“If you are strong enough, there are no precedents”: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Philosophy of Individual Will
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s aphorism “If you are strong enough, there are no precedents” emerges from a mind perpetually wrestling with the question of whether individuals possess the agency to transcend the circumstances of their birth and the limitations of established social codes. The quote likely originated during Fitzgerald’s most creatively fertile period in the 1920s, when he was simultaneously riding the crest of literary fame while developing increasingly sophisticated philosophical observations about American ambition, class mobility, and the nature of personal power. Writing in notebooks that would later be compiled posthumously as “The Crack-Up,” Fitzgerald filled pages with aphorisms and meditations on strength, character, and destiny. This particular observation reflects his lifelong preoccupation with the tension between individual will and social inevitability—a tension that animated both his fiction and his personal struggle to redefine himself repeatedly throughout his turbulent life.
To understand this quote, one must grasp Fitzgerald’s fundamental biography and the peculiar circumstances of his rise to literary prominence. Born in 1896 to an upper-middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald grew up in relative comfort but harbored a burning sense of social inadequacy that would define his entire career. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a failed soap manufacturer, and his mother came from a wealthy but eccentric family—a combination that left young Scott perpetually aware of both genteel traditions and financial precariousness. He attended Princeton University, where he immersed himself in the aesthetics of high society while remaining fundamentally outside it, an observation that would later fuel his greatest fictional work. His breakthrough novel, “This Side of Paradise,” published when he was just twenty-three, became a sensation and made him the literary voice of American youth, but Fitzgerald himself was never quite satisfied with his own work or achievement. He constantly felt the pressure to prove himself anew, to break free from previous definitions and expectations—a psychological state that directly informed his philosophy of strength and precedent.
Fitzgerald’s career was paradoxically marked by both tremendous success and persistent insecurity. After the triumph of “The Great Gatsby” in 1925, which is now regarded as the great American novel, Fitzgerald initially received mixed reviews and modest sales. The novel’s themes of reinvention, the pursuit of impossible ideals, and the corrupting influence of wealth directly reflected Fitzgerald’s own obsessions. His protagonist Jay Gatsby embodies the very principle expressed in the quote—a man who attempted through sheer force of will to transcend his origins, to rewrite the narrative of his own identity, and to overcome the social precedents that should have confined him to a particular station in life. Though Gatsby ultimately fails in his quest, his failure is portrayed with profound sympathy; Fitzgerald suggests that the tragedy lies not in the attempt to overcome precedent but in the world’s fundamental inability to accommodate such ambitions. This novel became the template for understanding Fitzgerald’s philosophy: strength, in his view, was the capacity to imagine and pursue a self beyond the predetermined boundaries of one’s circumstances.
What many people overlook about Fitzgerald is the extent to which his personal life was consumed by deliberate self-fashioning and reinvention. He was obsessed with clothes, manners, and the minutiae of social performance—not out of superficiality, but because he understood that identity itself was a kind of creative act. He famously said “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” a statement that revealed both his fascination with and resentment of the wealthy class he simultaneously envied and critiqued. Lesser-known aspects of Fitzgerald’s character include his intense competitiveness with other writers, his vulnerability to criticism despite his celebrated status, and his genuine belief that he could will himself into becoming a different person—a belief that extended to his marriage with Zelda Sayre, the beautiful southern belle he pursued relentlessly despite her initial disinterest. He quite literally created an idealized version of Zelda in his imagination before capturing her in reality, much as Gatsby created Daisy. Later in life, as his fortunes declined and he struggled with alcoholism, Fitzgerald became increasingly bitter about the impossibility of sustained reinvention, yet he never abandoned the core belief that strength of character could forge new paths.
The quote’s philosophical underpinning reflects Fitzgerald’s reading of Nietzsche and his understanding of Romantic literature, which celebrated the exceptional individual who could transcend social limitations through will and vision. However, Fitzgerald’s version is distinctly American; it speaks to the particular mythology of the self-made man, the notion that in a young nation, one’s past need not define one’s future. The strength Fitzgerald references is not merely physical or economic, but psychological and spiritual—it is the capacity to imagine a different self and possess the will to enact that imagination. This philosophy contains within it both liberating and cautionary elements. It offers hope to those constrained by circumstance, yet it also implies that failure to transcend one’s origins might reflect not bad luck or systemic injustice, but weakness of character. Fitzgerald himself struggled with this implication throughout his life, alternating between celebrating individuals who could reinvent themselves and mourning the tragedy of those bound by circumstance.
Over the decades, Fitzgerald’s quote has been adopted and adapted by motivational speakers, entrepreneurs, and self-help gurus as a kind of secular gospel about the power of personal determination. It appears frequently in business literature