What Can We Learn from Benjamin Franklin? Volume-1 13 Virtues & Practical Wisdom for a Better Life-BK28

What Can We Learn from Benjamin Franklin? Volume I

Thirteen Virtues and Practical Wisdom for a Better Life

Fang Tianliang

Preface:

From Penniless Apprentice to the Face on the Hundred-Dollar Bill

Take out a hundred-dollar bill and you will see an old man with thinning hair, a calm expression and the faintest hint of a smile. Unlike the other faces on everyday American banknotes, he was never President. He never commanded an army, and he was not born into a distinguished family. Yet he became one of the most representative figures in American history. His name was Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790).

For many Americans the name is familiar. But for readers elsewhere, who exactly was he? Why does a man who never held the highest office appear on the largest note in everyday use? More surprising still, this scientist, inventor, diplomat and Founding Father, celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, had only about two years of formal schooling. He was once a hard-up apprentice printer who, at seventeen, slipped away from home and travelled alone to a city where he knew no one. Decades later he was welcomed by scholars and aristocrats across Europe, awarded honorary degrees by famous universities, sent to negotiate with France on behalf of the United States, and helped shape the birth of a new nation.

How did a poor boy with almost no social standing become a man respected on both sides of the ocean? That is the part of Franklin's story most worth knowing.

 

The Boy with a Loaf under Each Arm

On a Sunday morning in October 1723, a small boat tied up at the Market Street wharf in Philadelphia. Out stepped a seventeen-year-old boy in dirty, rumpled clothes. He had been travelling for days, on foot, by boat and at the oars, and his pockets were stuffed with spare stockings and shirts. He looked a sorry sight.

He was ravenous. He went into a bakery and asked for the kind of biscuit he used to eat in Boston; they did not make it. He asked for a threepenny loaf; they had nothing by that name. So he said: then give me threepence worth of any sort. The baker handed him three great puffy rolls. He was surprised at how much threepence could buy. With no room in his pockets, he tucked a roll under each arm and walked up Market Street eating the third.

At the door of one house stood a young woman named Deborah Read. Watching this stranger stroll past with bread under his arms, she thought, as he later put it, that he made "a most awkward, ridiculous appearance". She could not have imagined that seven years later this boy would become her husband.

Franklin recorded the scene in loving detail in his Autobiography. He noted that all he had left that day was a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. He paid the copper to the boatmen as he came ashore. They had refused it at first, because he had helped row, but he insisted. A man is sometimes more generous when he has little money than when he has plenty, he observed, perhaps for fear of being thought poor. When he had eaten his fill he gave the other two rolls to a woman and her child who had come on the same boat and were waiting to go on. Then he followed a crowd of clean-dressed people into a Quaker meeting house, sat down, and in the deep silence fell fast asleep. Someone kindly woke him when the meeting ended. It was, he said, the first house he entered, and the first he slept in, in Philadelphia.

Writing this decades later, by then famous across two continents, Franklin pointedly invited the reader to compare that unlikely beginning with the figure he afterwards made in the same city. He never hid his humble origins; if anything he set them before the reader with a certain pride. That candour is one of the most attractive things about his story.

 

A Boy with Two Years of School

Franklin was born in Boston, in the colony of Massachusetts, on 17 January 1706. His father, Josiah Franklin, had emigrated from England and made his living as a tallow chandler, producing candles and soap. After his first wife died, Josiah remarried, and between the two marriages he had seventeen children. Benjamin was the fifteenth child and tenth son, and the eighth child of his second wife, Abiah. Franklin remembered seeing thirteen children sitting at his father's table at one time. The financial strain on such a household is not hard to imagine.

At first his father meant this tenth son for the Church, as a kind of tithe, and sent him to the grammar school. Young Benjamin did well, rising in less than a year from the middle of his class to the top. But his father did some sums. A university education was expensive, and a clergyman's income meagre. So Benjamin was moved to a school for writing and arithmetic, where he spent about a year. His handwriting improved quickly; his arithmetic, which later astonished people, was a failure. At around ten his formal schooling ended, and he went home to help his father cut wicks, fill moulds, mind the shop and run errands.

He disliked the work and longed to go to sea. That was exactly what his father feared, for one son had already gone to sea and never come back. To find this restless boy a suitable trade, Josiah often walked him round Boston to watch joiners, bricklayers, turners and braziers at work. Franklin later said this gave him a lifelong pleasure in watching good workmen handle their tools, and taught him enough to make small repairs about the house himself.

In the end, because the boy loved books, his father decided he should be apprenticed to his elder brother James, a printer. At twelve, Benjamin signed indentures that bound him until he was twenty-one.

It was not easy work for a boy. He set type, worked the press and handled paper, along with every kind of menial chore. But the printing house also opened a door into the world of knowledge. Surrounded by books, newspapers and essays, he read voraciously and began to write. At sixteen he wanted to publish in his brother's newspaper, but he was sure James would refuse. So he hit on a bold scheme. He invented a female pen name, Silence Dogood, posed as a country parson's widow, and slipped his essays under the printing-house door at night.

The essays discussed marriage, manners, education, religion and public life with humour and a satirical edge, and they won readers. James and his friends had great fun guessing the author, naming only men of learning and reputation. Benjamin listened, quietly delighted. None of the readers knew that the outspoken "Mrs Dogood" was a sixteen-year-old in the printing house. When James eventually learned the truth, the already tense relationship between the brothers grew worse.

In 1723, at seventeen, Franklin broke his indentures and secretly left Boston. He had little money, no impressive education and no family influence to arrange his future. Judged by his origins alone, hardly anyone would have predicted that he would become one of the great figures of American history.

 

From Printer to Scientist

In Philadelphia Franklin went on working as a printer. A lack of formal schooling did not persuade him that study was beyond him. On the contrary, he used his spare hours to learn writing, mathematics, languages and natural science. He went on to run his own printing business, publish a newspaper and Poor Richard's Almanack, and gradually won financial independence. But he never let money-making define his life. He remained endlessly curious about nature and about the small problems of everyday living.

Why does lightning flash across the sky? Why do some stoves give poor heat and fill the room with smoke? Why, as we age, do we need one pair of glasses for distance and another for reading? Why did mail ships sailing from England to America take a week or two longer than American whaling ships? Questions that others found unremarkable became his subjects of study. He showed that lightning is electrical, invented the lightning rod, improved the heating stove, devised bifocal spectacles, invented the glass armonica and printed one of the earliest charts of the Gulf Stream. Several words we now take for granted, such as "positive" and "negative" charge and "battery", were first used or popularised by him.

A man with two years of schooling had, through long self-education and experiment, entered the most important scientific circles of his age. In 1753 he received the Royal Society's Copley Medal, and that same year Harvard and Yale awarded him honorary master's degrees. In 1756 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Later the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford gave him honorary doctorates, and from then on people often called him "Dr Franklin".

 

A Life of Contrasts

At seventeen he walked the streets of Philadelphia with bread under his arms and almost nothing in his pocket. At seventy he risked capture by British warships to cross the Atlantic in winter as an envoy to France. He wore a fur cap and no wig, and became the most celebrated man in Paris. In 1778 France and the United States became allies; in 1783 he helped sign the Treaty of Paris that ended the War of Independence.

As a young man he counted every penny. Yet at forty-two he handed his business to a partner and gave most of the rest of his life to science and public affairs: a library, a fire company, a hospital, an academy. In his will he left a thousand pounds each to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent to young craftsmen and kept working for two hundred years.

He spent his life pursuing virtue, once setting himself the goal of "moral perfection", and frankly admitted that he never reached it. He owned enslaved people when young but became president of an abolition society in old age. He lived apart from his wife for more than a decade and was not with her when she died. He and his son ended up on opposite sides of the Revolution and were never reconciled. He was not a perfect man.

The chapters that follow explore each of these contrasts.

One small mystery is saved for the final chapter. In 1998, workers restoring the house Franklin once lived in in London dug up more than a thousand fragments of human bone. Why should a respected scientist and Founding Father be linked to a pit of human remains?

 

Why Learn from Franklin Today?

A boy who left school at about ten, and once failed arithmetic, became a researcher recognised by the international scientific community. An apprentice in a printing house became a successful publisher. A seventeen-year-old with almost nothing helped bring a nation into being. A man who worked hard to build wealth devoted much of it to public causes and even made provision for people two centuries after his death.

Why should such apparently unrelated achievements come together in a single person? He did not start out with all these abilities. His writing came from long practice, his science from self-study and experiment, his wealth from years of business, his diplomacy from dealing with every kind of person. He kept applying what he had learned to new problems, and kept learning new skills in the process of solving them.

We live in a very different world. We have schools, the internet, artificial intelligence and all kinds of advanced tools. Knowledge is far easier to come by than in his day, yet work and life bring new pressures: scattered attention, fierce competition, insecure incomes, complicated relationships and a pervasive uncertainty about the future. We may know more and still not know how to manage ourselves; we may be busier and still not be sure what we are pursuing.

So this book will not portray Franklin as a remote legend, nor ask readers to imitate everything he did. Starting from his real experiences, it takes up ten questions that bear directly on modern life. How can moral self-improvement become daily action? Without privileged schooling, how can we keep learning for life? Why do we find it so hard to change faults we know we have? What is wealth actually for? How can we stay curious? How can we manage our time and attention? How can we defuse conflict? How can we get along with people from other cultures? And how can what we build up as individuals become lasting help for others?

Most of the stories come from Franklin's Autobiography, his voluminous letters and essays, and accounts by people who knew him. Where the evidence is disputed, or a story is merely traditional and unverified, the book says so. Each chapter has a "Did You Know?" box with related curiosities, and a "People Like Us" box in which a few fictional but representative modern characters show what Franklin's methods might look like in everyday life today.

