Nietzsche introduced the Übermensch — usually translated "overman," sometimes "superman" — in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), and the word has been doing damage ever since. It sounds like a rank: someone above the rest of us, biologically or morally superior, the strong stepping over the weak. That reading isn't an accident. After Nietzsche's collapse in 1889, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took control of his unpublished work, edited it to fit her own nationalist politics, and helped hand fascists a version of her brother they could use. The actual concept survived that. Strip the borrowed politics back off and the Übermensch is a description of a person who keeps overcoming themselves — who treats their own current values as a draft, not a verdict, and keeps rewriting it rather than settling in. Nietzsche borrowed the phrase "become who you are" from the Greek poet Pindar, and it's a better summary than the word overman ever was: not become better than other people, become the author of yourself, continuously, on purpose.
Most people who reach for Nietzsche's self-overcoming stop at the self-help version of it. Outgrow your old habits. Become your best self. Level up. That's not wrong, exactly, but it's aimed at the wrong target. Levelling up assumes the values doing the judging — what counts as "better," what "best self" even means — are already settled, and the only job left is to hit them harder. That's not self-overcoming. That's just performance inside a scoreboard you never questioned. The harder version of the idea, the one that actually costs something, is overcoming the values themselves. Not the ones you drifted into by accident. The ones you sat down and deliberately chose.
That's the part most people skip, because it sounds like it shouldn't be necessary. You chose the value on purpose. You did the work. Why would you have to overcome it too?
Because a value doing real work in a life eventually gets tested by a life that's changed. You chose a standard of ambition at twenty-five that made sense for someone with nothing to protect and everything to prove. At thirty-five, with different constraints and a different set of people depending on you, the same standard might just be costing you evenings you can't get back for a version of status you no longer actually want. The standard wasn't wrong when you chose it. It's wrong now, and the discomfort of admitting that isn't failure — it's information. The book's own language for this is blunt: "some values you pick will turn out to be too vague, too borrowed, too performative, or too expensive to live. When that happens, revise them." A chosen value doesn't earn permanent immunity from revision just because you once meant it.
This is where the self-help reading of the Übermensch actually gets it backwards. It treats self-overcoming as a one-time event — the moment you finally commit, choose your values, stop drifting, become the author. Nietzsche's version has no finish line. The "overcoming" isn't a threshold you cross once and then live on the other side of. It's a standing posture toward everything you've already built, including the parts you're proud of. The camel in Zarathustra's parable takes on the weight of tradition; the lion rejects it and clears ground by force; but Nietzsche doesn't end there — the final transformation is the child, who creates new values freely, and then, presumably, keeps doing it again. Self-authorship isn't a state you arrive at. It's a habit you keep performing on values you already own, which is a much less comfortable practice than performing it on values you never liked in the first place.
That's also why revision gets treated as suspicious in most people's actual lives, rather than as the skill it is. Changing your mind about something you chose feels like proof you were wrong to choose it — evidence for the people around you, and for yourself, that the commitment wasn't real. So people keep obeying values that have stopped fitting, not because the values still work, but because abandoning them would look like failure. That's not loyalty. It's the fear of looking like you got it wrong in public. Nietzsche's overman doesn't have that fear, not because he's braver in some generic sense, but because he never treated the value as a truth he'd discovered in the first place. It was always a decision. Decisions can be remade without the person who made them being discredited. Only discovered truths get treated as permanent.
The useful test isn't whether your values are impressive. It's whether you're still willing to argue with the ones you're most attached to — the ones you'd defend hardest if someone challenged them at a dinner table. If a value has gone unexamined that long purely because examining it feels disloyal, that's not conviction holding it in place. That's the same drift the overman is supposed to be the opposite of, just wearing a chosen value as its disguise instead of an inherited one.
Self-overcoming was never about clearing a bar someone else set, or becoming a stronger version of a self you're not allowed to question. It's about refusing to let even your own past decisions run your life unexamined.
Nothing Matters. Now What? makes the same case without needing Nietzsche's name attached to it: "identity is an output," built from what you keep doing rather than discovered underneath it, and "values are not truths. They are decisions" — which means both stay open to revision for as long as you're still alive to make one.