The Practice of Becoming

June 8, 2026

The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.

Socrates

About the Author

Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) wrote nothing. Every word we have from him was preserved by others — principally his student Plato — and yet he is considered the founding figure of Western philosophy, the man from whom nearly all subsequent thinking about ethics, truth, and the examined life descends.
He was born in Athens, the son of a stonemason and a midwife. He served as a soldier, fought with documented courage at several battles, and then returned to Athens to spend the rest of his life doing something unusual: walking through the marketplace asking people questions. He questioned politicians about justice, poets about beauty, craftsmen about wisdom — and in almost every case he found that the people most certain they possessed a virtue understood it least. He called himself not a teacher but a midwife of ideas, helping others give birth to truths they already carried within them.
He was ugly by Athenian standards, barefoot by habit, and utterly indifferent to wealth, status, or comfort. He wore the same simple cloak winter and summer and ate and drank with equal moderation. He was married to Xanthippe, who by his own account was formidable, and he credited her directness with keeping him honest.
In 399 BC, at the age of seventy, he was tried by an Athenian jury on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hemlock. He was given opportunity to escape; his friends begged him to flee. He refused. He would not save his life by doing something dishonorable. He drank the hemlock with a steadiness that astonished everyone in the room. He died as he had lived — consistent all the way through.

Historical Context

The line you have just read does not appear in the formal Socratic dialogues of Plato, but it is firmly attributed to Socrates through the tradition and widely cited in the classical record. It captures what scholars call the Socratic project: the insistence that virtue is not a performance to be managed but a reality to be inhabited — and that the only reliable way to inhabit it is through sustained practice.
Athens in Socrates’ time was a city of appearances. Reputation, public image, and the carefully managed impression of virtue was the currency of civic life. Powerful men worked hard to seem just, seem generous, seem courageous. Socrates was a persistent disruption to all of that. He kept asking a simple, devastating question: but are you actually that? His conviction was that the gap between appearance and reality was not merely embarrassing — it was the source of most human misery, public and private.
The second half of the quote is as important as the first: virtues increase through practice. This was not an insight unique to Socrates — his student Aristotle would later formalize it as the doctrine of arete, or excellence through habituated action — but Socrates lived it in an era when most philosophers merely reasoned about it. He did not teach courage from a comfortable chair. He was brave at Potidaea. He did not lecture about integrity from a safe distance. He was consistent unto death.

A Story to Sit With

At his trial, Socrates was offered a choice: stop philosophizing, or die.
The Athenian jury expected him to beg. The convention of the time was for a defendant to weep, bring in weeping family members, appeal to the jury’s emotions, and promise to reform. Socrates did none of it. He told the jury that he could not stop asking questions, because the unexamined life was not worth living — and that if they expected him to compromise the truth to save his life, they had misunderstood him entirely.
His friend Crito came to him in the night before his execution with a plan and money for his escape. Guards had been bribed. A boat was waiting. All Socrates had to do was walk out. He refused. He said that to flee would be to act against the very principles he had spent seventy years professing. He had spent his life arguing that one must live consistently with what one believes to be right. To abandon that position the moment it became costly would be to prove, in the final hour, that he had never really meant it.
He stayed. He drank the hemlock. He held the cup in his own hand. The men around him were weeping; Socrates himself was calm. A student asked him why he was not afraid. He said, in effect: I have been practicing for this my whole life. This is not a departure from how I have lived. This is the last expression of it.
He had been, in reality, what he appeared to be. The cup was the proof.

Scripture Cross-Links

Matthew 23:27–28 — “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones… Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy.”
James 1:22 — “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.”
Alma 5:28 — “Behold, are ye stripped of pride? I say unto you, if ye are not ye are not prepared to meet God.”
Moroni 7:6–7 — “For behold, God hath said a man being evil cannot do that which is good; for if he offereth a gift, or prayeth unto God, except he shall do it with real intent it profiteth him nothing.”
Doctrine and Covenants 121:45 — “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God.”

Thematic Reflection

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from maintaining a performance. Anyone who has ever worked hard to seem patient, seem generous, seem at peace — when none of those things were actually true inside — knows how much energy that costs, and how hollow it ultimately feels. Socrates is offering us something better, and also more demanding: the invitation to close the gap between what we project and what we are.
The mechanism he names is worth sitting with: virtues grow through practice. This means you do not need to wait until you feel generous to act generously. You do not need to wait until you feel courageous to act with courage. The feeling follows the action, not the other way around. Every honest act deposits something into the character. Every deceptive one makes a small withdrawal. The account is always being updated.
This is deeply consistent with the restored gospel’s understanding of becoming, not merely believing. Our Father in Heaven is not primarily interested in whether we can articulate virtue — He is interested in whether we are becoming it. The scriptures are full of this language: be ye doers, let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly, stripped of pride. The standard is not performance. It is reality.
Socrates found this out the hard way — or perhaps the truest way. The last test of his life was the simplest: will you actually do the thing you have always said you believed? He did. He had been practicing long enough that the answer came without hesitation.

Richard’s Personal Reflection

I have thought about this often in the context of medicine. Patients trust their physicians with an almost irrational completeness — they undress, they confess, they place their lives in our hands — and the whole transaction rests on an assumption: that the person in the white coat is genuinely what the white coat suggests. A physician who is genuinely competent, genuinely careful, genuinely committed to this patient’s good. Not performing care. Delivering it.
I have seen both kinds. I have been both kinds, on my better and worse days. The days I was most present, most attentive, most genuinely engaged with the person in front of me — those were the days I came home feeling like I had actually done something. The days I was going through the motions — checking boxes, glancing at the clock, hearing words without really listening — those were the days that left me feeling strangely empty, regardless of how efficient I had been.
Socrates is right. You cannot sustain the gap forever. Eventually, what you are catches up with what you appear to be — for better or for worse. The only real peace is in closing the gap early and keeping it closed.

Grandfather’s Counsel

My dear ones, the world will teach you that image is everything — that how you look, how you present, what people think of you is the primary thing to manage. I want to offer you a different instruction: be, in reality, what you wish to appear to be. That is not only the most honorable way to live; it is the most restful. There is no maintenance cost on the truth. There is no story to keep straight, no performance to sustain, no fear of being found out.
And Socrates gives you an encouraging second thing: you do not have to have arrived at virtue to begin practicing it. Act patiently before you feel patient. Serve before you feel generous. Choose honesty when dishonesty would be easier. Each time you do, the virtue becomes a little more truly yours. You are literally practicing yourself into the person you want to become.
That is the project of a lifetime. And it is one of the most worthwhile ones I know.

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