Chinese tradition, like many others, has always valued self-cultivation, diligence, honesty, thrift and social responsibility, and this book draws comparisons with it along the way. Interestingly, Franklin read Confucius himself: in 1738 he printed passages on Confucius's moral teaching in his own newspaper. Different civilisations do not think in exactly the same way, but they can enlighten one another.

We cannot choose where we start in life. But through learning, self-cultivation, action and steady accumulation, we can gradually widen our choices. And a person's true achievement lies not only in changing their own fortunes, but in what they leave for others.

In eighty-four years Franklin left us a question worth pondering: if we begin today to change a little, every day, how different might our lives be a few decades from now?

That is the answer What Can We Learn from Benjamin Franklin? hopes to look for, together with you.

Fang Tianliang

 

Chapter 1: The Thirteen Virtues: Turning Self-Improvement into Daily Action

 

1. A Young Man Decides to Change

In his twenties, Benjamin Franklin set himself an audacious goal: to arrive at moral perfection. It sounds almost absurd. Here was a young man with no distinguished family, no complete education and a business to build, aiming for a state that many philosophers and religious teachers had found beyond reach. Where did such an idea come from?

To answer that, we have to go back to the most humiliating episode of his youth.

At eighteen, Franklin came to the notice of Sir William Keith, Governor of Pennsylvania. The governor admired the able young printer and promised to set him up in his own business. Franklin was to go to London to choose a press and type, and Keith would supply letters of recommendation and a letter of credit. Full of hope, Franklin boarded a ship for England. Only on arrival did he discover that the governor's letters had never been put in the mail bag. Keith, it turned out, loved to please people with promises he could not keep. Having nothing else to give, he gave expectations.

So the eighteen-year-old was stranded in London with no money and no one to turn to. He found work in printing houses and stayed a year and a half. During that time he did things he later regretted. He spent money on plays and amusements. He lent money to a friend who never repaid it. And to Deborah, the young woman in Philadelphia to whom he had pledged himself, he wrote one letter and then fell silent.

In the summer of 1726, aged twenty, Franklin sailed home. The long voyage gave him rare time to think, and on board he drew up a "Plan of Conduct". He set himself four rules: to be extremely frugal until he had paid all his debts; to speak the truth in every instance and raise no expectations he could not meet; to apply himself industriously to his business and not be distracted by any scheme for growing suddenly rich; and to speak ill of no man whatever, even when it was true, but rather to excuse the faults he heard charged on others, and on proper occasions to speak all the good he knew of everybody.

The plan was written in his sea journal. In the Autobiography he mentions it as all the more remarkable for having been formed when he was so young, and yet followed pretty faithfully into old age. It is worth being clear, though, that this Plan of Conduct and the thirteen virtues described below belong to two different stages of his life. The first was four rules made at twenty to climb out of a hole; the second was a systematic method of self-improvement he devised some years later, once his life had settled. They share a spirit, but they are not the same plan.

A few years later he opened his own printing house in Philadelphia, and the business began to prosper. It was then that he began thinking seriously about a larger question.

He recalled in the Autobiography that he had once believed that knowing what was right should be enough to keep him doing it. Life soon taught him otherwise. While he was guarding against one fault, he wrote, he was often surprised by another; habit took advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.

We say things we know we should not. We know a job should be done now, yet put it off a little longer. We know we should be thrifty, yet buy the thing we like. We know there is no need to get angry over trifles, yet when the feeling rises it is hard to master. Between knowing what is right and actually doing it lies a long distance.

Franklin did not want to be led by these faults all his life. So he did something unusual. Instead of vaguely resolving to be a good man, he broke moral improvement down into specific behaviours that could be practised and checked. His conclusion was that a merely speculative conviction that it is in our interest to be virtuous is not enough to prevent our slipping; contrary habits must be broken and good ones acquired before we can rely on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.

He called it "the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection". It became one of the most influential personal experiments of his life.

We need not aim at moral perfection today. But his experience prompts a question for all of us: if you know you have a fault and still cannot change it, what should you do?

 

2. Thirteen Virtues: Turning Abstract Principles into Concrete Action

Franklin noticed that the books he had read listed the virtues in different ways. Some writers took "temperance" to mean moderation in eating and drinking only; others stretched it to cover every pleasure, appetite and passion. Rather than wrestle with broad words, he preferred to use more names with fewer ideas attached to each, so that each would be clear.

After reflection he settled on the virtues he thought important and wrote a short precept for each. One detail is often overlooked: his first list had only twelve, and humility was not among them.

A Quaker friend kindly told him that he was generally thought proud; that his pride showed itself frequently in conversation; that he was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing and rather insolent. The friend gave several examples that Franklin could not deny.

Franklin took it to heart. He resolved to cure himself of this vice too, if he could, and added a thirteenth virtue, humility, giving it an extensive meaning.

He did not list the virtues in random order. He hoped each habit acquired would make the next easier. Temperance would keep his head clear and his guard up against old habits. Silence would free time for study, and cure his habit of punning and joking, which only made him acceptable to trifling company. Order would make room for his plans and studies. Resolution would keep him at the work of acquiring the rest. Frugality and industry would free him from debt and give him independence, which in turn would make sincerity and justice easier to practise.

The thirteen virtues are:

1. Temperance

Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

Do not eat until sluggish or drink until giddy.

Temperance is not refusing enjoyment; it is not letting enjoyment harm your body or your judgement.

2. Silence

Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

Say only what helps others or yourself; avoid idle chatter.

It does not mean being taciturn. It is a reminder that speech should do some good, not happen for its own sake.

3. Order

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

A place for everything, and a time for each task.

The aim of order is not rigidity but less chaos and less wasted effort.

4. Resolution

Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

Decide to do what you should, and do without fail what you decide.

Deciding is easy; what is hard is keeping on after the decision.

5. Frugality

Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

Spend only to do good for others or yourself; waste nothing.

Frugality is not meanness; it is letting money serve what is truly worthwhile.

6. Industry

Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

Waste no time, do useful things, cut out needless activity.

Industry does not mean working non-stop; it means making your time count.

7. Sincerity

Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

Do not deceive to harm; think fairly and speak honestly.

Sincerity means not only not lying, but not deliberately misleading.

8. Justice

Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

Do not harm others, and do not neglect the duties you owe them.

Even without doing wrong, we can harm others by failing in our responsibilities.

9. Moderation

Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

Avoid extremes; do not let resentment run as far as you feel it deserves.

Moderation is not abandoning principle; it is not letting anger make things worse.

10. Cleanliness

Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

Keep body, clothes and home clean.

Cleanliness is a habit, and a form of respect for ourselves and those around us.

11. Tranquillity

Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

Do not be upset by trifles or by common, unavoidable mishaps.

We cannot control everything, but we can learn how to respond.

12. Chastity

Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

Exercise restraint in sexual matters, never to the harm of your own or another's health, peace or reputation.

This precept reflects the ethics of Franklin's era. Readers today may understand its relevance in terms of respect, autonomy, responsibility and not harming others.

13. Humility

Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

Follow the example of Jesus and Socrates.

Franklin added this virtue after a Quaker friend's criticism. Placed last, it reminds us not to look down on others because of our knowledge, wealth or achievements.

None of this is mysterious. Temperance, industry, sincerity, justice and humility are valued in many civilisations. What was special about Franklin was not that he discovered these principles but that he tried to answer a more practical question: if everyone knows these things, why do so few people actually live by them?

Did You Know?

After his Quaker friend's rebuke, Franklin said that he could not boast of much success in acquiring the reality of humility, "but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it". He made a rule never to contradict others directly or to assert his own opinions positively. He even stopped using words like "certainly" and "undoubtedly", and said instead "I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present." He found that conversations went far more pleasantly, people accepted his views more readily, and he was less mortified when he turned out to be wrong. The habit was at first hard against his natural inclination, he said, but became so easy that for fifty years perhaps no one had heard a dogmatic expression escape him.

 

3. How Can a Little Book Change a Person's Behaviour?

Franklin did not try to practise all thirteen virtues at once. He knew that if he tried to correct every fault at the same time his attention would be divided and he might improve nothing. He compared it to weeding a garden: a man does not try to pull up all the weeds at once, which is beyond his reach, but works on one bed at a time, and only when that is done moves on to the next.

So he designed a gradual method. Each week he would concentrate on one virtue. In the first week he would guard especially against every slip in temperance, leaving the others to their ordinary chance; in the second week he would focus on silence while trying to keep his gains in temperance; in the third on order; and so on. Thirteen weeks made a course, and he could go through four courses a year.

He also made himself a little book. He allotted a page to each virtue and ruled it with red ink into a table: seven columns, one for each day of the week, headed with its initial letter, and thirteen rows, one for each virtue. Every evening he examined the day and marked a little black spot against any virtue he had failed in. If he had talked needlessly, a spot went in the row for Silence; if he had wasted money, in the row for Frugality. The fewer the spots, the fewer the faults. His aim was to see the pages gradually come clean, until after a thirteen-week course he might have the happiness of viewing a clean book.

On the first pages he copied some favourite maxims and lines of verse, and composed a short prayer that he said every day.

Because he kept scraping out the spots, the paper wore into holes. So he transferred his tables to the ivory leaves of a memorandum book. The red lines were permanent; the spots he made in black-lead pencil, which could easily be wiped away with a wet sponge, and the book used again.

Did You Know?

Franklin said he kept up the record for some time, then went through only one course a year, then one every several years, and finally stopped altogether because of voyages abroad and a multitude of affairs. But he always carried the little book with him. It is said that, in old age in France, he showed the worn ivory book to friends. A man who carried a record of his own faults with him for decades: the fact itself gives pause.

