The three powers exist because most people cannot tolerate that fall. Religion, politics, and marketing are replacement suns. They give you a direction so you do not have to choose one.

This workbook is for the people who want to choose.

Exercise 1: The audit

Get a blank page. Draw three columns. Label them: beliefs, rules, purchases.

Under beliefs, write down five things you believe about how life should be lived. Not philosophical positions. Practical beliefs. “A good person puts others first.” “Hard work gets rewarded.” “You should own a home by 35.” Whatever yours are.

Under rules, write down five rules you follow that you did not choose. Rules about how to behave at work. Rules about what you owe your family. Rules about how much money you should save, how you should dress, what you should eat. Rules that arrived in your life without a contract.

Under purchases, list five things you bought in the last year that you did not need. Be honest. The jacket you bought because someone else had one. The subscription you forgot to cancel because canceling felt like losing something. The meal you paid for because you wanted to be seen as generous.

Now look at each item. Ask one question: whose idea was this? If the answer is a church, a government, an advertisement, a social norm, or “everyone does it,” draw a line through it.

Count the lines. That number is the percentage of your life you are renting from the three powers.

Chapter 2: The golden rule is a trap

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Every child in the Western world hears this sentence before age ten. It sounds like wisdom. It functions as a leash.

The Golden Rule assumes symmetry. It assumes that if you treat others well, they will treat you well. This is false. Anyone who has been generous to a narcissist, loyal to a user, or kind to someone who mistook kindness for weakness already knows this. You do not need a philosophy book to learn it. You need one bad relationship.

Schopenhauer wrote about this in Parerga and Paralipomena, volume 2. His position: most people are driven by egoism, malice, or compassion, and the first two outnumber the third. The Golden Rule works only in a population where compassion is the majority driver. It is not. The Rule survives because it benefits the takers. The giver gives. The taker says “thank you” and takes more. The Rule tells the giver this is virtue. The giver keeps giving.

I lived this for years. I was the nice guy in every room. I put others first because I was told that is what good people do. The result: I was liked and I was used. I confused the two for a long time. Being liked felt like being valued. It is not. Being liked means you are convenient. Being valued means someone would pay a cost to keep you.

The Ubermensch does not follow the Golden Rule. The Ubermensch follows a harder rule: treat others according to their demonstrated behavior, not according to an abstract ideal of how people should act. This is not cynicism. It is accounting. You measure what people do, not what they say. You allocate your generosity the way a good CEO allocates capital: based on return, not sentiment.

Exercise 2: The ledger

Think of five people you have given significant time, energy, or money to in the last two years. Write their names.

Next to each name, write what you gave. Be specific. “Listened to her for two hours every week.” “Lent him $3,000.” “Covered his responsibilities at work for a month.”

Now, next to each entry, write what you received. Not what you hoped for. What you actually got back. Be honest. If the answer is “nothing,” write nothing.

Look at the ledger. If more than two of the five entries show a deficit, you are running a charity, not a relationship portfolio. A charity is fine if you chose it. Most people did not choose. They were trained by the Golden Rule to give without auditing.

Pick one name from your deficit list. Write one sentence describing what you will do differently with that person starting this week. Not what you will feel. What you will do. A specific action with a date.

Chapter 3: The college lie

“Go to college and you will be set financially.”

This was true in 1965. The median college graduate earned 50% more than the median high school graduate, and the cost of a degree could be covered by a summer job. In 2024, the average American college graduate carries $28,950 in student debt. The earnings premium still exists, but it is eaten by the debt service, the four years of forgone income, and the opportunity cost of not starting a business or learning a trade at 18.

I have two undergraduate degrees and an MBA. I am not against education. I am against the lie that a credential equals financial security. The credential opens a door. What you do after you walk through it depends on skills that no university teaches: negotiation, risk assessment, capital allocation, reading people, knowing when to quit.

The three powers love the college lie because it keeps people obedient for four to six years during the period of life when they are most likely to rebel. An 18-year-old with no debt and no degree is dangerous. An 18-year-old with $100,000 in loans and a fear of disappointing their parents is manageable.

Thiel made this argument in Zero to One: every moment spent on a credential is a moment not spent building something. His Thiel Fellowship paid students $100,000 to drop out and start companies. The results speak: Vitalik Buterin, who built Ethereum, was a Thiel Fellow. The dropout built a $200 billion network. The dean of his former university did not.

This is not an argument against learning. It is an argument against buying a branded education and calling it a life plan.

Exercise 3: The credential audit

Write down every credential you have. Degrees, certifications, licenses, courses completed.

