Brian Johnson explores Epictetus's Stoic idea of prokope, or progress, as the daily effort to improve yourself within a philosophy you've chosen. Long defines it as committed practice; Johnson says to go all in on whatever philosophy guides your life.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Optimize plus one. In our last few plus ones we've been learning how to operationalize antifragile confidence so we can make disaster virtues opportunity. We've been leaning into some ancient Stoic wisdom from Seneca via the modern philosopher Tom Morris. Today I want to chat about some ancient Stoic wisdom from Epictetus, this time via a modern philosopher named A.A. long. A.A. long is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He's also one of the world's most respected scholars of Stoicism. In his book how to Be Free, he provides a new translation of Epictetus classic in Kyridian and as you might have guessed, gives us some powerful wisdom on how we can become free. The book is packed with wisdom and Long's introduction is fantastic and check out the notes for more. Today I want to focus on a passage related to the importance of making progress. Long tells us, and I quote, Epictetus can come across as heavy handed and severe. One of the reasons I might like him so much, but his purpose as a teacher was to show his students how to make progress towards the Stoic goal and not just settle for being ordinary. He was well aware that acting consistently on the system of values I have outlined would be a counsel of perfection and even beyond himself. His focus is not on heroic achievement, but approximating to it, trying it out on situations that typically trouble people and undermine their performance in everyday life progress. This is such an important concept in Epictetus teaching that Long has it in the glossary of key Stoic terms we can find in the back of the book. And I actually started with this section, so let's flip to page 161 for the definition. Progress Technical term Greek prokope for persons who have committed themselves to Stoicism as their philosophy of life and who make every effort to improve their performance. Fun fact. I googled Procope so I could find a version of it which with the line on the top of the e in there. I found it interesting that the first few results were from Bible study websites. Note Epictetus books were written in the same colloquial Greek as the New Testament. That's a funny word, colloquial, which makes me want to modify the usage of the word progress to generalize it beyond just Stoicism and Christianity so it's more in line with our optimized approach. How about this for progress from the Greek Prokope for persons who have committed themselves to their chosen philosophy of life and who make every effort to improve their performance. That's about right. So what's your chosen philosophy of life? Have you committed yourself to it and are you making every effort, literally every effort, to improve your performance? That's what Optimize is all about. Go all in. Use every moment to practice your philosophy. Give us all you've got today.