The method has three notable features. First, he shrank the goal. He no longer demanded that he become perfect all at once, only that he do one thing well first. Second, he made behaviour visible. Memory flatters us. How many needless words we spoke yesterday, how much time we wasted the day before, are soon forgotten; a record reveals the faults that keep recurring. Third, he made improvement a long-term process. After thirteen weeks he could start again. A bad week did not mean the whole plan had failed.

There are parallels with the habit trackers, exercise logs and time-management apps people use today. But Franklin was not running a psychology experiment, and he never proved that his method works for everyone. He simply treated his own life as something to be observed and improved. That experimental spirit is worth more than the little book itself.

 

4. The Speckled Axe

If the story ended here, Franklin would seem to have found the road to a perfect character. It was not so simple.

At first he was surprised to find himself much fuller of faults than he had imagined, though he had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish. Of all the virtues, he found Order the hardest. He could restrain his eating and cut down idle talk, but he could not keep every object in its place or every task to its time. Above all, when he had to deal with other people over business and public affairs, his schedule was constantly disrupted. A master printer, he explained, must see customers whenever they choose to come. And because his memory was unusually good, he had never felt much inconvenience from his own lack of method.

He told a delightful story about this in the Autobiography. A man bought an axe from a smith and wanted the whole surface to be as bright as the edge. The smith agreed to grind it for him if he would turn the wheel. So the man turned while the smith pressed the broad face of the axe hard against the stone, which made the turning very tiring. Every now and then the man stopped to see how the work was going. At last he said he would take the axe as it was. "No," said the smith, "turn on, turn on; we shall have it bright by-and-by; as yet, it is only speckled." "Yes," said the man, "but I think I like a speckled axe best."

Franklin suspected he was much the same. Many people, he said, find it so hard to acquire good habits and break bad ones that they give up the struggle and conclude that "a speckled axe is best". He even admitted that he was sometimes persuaded by a plausible line of reasoning: that such extreme nicety as he demanded of himself might be a kind of foppery in morals, which would make him ridiculous if it were known; that a perfect character might bring the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.

The story is funny, but it captures a universal weakness. We want the benefits of change without bearing its costs for long. We want good health but will not give up bad habits; we want to learn a language but will not practise every day; we want a tidy home but are always too busy today and will tidy tomorrow. It is not that we do not know what to do; it is that we will not keep paying the price. Worse, we are very good at finding respectable reasons for not paying it.

Franklin found this weakness in himself. He never reached moral perfection, and he admitted that Order remained one of his chief difficulties. He also found pride peculiarly hard to overcome. "In reality," he wrote, "there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself." A man may learn to keep pride out of his speech yet still believe, inwardly, that he is humbler than others. As Franklin wryly put it, even if he could conceive that he had completely overcome pride, "I should probably be proud of my humility." It is a loop almost impossible to escape.

He did not declare his project a failure. On the contrary, he believed that although he fell far short of his original goal, the effort made him a better and happier man than he would otherwise have been. He compared it to those who aim at perfect handwriting by copying engraved copies: though they never reach the excellence of the models, their hands are improved by the endeavour, and become tolerable while they remain fair and legible.

The value of self-cultivation lies not in proving that we have no faults, but in making sure our faults no longer run our lives.

Writing his Autobiography at seventy-nine, Franklin made a point of telling posterity what he owed to this effort. To temperance he ascribed his long-continued health; to industry and frugality, the early easiness of his circumstances and his acquisition of fortune and knowledge; to sincerity and justice, the confidence of his country and the honourable employments it gave him; and to the joint influence of all the virtues, even in their imperfect state, that evenness of temper and cheerfulness in conversation which made his company still sought by many, even in old age.

 

5. Why Do We Know So Much and Change So Little?

Today we have learning opportunities Franklin could never have imagined. Want to manage your time? There are countless courses online. Want to improve your health? The information is endless. Want better communication skills? Books, videos and talks are everywhere. Yet more knowledge does not automatically mean a better life. Sometimes we are more distracted than people ever were. The scenes below may feel familiar.

Phones: A New Test of Silence and Order

People Like Us

Lily Lin is thirty-two and works in marketing operations at an internet company. At ten one night, ready for bed, she picks up her phone just to check one message in a work group chat. Then a funny video appears. When it ends, the app suggests another. The next time she looks at the clock it is half past eleven. The next morning she is tired and blames herself for having no self-control. This happens about five nights a week.

Following Franklin's method, Lily does not need to give up her phone at once. She can choose one specific action: after ten at night, charge the phone outside the bedroom. Then she can watch for seven days. On which nights did she manage it, and on which did she not? When she failed, why? Perhaps there was a work message she had to deal with, perhaps she was bored, perhaps she simply reached for the phone out of habit.

Lily tried it. In the first week she succeeded on four nights out of seven. Her notebook showed that the three failures all happened because her alarm was on her phone, so she told herself she had to bring it in anyway. The next week she spent a few pounds on the simplest possible alarm clock, and succeeded on six nights. Only when we find the cause can we find a solution that suits us. That is how "I must use my phone less" becomes a plan we can carry out.

Procrastination: A Test of Resolution and Industry

An office worker has an important report to write. He knows it must be done but always feels he needs more material first, so he reads the news, sorts his inbox and deals with minor tasks. The day passes and the report is still not started. Blaming himself for laziness may not help. Instead he can change the goal: tomorrow, after starting work, spend twenty minutes on the report first. Not finish it, just start. If he manages that for seven days, twenty minutes may become a steady working habit. Franklin stressed resolution and industry; today we can go further and adjust our working environment, reducing distractions so that action comes more easily.

Spending: A Test of Frugality and Vanity

Some people earn decent money and still save nothing. They are not wildly extravagant every day; it is that when they see others buying new gadgets, changing cars or going on holiday, they feel they ought to have the same. What drives spending is sometimes not need but comparison.

Franklin told a little story about this. In the early years of his marriage the household lived plainly. For a long time his breakfast was bread and milk, eaten out of a twopenny earthen porringer with a pewter spoon. Then one morning he found his breakfast in a china bowl, with a silver spoon beside it. His wife had bought them without telling him, for what was then a considerable sum. Her only excuse was that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbours. That, Franklin wrote, was how luxury first entered the family, in spite of principle; as their fortunes improved, their plate and china grew to the value of several hundred pounds.

He told the story without reproaching his wife; there is even tenderness in it. But it shows how often our spending is driven by the thought that if others have something, we should too. Franklin's rule for frugality was simple: waste nothing, and let every expense do some real good. Before buying something non-essential, we might ask three questions. Do I really need it? Would I still want it if nobody knew I had bought it? Could this money be used for something more important? This is not a call to live austerely. It is a way of not letting other people's opinions decide what we spend.

Emotions: A Test of Tranquillity and Moderation

A mistake at work, a sharp remark from a family member, plans upset by something unexpected: any of these can make us irritable. Often the event itself is minor. What really drains us is the complaining, arguing and worrying that follow. Franklin's Tranquillity reminds us not to be disturbed by trifles or by accidents common or unavoidable. But tranquillity does not mean tolerating injustice or suppressing every feeling. Someone treated unfairly can state their case firmly and defend their rights while trying not to let anger govern their judgement. We cannot choose everything that happens to us, but we can gradually learn how to respond.

 

6. Daily Self-Examination in China and Franklin's Thirteen Virtues

Franklin lived in eighteenth-century America, yet his thinking about self-cultivation invites comparison with ancient Chinese thought.

In the Analects, the disciple Zengzi says: "Each day I examine myself on three counts. In acting on behalf of others, have I been less than wholehearted? In dealing with friends, have I failed to keep my word? Have I failed to practise what has been passed on to me?" All three are concrete. Zengzi did not vaguely ask whether he was a good person; he grounded self-cultivation in responsibility, trustworthiness and learning.

Franklin did something similar. Each morning he asked himself, "What good shall I do this day?" and each evening, "What good have I done today?" Both men believed that character is not established by a single vow but by daily checking and practice. Their emphases differ, though. Zengzi's reflection is tied more directly to our moral duties towards others; Franklin organised personal habits, work and conduct into a list of thirteen and managed them with a chart. The first stresses self-examination within relationships; the second adds a concrete recording tool. Combine the two and we can ask both whether we have met our responsibilities and whether our actual behaviour is improving.

Chinese history even offers a method strikingly like Franklin's. According to accounts handed down from the Song dynasty onwards, an official named Zhao Gai kept two jars on his desk, one for black beans and one for white. For each good thought or deed he dropped in a white bean; for each bad thought or wrong deed, a black one. At first there were more black beans than white; over time the white came to outnumber the black. The "ledger of merits and demerits" recorded by Yuan Liaofan in the Ming dynasty likewise involved noting one's good deeds and faults every day and tallying them up.

In form these practices are remarkably close to Franklin's black spots: both turn invisible virtue into visible marks. The difference is that the merit ledgers often carried a religious belief in karmic reward, whereas Franklin's book was more like a self-management work log.

The Ming philosopher Wang Yangming's teaching of "the unity of knowledge and action" offers another angle. If someone knows they should be sincere yet still deliberately deceives others, they cannot be said to have truly made sincerity their own. If someone knows they should honour their parents yet ignores their needs for years, understanding filial duty does not mean they practise it. Franklin's method likewise shifts attention from "what I know" to "what I have done". The two should not simply be equated, however. Wang Yangming's idea belongs to a complete philosophy of mind and is not merely habit training in the modern sense.

Different civilisations discuss human improvement in different languages. What matters is how we apply that wisdom in our own lives. Chinese tradition explains why we should cultivate ourselves and links it to family and social responsibility; Franklin's thirteen virtues offer a concrete method ordinary people can try. Tradition tells us why; Franklin reminds us that self-cultivation also means actually doing a little every day.