Next to each one, write the year you earned it and what it cost in money and time.

Now, next to each, write the specific financial return it generated. Not the job it “helped” you get. The measurable, traceable income or opportunity that would not exist without that specific credential. If you cannot name one, write “unproven.”

Count the unproven entries. Divide the total cost of those credentials by zero. That is the return on investment of faith in the system.

Now write one skill you taught yourself for free that has made you more money or more free than any credential on the list. If you cannot name one, that is the next thing you build.

Chapter 4: Be nice and you will be loved

“Be a nice guy and you will find love.”

This is the relationship version of the Golden Rule. It promises that if you are agreeable, accommodating, and pleasant, someone will love you for it. This is a lie, and it produces a specific kind of misery: the misery of the person who did everything right and still ended up alone or in a relationship that feels like a transaction.

Adler saw this clearly. In what is now taught as Adlerian psychology, he argued that the desire to be liked is a form of dependency. The person who organizes their behavior around being liked is not being generous. They are bribing. They offer niceness in exchange for approval. When the approval does not come, or comes but feels hollow, they do not question the strategy. They double down. They become nicer. They become more accommodating. The hole gets deeper.

I know this because I was this person. My first marriage ended because I was so committed to being the nice guy that I never said what I actually thought. I confused silence with maturity. It was cowardice.

The Ubermensch does not seek to be liked. The Ubermensch seeks to be accurate. Accuracy in relationships means saying the true thing, not the comfortable thing. It means disappointing people when the alternative is lying to them. It means accepting that some people will leave because you stopped performing agreeableness, and understanding that anyone who leaves for that reason was never there for you.

Exercise 4: The nice-guy inventory

Write down three times in the last year when you said yes and meant no. Be specific. The dinner you attended because you did not want to offend. The project you accepted because you did not want to seem difficult. The opinion you swallowed because the room would have been uncomfortable.

For each one, write what it cost you. Time, energy, self-respect, or a missed opportunity. Put a number on it if you can. Hours wasted. Dollars lost. Days spent doing work that was not yours.

Now write what you were afraid would happen if you had said no. Name the fear precisely. “They would think I am selfish.” “She would have been angry.” “He would have stopped talking to me.”

Ask: did the person in that scenario earn the power you gave them? Did they demonstrate, through their own behavior, that their opinion of you should govern your decisions?

Write one sentence: the next time I am asked to [specific situation from your list], I will say no. Write the exact words you will use. Practice them out loud. Not in your head. Out loud.

Chapter 5: The happiness lie

“If you do X, you will be happy.”

X changes depending on who is selling. Religion says: follow the commandments. Politics says: be a good citizen. Marketing says: buy the thing. Self-help says: think positive, journal, meditate, manifest. The X rotates. The promise stays the same: do this, and the empty feeling will go away.

It will not go away. The empty feeling is not a bug. It is a signal.

Schopenhauer argued in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung that satisfaction is temporary by design. You want something. You get it. The satisfaction lasts hours, sometimes days. Then the wanting returns with a new object. The cycle does not break because it is not meant to break. It is the engine of the will.

The three powers understood this before Schopenhauer wrote it down. They built industries on the cycle. Religion calls the empty feeling sin and sells absolution. Marketing calls it inadequacy and sells products. Politics calls it insecurity and sells protection. Each one needs you to stay on the wheel.

The Ubermensch steps off the wheel. Not by suppressing desire. By redirecting it. The question is not “what will make me happy?” The question is “what work would I do even if it never made me happy?” The answer to that question is your actual life. Everything else is noise.

Exercise 5: The satisfaction test

Write down the last five times you felt genuine satisfaction. Not pleasure. Not excitement. Not relief. Satisfaction: the feeling of having done something that mattered, measured by your own standard, regardless of what anyone else thought.

For each one, write what you did and how long the satisfaction lasted. Hours? Days? Weeks?

Now write down the last five purchases that were supposed to make you feel better. The new clothes, the gadget, the meal, the subscription. For each one, write how long the feeling lasted.

Compare the two lists. The first list is your real life. The second list is the leash.

Write one sentence: the work that satisfies me, regardless of outcome, is ___. If you cannot fill in the blank, you have not tried enough things. That is the next step. Try something. Not something society recommends. Something you are curious about that nobody around you understands.

Chapter 6: Money is agency

Most people think about money wrong. They think money is a reward. Work hard, get paid, spend, repeat. This framing turns money into a consumption cycle. You earn it to spend it. You spend it to feel something. You feel it for a moment. Then you earn again.

