How Benjamin Franklin Began My Passion for Self-Improvement
The one high school reading assignment that really stuck with me.
I first read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin for a high school English class. Unlike most reading assignments throughout my school career, this one had a marked impact on me and has stuck with me ever since.
I was especially fascinated by Franklin’s account of his methodical self-improvement scheme, which he called his “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.”
Sometime in his early twenties, Franklin identified thirteen cardinal virtues he wanted to attain and for each one wrote a precept, yielding the following list:
TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
Franklin drafted a table of these virtues in a notebook. Whenever he failed to live up to one of them, he made a mark in his table, thus tallying his moral lapses. He strove to have ever fewer transgressions with each passing day until he had a consistently clear table.
Reading about this method as a teenager inspired me to adopt it myself. I remember creating my own version of Franklin’s table on paper. I also remember eagerly informing my best friend Ronnie about the technique and then being amazed to see him produce from his locker his own personal recreation of Franklin’s table that he had already been using!
This was my first encounter with the study and practice of self-improvement, which I rediscovered as a passion years later after graduating college and beginning my career. I hope to pass that passion on to my young daughters. Sharing with them The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is one of the ways I will endeavor to do that.