 

7. A Seven-Day Practice: Change Just One Small Thing

Franklin's original method was a long-term plan of thirteen-week courses. The seven-day practice offered here is only a way for beginners to learn how to observe and adjust one behaviour. It is not a full copy of his method.

There are three steps.

Step one: choose just one virtue and turn it into a specific situation. Do not choose too many. For example:

Silence: when someone else is talking, do not interrupt; hear them out, then respond.

Frugality: wait at least one day before buying anything non-essential.

Industry: each day, spend twenty minutes on the most important task before dealing with messages.

Tranquillity: when emotions run high, stop arguing and continue only when you can speak calmly.

Order: each day, put your three most-used items back in their fixed places.

Humility: when giving an opinion, use "definitely" and "absolutely" less, and "my view at the moment is" more.

Step two: each evening spend five minutes answering four questions. Did I meet a situation today that called for this virtue? What did I do? If it went badly, what was the main difficulty? What one small thing can I change tomorrow?

Step three: on the seventh day, review the week and write down just one adjustment. If you keep forgetting, add a reminder. If the goal is too big, make it smaller. If the method does not fit your work or family life, change the method rather than blaming yourself.

Self-improvement should not become another exhausting job. It should reduce the chaos in our lives, not add new burdens. Appendix 1 contains a seven-day record sheet you can photocopy or draw in a notebook.

 

8. Don't Aim for a Life without Black Spots

Franklin set himself the goal of moral perfection and finally admitted he had not reached it. If success meant practising all thirteen virtues perfectly, his plan failed. But he did not see it that way; he believed the effort itself had made him better.

So the thirteen virtues should never become a yardstick for judging whether others are noble, still less a stick for beating ourselves. They are first of all a mirror, in which we can see our habits, desires and weaknesses, and also our progress, little by little.

There is no need to wait for New Year, or for a free moment, or for some great setback. Real self-cultivation is not suddenly becoming perfect one day. It is trying, on each ordinary day, to bring our conduct a little closer to the principles we believe in.

 

 

Chapter 2: Without Higher Education, How Can We Keep Learning for Life?

 

1. An Apprentice with Two Years of School

Franklin left school at about ten to help in his father's chandlery, and at twelve became an apprentice in his brother James's printing house. There were many children at home and his father could not afford more schooling. By the standards of the time he had almost no proper education.

Years later Harvard and Yale gave him honorary degrees, the Royal Society elected him a Fellow, and European scholars called him "Dr Franklin". The contrast can create an illusion: that he must have been a born genius, or had some secret shortcut.

He did not. In the Autobiography he makes it clear that his ways of reading and studying were mostly worked out by himself, and mostly laborious.

He loved reading from his earliest memory, he said, and every bit of money that came into his hands went on books. One of his first was John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress; when he had finished it he sold it to buy a set of cheap little history books. His father's shelves held mostly works of theological dispute, and he read those too. Later he regretted that, at the age when he most thirsted for knowledge, more suitable books had not come his way. But his father did own Plutarch's Lives, which the boy read avidly and considered time very well spent.

 

2. Borrowed Books Had to Go Back Before Dawn

For an apprentice, buying books was a luxury. Franklin found several ways round the problem.

The first was borrowing. He made friends with some booksellers' apprentices, who occasionally lent him books. These were stock for sale and had to be returned promptly and in perfect condition. So he would often borrow a book in the evening, read in his room late into the night, and return it early the next morning before it was missed. More than once, he said, he sat up most of the night to finish a book.

Later a merchant named Matthew Adams noticed the boy who frequented the printing house. Adams had a good collection of books and invited Franklin to see them, lending him whatever he wished to read. The kindness of an adult stranger opened a door for a poor boy's reading.

The second way was saving. At about sixteen Franklin came across a book recommending a vegetable diet and decided to try it. This caused some inconvenience, because his brother boarded the apprentices. So Franklin proposed that James give him half what he paid for his board each week, and he would feed himself. James agreed at once.

Franklin soon found he could save half of that again. He learned a few simple vegetarian dishes, such as boiled potatoes and rice and hasty pudding. When the others went out to eat, he stayed behind in the printing house and made a meal of a biscuit or a slice of bread, a handful of raisins or a tart from the pastry cook's, and a glass of water. The money he saved went on books.

He found an extra advantage, too. While the others were at their meal the printing house was quiet, the ideal time to read. Eating lightly also kept his head clear, and he made faster progress.

The third way was squeezing out time. An apprentice's hours were long, so his reading time came mostly from late nights, early mornings and Sundays. Custom required him to attend church on Sundays. Franklin admitted that he often found reasons to stay behind alone in the printing house to read instead, and that his father would certainly not have approved.

None of these methods is new: find people who will lend you books, economise elsewhere, and piece together spare moments. Yet these humble methods allowed a boy with no chance of schooling to read many books his contemporaries never opened.

Did You Know?

Franklin later went back to eating meat, and he told the story of why. In 1723, sailing from Boston to New York, his ship was becalmed off Block Island and the crew caught a great many cod. He had considered eating fish a kind of unprovoked murder. But when the fish came hot out of the frying pan, it smelled admirably well. He hesitated, then remembered that when the fish were opened he had seen smaller fish in their stomachs. "Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So he dined heartily on cod. He finished the tale with a wry observation: "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

 

3. Rewriting Other People's Essays

Franklin's effort to learn to write began with an argument.

As a boy he had a bookish friend named John Collins. The two loved to dispute, and once argued over whether women should be educated and whether they were capable of learning. Collins thought them naturally unsuited; Franklin took the opposite side, partly, he confessed, for the sake of argument. They parted without settling it and agreed to continue by letter.

His father happened to read the letters. Without taking sides on the question, he pointed out a problem. Thanks to his work in the printing house, Benjamin had the advantage in spelling and punctuation, but he fell far short of his opponent in elegance of expression, method and clarity. His father gave several examples.

Franklin saw that he was right, and resolved to improve his writing.

Around then he came upon an odd volume of the Spectator, the English periodical edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and famed for its clear and graceful prose. He thought the writing excellent and wished to imitate it.

His method was not complicated. He took a few essays and made brief notes of the sense of each sentence. A few days later, without looking at the original, he tried to rewrite the essays from his notes in whatever suitable words occurred to him. Then he compared his version with the original, found where he fell short, and corrected it.

His main problem, he found, was a lack of vocabulary: he could not readily find the right word. He reasoned that if he had kept on writing verse, the need for words of the same meaning but different length or sound would have forced him to collect a large stock. So he turned some of the essays into verse, and after a while, when he had largely forgotten the prose, turned them back.

He also found his writing lacked method. So he jumbled his notes into confusion and, a few weeks later, tried to arrange them in the best order before writing out the full essay. This taught him to organise his thoughts.

He kept up this cycle of reading, noting, rewriting, comparing and correcting for a long time. Sometimes, he said, he fancied that in certain small particulars he had improved on the original, which encouraged him to think he might one day become a tolerable English writer.

The point was not to prove how clever he was, but to turn "I have read it" into "I can write it".

Writers today can still use almost exactly the same method. Some modern writing courses include exercises in imitation or "back-translation" that work on the same principle as Franklin's practice three centuries ago: by actively producing something, you expose the specific gap between yourself and good work, and then you set about closing it.

 

4. The Boy Who Failed Arithmetic Became a Scientist

As the Preface mentioned, Franklin failed arithmetic as a child. He never hid it.

At about sixteen, ashamed of his ignorance of figures, he found a popular arithmetic textbook and worked through it by himself, with great ease, he said. He then read some books on navigation and picked up a little geometry, though he admitted he never went very far in that science.

There is something worth noticing here. At ten he failed the subject; at sixteen he taught it to himself. What changed? One likely answer is that at sixteen he knew why he needed arithmetic. The printing business ran on calculation, and so did his growing interest in natural science. The motive changed, and so did the result.

Many adults rate their own ability to learn very low because they treat a childhood failure in one subject as a lifelong verdict. Franklin's story reminds us that something we could not learn at one age may be learnable at another, with a different motive and a different method.

 

5. Learning Italian with a Chessboard

Franklin's way of learning languages is even more entertaining.

Around 1733, aged about twenty-seven, he began teaching himself French and was soon able to read French books. Then he started on Italian.

A friend of his was also learning Italian, and the two often played chess together. Franklin found that chess was eating up too much of the time he should have spent studying. So he proposed a condition: from now on, the winner of each game had the right to set the loser a task in Italian, such as learning part of the grammar by heart or doing some translation, which the loser had to complete before they next met.

They were evenly matched, so each won and lost in turn. Chess, which had been stealing their study time, became a way of keeping each other at it. That, said Franklin, was how both of them "beat one another into that language". Later he also learned to read Spanish without much trouble.

More interesting still, after learning these modern languages Franklin picked up Latin again, which he had studied for only a year at grammar school, and found it much easier than expected. This led him to a conclusion that ran against the educational wisdom of his day. Schools usually taught Latin first, on the grounds that the modern languages derived from it would then be easier. Franklin thought it might be more sensible the other way round: start with French and Italian, practical and easier to pick up, and then go on to Latin. Even pupils who gave up Latin would by then have gained one or two useful languages. To reach the top of a staircase, he said in effect, it is easier to start at the bottom step than to leap down from the top.

The lesson is not merely that you can learn a language through chess. What Franklin did was take a hobby that competed with study and redesign it as part of study itself. He did not use willpower to suppress his love of chess; he added a rule to it.

 

6. Friday Nights at the "Leather Apron Club"

All of the above is learning alone. Franklin's most creative way of learning was learning with others.

In the autumn of 1727, aged twenty-one, he gathered several young friends who loved reading and discussion into a club for mutual improvement called the Junto. Some jokingly called it the "Leather Apron Club", since most members were tradesmen who wore leather aprons at work.