Money is not a reward. Money is stored agency. Every dollar you save is a future decision you get to make. Every dollar you spend is a decision you gave away. Every dollar you borrow is a decision you will owe someone else, with interest.

In 2024, the average American household carries $6,329 in credit card debt at an average interest rate above 20%. That is not a financial statistic. It is a measure of lost sovereignty. Those households owe roughly $1,200 a year in interest alone. That is $1,200 worth of decisions someone else gets to make.

The phrase “people buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people they don’t care about” has been attributed to everyone from Will Rogers to Dave Ramsey. The attribution does not matter. The observation is self-evidently true. Walk through any shopping mall on a Saturday and count how many people are carrying bags of things they will forget they own within 60 days.

The Ubermensch treats money the way Machiavelli treated political capital in Il Principe: as a resource to be accumulated for strategic deployment, not for display. Machiavelli’s advice to the prince was to appear generous, but to be frugal. The distinction is not about deception. It is about control. The prince who spends freely is loved until the money runs out, and then he is hated. The prince who accumulates and deploys strategically keeps his options open.

Your money is your optionality. Guard it the way you would guard a weapon.

Exercise 6: The agency audit

Pull your bank and credit card statements for the last three months. Categorize every expense into three buckets:

Agency-building: savings, investments, debt payoff, education that has a specific ROI target, tools that directly enable your work.

Neutral: rent, utilities, groceries, transportation. The baseline cost of existing.

Agency-draining: everything else. The subscription you forgot. The dinner that was more performance than pleasure. The purchase that was therapy in disguise.

Calculate the percentage in each bucket.

If agency-draining is above 15% of your after-tax income, you are funding the three powers with your own sovereignty. Every dollar in that bucket is a vote for the system that keeps you on the wheel.

Write three specific expenses you will eliminate this month. Not “spend less.” Name the vendor, the amount, and the date you cancel. Then cancel them before you finish this chapter. Not tomorrow. Now.

Chapter 7: The Ubermensch project

You have completed six exercises. You have a document. It contains an audit of your beliefs, a ledger of your relationships, a review of your credentials, an inventory of your compliance, a test of your satisfactions, and a map of your spending.

That document is not a self-help worksheet. It is an X-ray. It shows you the exact shape of the cage you built around yourself, one polite decision at a time.

Nietzsche wrote in Also Sprach Zarathustra: “Man is a rope tied between beast and Ubermensch, a rope over an abyss.” He did not say man is the Ubermensch. He said man is between. The project is the crossing. The crossing is not a destination. It is a practice.

The Ubermensch is not a finished state. It is not a title you earn. It is the daily act of choosing your own values when the world offers you cheaper ones. It is saying no when saying yes would be easier. It is writing down what you believe and testing it against reality, then rewriting it when reality wins.

I am on this crossing. I am not at the other side. I am on the rope. Some days I look down. Some days I walk. The difference between me and the person who never starts is not talent or intelligence. It is the decision to step onto the rope in the first place.

This workbook exists because I believe you are smart enough to see the cage and brave enough to dismantle it. Not because I told you to. Because you looked at the evidence and decided for yourself.

The three powers will not stop. Religion will keep preaching. Politicians will keep promising. Marketers will keep selling. They do not need you to believe them. They only need you to comply. Compliance is the default. It requires no effort. The Ubermensch project requires effort every single day.

Exercise 7: The manifesto

Write your own values. Not the ones your parents gave you. Not the ones your company printed on a poster. Not the ones your religion assigned at birth. Yours.

Five values. One sentence each. For each value, write one specific behavior that would violate it. Not an abstract violation. A real one. “I value directness. I violate it when I soften feedback to keep the room comfortable.” That is the format. Concrete. Testable. Honest.

Below the values, write one sentence: the life I am building is ___.

Do not write what you hope for. Write what you are willing to work for, starting tomorrow, with no guarantee that it will make you happy.

Sign it. Date it. Put it somewhere you will see it every morning.

Then get to work.

A note on the opponent

The smartest objection to this workbook is: “Nietzsche went insane. Schopenhauer died bitter and alone. Machiavelli died in exile. Why should I follow a philosophy whose founders lost?”

I do not follow their lives. I build on their ideas. Newton was cruel. Darwin was anxious. Galileo recanted under pressure. We do not reject gravity because Newton was an unpleasant person. We do not deny natural selection because Darwin could not sleep.

The ideas survive the men. The Ubermensch project is not about imitating Nietzsche. It is about taking his best question seriously: if all the old values were stripped away tomorrow, what would you build in their place?

This workbook is my answer. Yours will be different.

What will YOU build?