NASHVILLE, Tennessee – Advance Financial Chairman Mike Hodges, who launched the Hodges Foundation for Philosophical Orientation Friday night in Nashville, is fond of Friedrich Nietzsche’s call to “live dangerously.”
“For believe me! The secret of harvesting from existence the great fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is to live dangerously!” Nietzsche famously wrote.
Hodges told The Tennessee Star in an interview published Saturday that he’s attracted to Nietzsche’s philosophies of “creativity, authenticity, individuality, commitment, becoming who you are, and living dangerously.”
“If you’re going to be in the world and be successful, these are things you should think about,” he said. Hodges even got his daughters t-shirts with the phrase “live dangerously” for Christmas one year, but living dangerously doesn’t mean being rash, he explained.
“Living dangerously doesn’t necessarily mean you hang off cliffs in a squirrel suit or jump off of buildings in a Spiderman suit. What it means is to challenge yourself again, and again, and again, and again in every moment. And philosophy, some philosophies, pushes you to do that, pushes you to become who you are,” he said.
His wife, Tina, said their oldest daughter quit her private school and joined a home school program instead, which many parents considered “a dangerous move.”
“So that might be living dangerously to you,” Tina said they told their daughter.
“It stresses creativity, originality, authenticity, individuality. I think all of us could benefit by thinking about those things more and pushing ourselves,” Mike said. “So when I’m using the term dangerous, that’s a broad and could be a loaded term. It’s dangerous in that life has become so confined and for so many people, and so narrow in the way that they view things, and so comfortable. What Nietzsche would have called for is to expand a little bit, and that’s where you will grow.”
You can read more about the Hodges Foundation here, and read The Tennessee Star’s full interview with the Hodges here.
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[Editors note: Mike and Tina Hodges are chairman and CEO, respectively of Advance Financial, an advertiser in The Tennessee Star, which, along with The Michigan Star, The Ohio Star, The Minnesota Sun, and Battleground State News, is owned by Star News Digital Media.]
Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of Battleground State News, The Ohio Star, and The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