The first members included printers, a scrivener, a shoemaker, a joiner, a surveyor, and a self-taught glazier named Thomas Godfrey, who later invented an instrument for measuring angles at sea. Like Franklin, most had not been to college and were of modest means, but all were hungry for knowledge.

The Junto met every Friday evening. Each member in turn was to propose one or more questions on morals, politics or natural philosophy for the group to discuss, and once every three months each had to write and read aloud an essay on a subject of his choice.

Franklin drew up a list of standing questions to be gone through at each meeting. Among them were these:

Have you met with anything in the author you last read that is remarkable or suitable to be communicated to the Junto?

Have you lately heard of any citizen's thriving well, and by what means?

Do you know of a fellow citizen who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? Or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against?

Is there any man whose acquaintance we want, and which the Junto, or any of them, can procure for us?

In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, be serviceable to mankind, to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?

Most interesting were the rules of debate. To avoid quarrels, discussion was to be conducted in a sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory. All expressions of positiveness in opinion and all direct contradiction were prohibited, under small fines.

In the Autobiography Franklin says that his friendship with William Coleman, a member, lasted more than forty years, and "the club continued almost as long". The Junto was more than a reading group. The library described below grew directly out of the Junto's needs, and some of Franklin's later public proposals, such as organising a fire company, were also first discussed there. The hospital, the academy and other later ventures, however, depended on much wider support in the city, and should not all be credited to this little club.

 

7. Fifty People Club Together to Build a Library

Soon after the Junto began, it hit a practical problem. Members often needed to consult books, but each owned very few, and Philadelphia at the time had hardly a decent bookshop.

Franklin first suggested that they all bring their books to the room where they met, so that everyone could use them. The arrangement was tried for a year with poor results. There were too few books, they were hard to look after, some owners felt their books were being damaged, and in the end everyone took their books home again.

Franklin did not give up. In 1731 he proposed something bolder: a subscription library. Each member would pay forty shillings up front to buy books from London, and ten shillings a year thereafter for new ones.

In a city that was not yet wealthy, where many people did not much value reading, finding subscribers was hard work. With great effort he found fifty, mostly young tradesmen. From this he drew a lesson. When promoting such public schemes, he found that presenting himself as the proposer of a useful project tended to provoke resentment, as if he were trying to raise his own reputation. So he changed his approach and said that the plan came from "a number of friends", who had asked him to put it to lovers of reading. After that, things went smoothly. He said he always used this method afterwards on similar occasions, and recommended it: "The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid. If it remains a while uncertain to whom the merit belongs, some one more vain than yourself will be encouraged to claim it, and then even envy will be disposed to do you justice."

The Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731, is regarded as one of the earliest subscription libraries in North America. It still exists, and holds a great collection of rare early American material.

Franklin said the library afforded him "the means of improvement by constant study". He set aside an hour or two each day to read there, and so in some degree made up for the learned education his father had once intended for him. He also observed that as such libraries spread across the colonies, they made ordinary tradesmen and farmers as intelligent in conversation as most gentlemen in other countries.

 

8. A Widow's Account Books

There is another story about learning in the Autobiography that is easily overlooked.

As his printing business grew, Franklin began setting up partnership printing houses in other towns, in a way that resembles modern franchising. He would supply a press, type and some capital, and send a reliable skilled worker to run the business, with profits shared on agreed terms. In 1731 he sent a journeyman named Lewis Timothy to Charleston, South Carolina.

Timothy was well educated and honest, but he knew nothing of accounts. The accounts he sent back were often unintelligible to Franklin, and little money came with them. A few years later Timothy died, and the business passed to his widow, Elizabeth.

To Franklin's surprise, she not only carried on the printing house but kept the books with perfect clarity, sending him every quarter a regular, exact account and the money due. She had been born and raised in Holland, where, Franklin said, the knowledge of accounts formed part of female education. She managed the business so well that she was later able to buy out Franklin's share and hand the printing house to her grown son.

Franklin told the story to make a point that was quite advanced for his time: young women should be taught accounts and business, which he thought likely to be of more use to them and their children than music or dancing. Then, if widowed, they could protect themselves from being cheated by crafty men, and perhaps continue a profitable business until a son was grown up to take it on.

Remember the boyhood argument with Collins over whether women should be educated? Decades later, Franklin gave his answer with a true business story.

 

9. From Knowing to Doing

Franklin later became a printer, writer, scientist and diplomat, a range that looks remarkably "cross-disciplinary". But look closely at how he learned and a clear thread appears. He rarely stopped at "I have read it" or "I know it". He quickly put what he learned to use: in essays, in print, in experiments, in Junto discussions or in practical affairs. He read not to hoard knowledge but to turn it into action that could be tested.

The method has power, and it has limits. It depends on a willingness to keep doing unglamorous exercises, like rewriting other people's essays, and on having some time and the right surroundings. If your work is crushing, or you have no chance to produce anything, self-teaching alone is hard to sustain. Franklin did not learn in a vacuum either. He had practical work in the printing house, a newspaper to publish in, an older man like Matthew Adams who lent him books, his Junto companions, and later many more places to test his ideas.

Did You Know?

A popular saying attributed to Franklin goes: "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." Yet researchers have not found it anywhere in Franklin's writings or letters. It is more likely a modern rewording of much older ideas. Interestingly, the Chinese philosopher Xunzi, of the third century BC, wrote something similar: "Not having heard is not as good as having heard; having heard is not as good as having seen; having seen is not as good as understanding; understanding is not as good as putting into practice. Learning reaches its goal only in practice." Franklin never said the popular line, but his life is a fine example of Xunzi's point. Appendix 3 looks at several other "Franklin quotations" that he probably never said.

 

10. Why Do People Learn So Much and Change So Little?

Our learning conditions are far better than his, and far more complicated. There are endless online courses, videos and articles; almost any knowledge can be found. Yet many people finish a course and are no different.

The reason is often not that they have not learned enough, but that they lack the step that turns input into output. They read an article on writing and never write a paragraph; watch a video on time management and do not change tomorrow's schedule; save ten learning resources and never use a single one to solve a real problem in front of them.

People Like Us

Jack Chen is forty-eight and has worked as a food-delivery rider for six years. He has always wanted to learn a trade and move into work that is less physically punishing. His phone holds dozens of saved videos with titles like "Electrical Work from Zero" and "Learn Appliance Repair in Three Months". He watches a few when he has time and forgets them straight away; after a year he had never even touched a multimeter. Then, in his apartment complex, he met a retired electrician who gave him one piece of advice: stop watching new videos. Pick the simplest job, say replacing a socket, follow one video and do it, and if you get it wrong, come and ask me. Jack bought a few old sockets and a length of cable at a second-hand market for next to nothing and practised the wiring over and over on his kitchen table. A month later, for the first time, he replaced a broken switch for a neighbour. He said that moment felt more solid than watching a hundred videos. In this story the old electrician plays the part of Matthew Adams and the Junto: someone you can ask, and someone who can check your work.

Chinese thought about learning places a similar emphasis. The opening line of the Analects says, "To learn and to practise it at due times." The character for "practise" originally pictured a young bird repeatedly trying its wings: not rereading, but practising and applying what one has learned. The idea of "investigating things to extend knowledge" means gaining understanding through contact with concrete things, not stopping at abstract principle. And Confucius's remark that "when three people walk together, one of them can be my teacher" reminds us that learning from those around us matters as much as learning from books.

All of this shares Franklin's refusal to stop at merely knowing. The difference is that traditional self-cultivation tended to link learning with moral perfection, while Franklin more directly treated learning as a set of skills to be drilled. Writing, languages, experiments, business and negotiation could all be honed in similar ways.

 

11. Choose Something You Can Test Again and Again

For readers today, what matters is not the ambition to be self-taught like Franklin, but to find one thing you want to do well and practise it in a way you can check, again and again.

His story suggests several concrete methods:

To learn to write, use his "rewriting method": pick a short piece you admire, note the main point of each paragraph, rewrite it two or three days later without looking, then compare and correct.

To learn a language or any skill, use his "chess method": find a partner and set each other a small rule, so that something that distracts you becomes a way of keeping each other going.

To keep learning over time, borrow the idea of the Junto: find three to five like-minded people, meet regularly, and have each bring a question or something new they have learned.

If you think you "just can't learn" something, remember his arithmetic: what he could not learn at ten, he taught himself at sixteen. A different motive and method may give a different result.

What matters is not how much you have learned but whether you have taken it out and tried it once, and seen the result.

Franklin had no degree, but he had the habit of constantly putting what he learned to use. Today a degree is no longer the only gateway, yet "learning and then stopping" is still the most common waste of all. If, after this chapter, you can choose one specific thing and practise it for a while in a way you can compare and adjust, you will have done more than simply agree that lifelong learning matters.

 

Chapter 3: Facing Our Faults: Why Is Change So Hard?

 

1. The "Errata" of a Life

Printers know one word very well: errata.

In the days of hand-set type, a printed book almost inevitably contained wrong letters, missing words and transposed lines. Rather than pulp the whole run and reprint, the printer would add a page of errata at the back, listing each mistake and how it should be corrected.

Franklin was a printer all his life, and he applied the trade's term to himself. In the Autobiography he calls the serious mistakes of his youth the "errata" of his life. He would have no objection, he said, to living the same life over again from the beginning, "only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults of the first".

Even without the chance to correct it, he said, he would accept the offer. And since life cannot be lived again, the next best thing was to recall it, write it down, and make that recollection as durable as possible.

It is a striking way of seeing things. It admits that mistakes exist but treats them not as permanent stains, rather as entries to be corrected: what went wrong, where, and how it was later put right.

So what was on Franklin's list of errata?

 

2. Money That Should Not Have Been Touched

The first erratum concerned money.

In 1724, aged eighteen, Franklin paid a visit to Boston. On his way back to Philadelphia, a friend of his father's, a Mr Vernon, asked him to collect a debt of about thirty-five pounds on his behalf and keep it until Vernon sent for it. It was a considerable sum.

On the journey Franklin met up in New York with his friend John Collins, the same friend with whom he had once argued by letter about women's education. Collins had been a clever, studious young man, better at mathematics than Franklin. But after Franklin left Boston, Collins had taken to drink and gambling. He arrived in New York penniless and in debt to his inn, and Franklin paid his lodging and travel. When his own money ran short, Franklin dipped into the sum he had collected for Mr Vernon.

Collins followed him to Philadelphia, never found work, and kept borrowing money he never repaid. Once, out boating on the Delaware with Franklin and some friends, Collins refused to take his turn at the oars and said the others could row him home. Franklin refused. Collins flew into a rage and came at him. As he lunged, Franklin caught him by the crotch and threw him headlong into the river. Collins was a good swimmer, so Franklin was not worried for his safety. Whenever he swam near the boat they pulled a few strokes away and asked if he would now row. Only when he was nearly exhausted did they haul him aboard. After that the two hardly spoke again. Collins later went to the West Indies and was never heard of afterwards.

But Franklin could not repay the money. This, he said, was one of the first great errata of his life. He lived in fear that Mr Vernon would suddenly write asking for it, and the thought troubled him whenever it came to mind. Only some years later, once his circumstances had improved, did he repay it with interest. Mr Vernon, he said, had been very kind and never pressed him.

 

3. A Forgotten Promise

The second erratum concerned love.

As the Preface told, on Franklin's first day in Philadelphia a young woman named Deborah Read saw him walk past her door with bread under his arms. Later Franklin happened to lodge with the Read family, and the two grew fond of each other. Before he left for London they had exchanged promises.

But once in London, stranded and dazzled by the novelty of city life, he soon put that promise out of his mind. He confessed in the Autobiography that while in London he wrote to Deborah only once, and in that letter said he was not likely soon to return.

Deborah's mother concluded that the young man was not to be relied on and persuaded her daughter to marry a potter named John Rogers. The marriage was miserable. Rogers was reported to have another wife in England; he ran up heavy debts and fled to the West Indies, where he vanished. Deborah was left in a painful position: she could not prove her husband was dead, and so by law she could not remarry.

When Franklin returned and saw her situation, he blamed himself. Her unhappiness, he felt, was largely due to his own giddiness and inconstancy in London. In 1730 they were joined in a common-law marriage; because Rogers's fate was unknown, a formal wedding was impossible. Thus, Franklin wrote, he corrected that great erratum as well as he could.

They lived together for more than forty years. Deborah was industrious and capable. She tended the shop, folded and stitched pamphlets, bought old linen rags for the papermakers, and through the long years of his missions to England managed the household and business alone. Franklin once put in his almanac a maxim to the effect: keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards. His own marriage was probably sustained by just such mutual forbearance.

 

4. A Lasting Regret

One erratum in Franklin's life could never be corrected.

In 1732 he and Deborah had a son, Francis, whom the family called "Franky". In 1736 smallpox broke out in Philadelphia. There was already a preventive method called inoculation, or variolation: matter from a mild case of smallpox was introduced into a healthy person, who would usually suffer a milder bout of the disease and thereafter be immune. The method carried real risk and was hotly debated at the time.

Franklin himself supported inoculation, and his newspaper had published articles in its favour. But when it came to his own child he hesitated. Franky was ill at the time and weak, and Franklin feared inoculation would put him in greater danger. He decided to wait.

While he waited, four-year-old Franky caught smallpox and died.

Rumours spread in the city that the child had died of inoculation. Franklin had to publish a notice in his newspaper stating that his son had never been inoculated but had caught smallpox in the common way. He made the matter public, he explained, because he did not want the rumour to deter other parents from inoculating their children.

Many years later he wrote in the Autobiography: "In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and I still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation." He mentioned it, he said, for the sake of parents who omitted the operation, so that they might choose the safer course, since they would never forgive themselves if a child died for want of it.

Franky's gravestone bears the words: "The DELIGHT of all that knew him."

The episode shows us a different Franklin. He believed in science and evidence, yet when the risk fell on his own child he too was afraid, hesitated, and made a decision he regretted deeply. He did not hide from the mistake. He wrote it down in the hope that other parents would not repeat it.

It should be said that eighteenth-century variolation was quite different from modern vaccination, and this book is not discussing any specific medical question. Parents today facing decisions about their children's health should consult a doctor and follow the official guidance of their national health authorities, such as the NHS in the UK. This episode is told here only to show how one man faced a mistake that could not be undone.

 

5. The Roast Pig

Not all of Franklin's stories about faults are sad. Some are laugh-out-loud funny.

When he first arrived in Philadelphia he worked for a printer named Samuel Keimer. Keimer was an eccentric, given to strange religious and philosophical notions and fond of argument. Franklin often trapped him with Socratic questions, until Keimer grew so wary that he would hardly answer the commonest question without first asking, "What do you intend to infer from that?"

Keimer was also a great glutton. Franklin, still a vegetarian, thought it would be a good joke to persuade him to give up meat, claiming it was good for his health. Remarkably, Keimer agreed, on condition that Franklin kept him company.

Franklin arranged with a neighbour woman to cook for them in turn from a list of forty meatless dishes he gave her. After three months Franklin was getting on fine, but Keimer was suffering grievously. At last he could bear it no longer. He ordered a roast pig and invited Franklin and two women friends to dine. The pig came to the table before the guests arrived, and Keimer, unable to resist, ate the whole thing himself.

Keimer is ridiculous in this story, but which of us has not had a similar moment? We swear off something, grit our teeth for a while, then make up for it all at once.

The tale illustrates a simple truth: changing a habit by repression alone rarely lasts. Keimer had not chosen vegetarianism for himself; he was talked into it and was following someone else. He neither truly understood nor believed in it; he simply endured. When endurance reached its limit, there was the roast pig.

 

6. Pride: The Craftiest Fault

We saw in Chapter 1 that Franklin considered pride the hardest fault to conquer, and that even if he thought he had overcome it completely, he would probably be proud of his humility.

This was not empty self-deprecation. It was an honest observation: as he worked at humility, the black spots did not vanish; they simply took another shape. He did not abandon the plan, nor pretend he had reformed. He noted what he found and kept watching.

Remarkably, this self-doubt lasted into old age.

In 1787, at eighty-one, Franklin attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as a delegate for Pennsylvania. The convention ran for nearly four months, and the delegates argued incessantly. By 17 September the draft Constitution was finally complete and ready to be signed. But some delegates were still dissatisfied and reluctant to sign.

Too frail to speak at length, Franklin had a colleague read a speech he had prepared. He began frankly: there were several parts of this Constitution that he did not at present approve, but he was not sure he would never approve them. For having lived long, he had experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects which he had once thought right. "The older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others."

Then he told a little joke. A certain French lady, in a dispute with her sister, said: "I don't know how it happens, Sister, but I meet with nobody but myself, that's always in the right."

There was probably laughter in the room. Franklin's point was that everyone tends to believe they are always right, and that is exactly what needs watching. He asked the remaining objectors to doubt their own infallibility a little, as he did, and sign for the sake of unanimity.

An eighty-one-year-old man, famous throughout the world, admitting publicly at one of the most important political moments of his life that he might be wrong: that perhaps says more than his little book of black spots about how he watched the fault of pride all his life.

 

7. Two Common Reactions: Giving Up or Beating Ourselves Up

Many people are not completely blind to their faults. But once they see them, they react in one of two ways. Either they think "That's just how I am, I can't change", or they think "I must fix this immediately, or I've failed". Both stop change in its tracks. The first leads to giving up; the second leads to a brief burst of effort, then more self-blame when it does not work, and then giving up anyway.

The first reaction is the man in Chapter 1 who preferred his speckled axe. The second is rather like Keimer's vegetarianism: hold on for a while, then collapse.

Franklin's record-keeping offers a different path. He marked his faults with black spots each day but did not demand that he wipe them all out in a single week. The spots were information. They told him this virtue needed more practice; they did not prove he was a bad person. He accepted that he could not be perfect, and he never stopped watching for the faults he could reduce.

His errata metaphor reflects the same attitude. A book with errata is not worthless; a person who has made mistakes is not good for nothing. What matters is whether we can see our mistakes clearly, one by one, and correct them as far as possible.

 

8. Change Is Not Just a Matter of Willpower

Change is hard not only because of "defensiveness" or "perfectionism". Environment, the momentum of habit and real-life circumstances matter just as much.

In a quiet room, order is easy. But when work is disrupted, a family member needs care, or a phone keeps buzzing, the best arrangements collapse. Franklin admitted that order was especially hard for him. It was not that he did not know where things belonged, but that customers came to the shop whenever they pleased and real life kept breaking into his plans. Blaming ourselves for "lack of willpower" in such cases rarely helps. It is more useful to see which interruptions can be reduced in advance and which, for now, cannot be avoided.

There is a subtler obstacle too, revealed by the cod story in Chapter 2: we are very good at finding reasons for doing what we want. As Franklin said, being a reasonable creature is so convenient, since it lets us find or make a reason for anything we have a mind to do.

"I'm too tired today, I'll start tomorrow." "Just this once won't hurt." "Everyone does it, so I'm not so bad." These sound reasonable, and sometimes they are. But when the same reason keeps coming back, it is worth asking: is this a real difficulty, or an escape route I have left myself?

People Like Us

Howard Wang is twenty-seven, an engineer at a manufacturing firm. He is technically excellent, but colleagues say he is "too blunt". In meetings, the moment someone's proposal has a flaw, he is first to point it out, often adding, "Surely everyone knows that?" He knows this is a problem and has resolved several times to change, but whenever he gets impatient in a meeting the words just come out. So he tried Franklin's approach and practised just one thing: before voicing an objection in a meeting, he would first say, "I may not have fully understood, but I'd like to check something…" In the first week his notebook recorded five times he "couldn't hold back". He noticed that four of the five happened in meetings after four in the afternoon, when he had been working for hours and was tired and irritable. So he made two adjustments: he tried to schedule important discussions in the morning, and before afternoon meetings he drank some water and took a short walk. A month later the number of slips had fallen to one or two a week. His temper, he said, hadn't changed. What had changed was that he now knew when he was most likely to slip.

These are not cases of simply not knowing. They are cases of knowing and still being carried along by our state of mind, our surroundings and old habits.

 

9. How Ancient Chinese Thinkers Viewed "Faults"

Chinese tradition has many incisive sayings about how to treat our own faults.

The Analects says: "To err and not correct it: that is truly to err." Confucius praised his disciple Yan Hui for "never making the same mistake twice". And Zigong said: "The faults of a gentleman are like eclipses of the sun and moon. When he errs, everyone sees it; when he corrects it, everyone looks up to him."

"To know shame is close to courage" holds that recognising our shortcomings is where change begins. "Seek the cause in oneself" reminds us to look first at ourselves when things go wrong.

These ideas share Franklin's refusal to blame everything on outside circumstances, and his belief that correcting a fault matters more than never committing one. His errata metaphor and Zigong's eclipse metaphor are remarkably alike: the mistake is public and visible, and so is the correction.

The difference is that traditional self-cultivation often linked "knowing shame" with moral demands, and in practice could lead to fierce self-reproach on seeing one's faults. Franklin's black spots are closer to an observational tool: they record what happened, but do not automatically mean "you are a bad person". Modern psychology discusses "self-compassion": the idea that seeing our problems clearly without condemning ourselves entirely may make us more likely to keep acting. Research in this area is still developing and its findings are not entirely consistent, but it does offer a useful comparison with Franklin's attitude.

 

10. Write Yourself a Page of Errata

For readers today, what helps is not resolving to "know myself completely", but choosing one specific, recurring behaviour and looking at it without attacking yourself.

Try writing yourself a simple page of errata, as Franklin might. You do not need to list every mistake of your life, just one thing that has come up repeatedly recently and that you would like to change. Use the printer's format:

The text (what actually happened): for example, "This week I impatiently interrupted my family three times."

The error (when it happened): for example, "Each time I'd just got home from work and was exhausted."

The correction (what to do next time): for example, "When I get home, change and wash my face, rest for ten minutes, then start talking."

When you have written it, do not score or punish yourself. A week later, look at your errata again and see whether the correction worked. If it did not, revise it once more.

At twenty-two, Franklin wrote himself a humorous epitaph:

"The Body of B. Franklin, Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ'd, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and amended By the Author."

The epitaph was never carved on his gravestone, but it circulated widely in his lifetime. At twenty-two he was already imagining his life as a book in need of constant revision. That may be the healthiest attitude to our faults: admit that the first edition has errors, and trust that revision is possible.

 

Chapter 4: From Apprentice to Independence: What Is Wealth For?

 

1. A Whistle That Cost Too Much

At seventy-three, living in Paris, Franklin wrote a short piece for a French friend called "The Whistle". It recalled something that happened when he was seven.

It was a holiday, and relatives had filled his pocket with coppers. Young Benjamin ran off to a shop that sold toys for children. On the way he met another boy blowing a whistle and was charmed by the sound. On the spot he offered all his money for it.

At home he went whistling all over the house, much pleased with his whistle but disturbing the whole family. When his brothers, sisters and cousins heard what he had paid, they told him he had given four times what it was worth, and reminded him of all the good things he could have bought with the rest. They laughed at him so much that he cried with vexation. The reflection, he said, gave him more chagrin than the whistle gave him pleasure.

The incident, he wrote, was of use to him afterwards. Whenever he was tempted to buy something unnecessary, he said to himself, "Don't give too much for the whistle," and saved his money.

As he grew up, he went on, he saw a great many people who "gave too much for the whistle". There was the man who sacrificed his time, liberty, virtue and perhaps his friends to win favour at court; the man who neglected his own affairs for political bustle in pursuit of popularity; the miser who gave up every comfort of life, every pleasure of doing good and the esteem of his fellows for the sake of accumulating wealth; and the man who ran into debt for fine clothes, fine furniture and a fine carriage and ended his career in prison. A great part of the miseries of mankind, he concluded, are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their "giving too much for their whistles".

The essay is a good doorway into Franklin's view of wealth. He never thought money unimportant. But all his life he kept asking: is the price I am paying for this worth it?

 

2. The "Water-American"

As we saw, at eighteen Franklin was lured to London by Governor Keith's empty promises and left without a penny. To survive, he took a job at a large London printing house.

There he earned a nickname: the "Water-American".

London pressmen at the time drank a great deal of beer, believing that strong beer gave them strength for heavy work. One of Franklin's fellow workers drank a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o'clock, and another when he had finished his day's work. The beer cost him four or five shillings a week.

Franklin drank only water. He tried to convince his workmate that the strength in beer came only from the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a penny loaf than in a quart of beer; and therefore that a penny loaf eaten with a pint of water would give more strength than a quart of beer. The man was not persuaded and went on drinking. Every Saturday night, Franklin observed, he had a large sum to pay out of his wages for his beer, and so these poor devils kept themselves always under.

At first the workmen mocked the young man who drank water. But they soon found that the "Water-American" was stronger than those who drank strong beer. Formes of type had to be carried up and down stairs. The others carried one form at a time with both hands; Franklin carried one in each hand, two at a time.

At the second London printing house where he worked, something else happened. By custom, a newcomer paid five shillings as a "welcome" for drink. Franklin had paid it once below, in the pressroom. When he moved upstairs to the composing room, the compositors demanded another five shillings. He thought it an imposition and refused.

Over the next two or three weeks his work kept going wrong. His type was mixed up, his pages transposed, his matter broken. The workmen said it was the work of the "chapel ghost", which haunted anyone not regularly admitted. Franklin realised that, although his master supported him, it was unwise to stay on bad terms with the people he worked beside every day. He paid.

After that, he recalled, he was on excellent terms with them and soon had considerable influence. He persuaded several to give up their muddling breakfast of beer, bread and cheese and instead have a cheap, filling breakfast of hot water-gruel, sprinkled with pepper, crumbled with bread and a bit of butter in it, which cost less than a pint of beer. Workmen who had always run up credit at the alehouse now found that breakfasting with him was cheaper and kept their heads clearer.

Put the two stories together and something interesting appears. On the question of beer, Franklin held to his choice and in the end influenced others by example. On the question of the welcome money, he gave way. He distinguished clearly between matters of principle that affected his long-term interests and small costs worth paying to fit in.

 

3. A Merchant's Dinner

Late in his London stay, Franklin met someone who changed his fortunes: the Philadelphia merchant Thomas Denham.

They had met on the voyage over. Franklin tells Denham's story in the Autobiography. Years before, Denham had been in business in Bristol, failed, and owed money to many people. He compounded with his creditors, paying only part of what he owed, and went to America. There, by close application, he made a substantial fortune in a few years. Returning to England on the same ship as Franklin, he invited his old creditors to an entertainment.

The creditors came and thanked him for his hospitality, supposing it to be an ordinary dinner. But when the first course was removed, each found under his plate an order on a banker for the full amount of the unpaid remainder, with interest.

By law and agreement, Denham had long since been under no obligation to pay. But he believed that what he owed, he should repay.

The episode made a deep impression on the young Franklin, who still owed Mr Vernon money. Perhaps partly under Denham's influence, he wrote his Plan of Conduct on the voyage home, and its first rule was to be extremely frugal until he had paid all his debts.

Denham thought highly of Franklin. Back in Philadelphia he employed him as a clerk in his store and taught him bookkeeping and business. Franklin said he respected and loved him like a son. Sadly, not long afterwards both fell seriously ill. Franklin recovered; Denham did not. On his deathbed, Denham forgave Franklin the passage money he owed him.

 

4. Wheeling Paper through the Streets

In 1728, aged twenty-two, Franklin went into partnership with a young printer named Hugh Meredith and opened his own printing house. Meredith's father put up most of the money; most of the skill and management came from Franklin.

It was hard going at first. Philadelphia already had two printers, and some people predicted that a third would certainly fail.

Franklin used several methods to build his credit.

The first was sheer hard work. He took on the printing of a history of the Quakers, demanding work at a low price. Each day he set a whole folio sheet before he stopped, often working past eleven at night. One evening, just as he had finished a forme and was about to go home, he accidentally knocked it over and two pages of type fell into pie. He did not go home; he reset them that night.

The neighbours noticed. At a merchants' club in town, someone remarked that the new printing house would not last. But a Dr Baird disagreed: "The industry of that Franklin is superior to any thing I ever saw of the kind; I see him still at work when I come home from club, and he is at work again before his neighbours are out of bed." After that remark went round, people came to them with orders for stationery.

The second was not only to be industrious and frugal, but to be seen to be so.

Franklin is strikingly frank about this in the Autobiography. To secure his credit and character as a tradesman, he took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. He dressed plainly, was never seen at places of idle diversion, and never went fishing or shooting. A book sometimes indeed debauched him from his work, but that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal. And "to show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchas'd at the stores thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow."

A young tradesman thought of as hard-working, honest and willing was one merchants would give credit to and customers would trust with work.

This frankness is interesting. Some might feel that "making sure others see you working hard" smacks of putting on a show. But Franklin did not mean pretence. He genuinely was industrious and frugal; he simply understood that in a small city running on credit and reputation, what others thought of you was itself an important asset.

The third method was solving the partnership problem.

Meredith was a decent man but a poor partner. He knew little of printing and was often drunk. The money his father had promised did not fully materialise, the printing house owed its suppliers, and there was a danger of being sued.

At this point two of Franklin's friends from the Junto, William Coleman and Robert Grace, separately came to him and offered to lend him the money to carry on alone, if he would part from Meredith. Franklin felt he could not propose the separation himself, since the Meredith family had been good to him.

Then Meredith himself came to him. He was not fit for the trade, he said; his father was disappointed and could not pay. He wanted to go back to the country and farm. If Franklin would take over the printing house's debts, return his father's investment, pay his own small personal debts, and give him thirty pounds and a new saddle, he would leave the partnership.

Franklin agreed, borrowed half the sum from each of his two friends, and paid off the debts. From then on the business was his alone.

This episode shows that Franklin's success was not his own doing alone. At the critical moment, Junto friends were willing to trust him and lend him money, and that trust came from his everyday industry and reliability.

 

5. Printing Money

What really put Franklin's business on a firm footing was a pamphlet about paper money.

In 1729 the Pennsylvania Assembly was debating whether to issue more paper currency. Hard coin was scarce in the colony, which constrained trade. Franklin wrote A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, arguing for a moderate increase to stimulate trade and employment.

The pamphlet was popular with ordinary people, and the Assembly voted for the issue. Franklin's friends in the House, who thought he had been of service, gave him the job of printing the money. It was, he said with a smile, a very profitable job and a great help to him, another advantage gained by being able to write.

Printing currency posed a big problem: counterfeiting. Franklin devised an ingenious answer. He printed leaf patterns on the notes, made not from drawings but from casts of real leaves. Every leaf's veins are unique and extraordinarily intricate, making them very hard to copy. This "nature printing" was one of his anti-counterfeiting inventions, and he and his partner later printed large quantities of money for several colonies.

 

6. Poor Richard's Almanack: A Pen Name and a Prank

Of all Franklin's publications, the most popular and most profitable was Poor Richard's Almanack.

In colonial America almost every household owned an almanac. It contained a calendar, weather predictions, tides, sunrise and sunset, holidays, farming advice, useful information, and verses, proverbs and jokes. For many families it was the only book apart from the Bible.

At the end of 1732 Franklin published the first Poor Richard's Almanack. It was signed "Richard Saunders", supposedly a poor stargazer with a shrewish wife, Bridget, who complained that he did nothing but gaze at the stars and so drove him to publish an almanac to bring in money.

To boost sales, Franklin played a bold prank in the very first issue. In the preface, Poor Richard explained that he would have published an almanac long ago but did not want to take business from his good friend Mr Titan Leeds, a real person who published a well-known rival almanac. However, Richard went on, that obstacle would soon be removed, for by his calculations Mr Leeds would die on 17 October 1733, at 3.29 in the afternoon.

Leeds, naturally furious, protested in his own almanac that this was the nonsense of an impostor. In the following year Poor Richard replied with a straight face that Mr Leeds must certainly be dead, since a living Mr Leeds would never use such ill language to an old friend, so someone must be using his name. The joke ran for years. When Leeds really did die in 1738, Poor Richard pretended to thank his "ghost" for finally admitting the prediction.

The prank was not original; it borrowed from a famous hoax by Jonathan Swift. But it won Poor Richard a great many readers. The almanac ran for twenty-five years and, according to Franklin, sold nearly ten thousand copies a year, a remarkable figure in the colonies at the time.

Did You Know?

Many sayings from Poor Richard are still quoted today: "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"; "A penny saved is two pence clear"; "Well done is better than well said"; "Fish and visitors stink in three days". But Franklin himself admitted that most were not his own. He gathered them from the proverbs of many nations and earlier writers and reworked them to be shorter and more memorable. In 1757, on a voyage to England, he collected twenty-five years' worth of almanac sayings on industry and frugality into a single piece, delivered as a speech by an old man called Father Abraham at an auction. Published separately as The Way to Wealth, it was translated into many languages and circulated widely in Europe and America. Its ending is delicious: the crowd heard the old man out, approved the doctrine, and immediately practised the contrary. As soon as the auction opened, everyone bought extravagantly.

 

7. "Retiring" at Forty-Two

After twenty years of business, by his early forties Franklin owned a printing house, a newspaper, an almanac and a bookshop, and had partnership printing houses in several other towns. He also held public posts, including postmaster of Philadelphia.

His wealth came mainly from the printing business itself (the newspaper, the almanac, books, government printing and currency), from his partnership printing houses in other colonies, and later from property and other investments.

His partnership model deserves a closer look. From among the workmen he had trained, he chose able and trustworthy men and sent them to other towns. He paid for the press and type; the partner ran the business, and the profits were divided as agreed, usually over six years. At the end of that time the partner could buy Franklin's share at an agreed price, using his own savings, and become an independent printer.

Most of these partners did well, Franklin said, and at the end of their terms were able to buy him out and prosper. He also drew a lesson: partnerships often end in quarrels because the terms are not clear enough. In his agreements he always set out each party's duties and expectations explicitly, and so there was rarely any dispute. He advised everyone entering a partnership to do the same: however much you trust each other, put the rules in writing, to avoid suspicion and resentment later when memories differ.

In 1748, at forty-two, Franklin made a decision. He handed the daily management of the printing house entirely to his foreman, David Hall, under an eighteen-year partnership. Hall ran everything; Franklin took a share of the profits each year.

So at forty-two Franklin freed himself from daily business and gained a great deal of free time. He hoped, he said, to devote it to philosophical studies and amusements. But he soon found that others would not leave him idle. The government made him a justice of the peace, the city made him an alderman, the citizens elected him to the Assembly. His "retirement" became busier than his working life.

This was not sudden riches, nor a fortune from some patent. His main income came from the printing trade and from the long partnership with Hall. Such arrangements were not unusual at the time, but Franklin used his thoroughly. Instead of ploughing all his profits back into expansion, once he was comfortably off he deliberately stepped back from day-to-day business.

 

8. "He Lived Usefully"

In 1750, aged forty-four, Franklin wrote to his mother: "I would rather have it said, He lived usefully, than, He died rich."

The line is often quoted. But it rests on the fact that he had already secured basic financial security through years of business. Without those years of accumulation, his later "usefulness" would have lacked a practical foundation.

Franklin also wrote a famous short piece, Advice to a Young Tradesman. Its first sentence is: "Remember that time is money." He explained that a man who can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad or sits idle for half the day, should not reckon that the sixpence he spends during his diversion is his only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings more.

"Time is money" is often read today as encouragement to earn as much as possible. Set within Franklin's life, it means almost the opposite: precisely because time is money, once he had enough money he used it to buy back his time.

Franklin's path had several clear features. First, he treated printing early on as a business to be sustained, not a temporary means of survival. Second, he paid attention to real income and cost rather than mere size. Third, he valued credit highly, as Denham's dinner and the wheelbarrow show. Fourth, he was good at working with others and set the terms of cooperation out clearly. Fifth, once the business gave him a steady income, he chose to withdraw from daily affairs and spend his time on what he thought more valuable. He never treated making money as an end in itself.

 

9. Historical Conditions That Cannot Simply Be Copied

His approach depended on its historical setting. Eighteenth-century printing relied on local customers and government orders, and competition was utterly different from today. His government work, such as printing currency, was inseparable from his political connections. His partnerships rested on long trust and personal relationships and cannot simply be equated with modern "passive investment" or dividends. Apply Franklin's methods directly to today's shares, funds or start-up exits and it is easy to go wrong. What he earned was business income and partnership profit, not passive returns from capital markets.

His commercial world also contained things we cannot accept today. His newspaper carried advertisements for the sale of enslaved people, and for a long time he himself owned enslaved people. That is a part of his story of wealth that cannot be avoided.

The discussion of Franklin's views on wealth in this book is not investment or financial advice. Everyone's finances, tolerance of risk and legal environment are different. For specific financial decisions, please consult a qualified professional.

 

10. What Can Money Buy?

When people today talk about financial independence, they often mean "not having to work" or "financial freedom". For Franklin, financial comfort was mainly a way to buy choice over his time: freedom to experiment, to take part in public affairs, and not to accept work he did not want for the sake of immediate income. If someone saves enough money but still spends all their time on things they do not care about, their "independence" exists only on paper.

People Like Us

Rose Zhou is forty. For eight years she and her husband have run a small noodle shop on the edge of town, working from dawn to dusk. Business is good, but she feels tied down: up at five every morning to make dough, closing at ten at night, with only a few days off at Chinese New Year. She had never once been to a parents' evening at her child's school. One day she did the sums and found that the busiest, most profitable hours were just three at lunchtime and three in the early evening. Selling breakfast from seven to ten made very little profit but cost her five extra hours a day. After talking it over with her husband, she stopped serving breakfast and promoted a steady employee of three years to manager, giving her a share of the takings in return for running the evening shift. The shop's income fell slightly, but Rose gained several hours a day. The first time she went to a parents' evening, she said, sitting in that classroom she suddenly felt that all the money she had earned over the years had finally bought her something she truly wanted. What Rose did is rather like Franklin's partnership with David Hall: find someone reliable, hand over the daily running, and trade part of the income for time.

Chinese tradition has the saying "A gentleman loves wealth, but acquires it in the right way." The Great Learning goes further: "There is a great way to produce wealth. Let the producers be many and the consumers few; let work be done quickly and spending be slow; then wealth will always be sufficient." It could almost be an ancient Chinese edition of The Way to Wealth.

These sayings share Franklin's rejection of gaining wealth by any means, and his refusal to treat poverty itself as a virtue. The difference is that the traditional formulations focus more on moral restraint, while Franklin talks more directly about what money can buy: time, choice, and the freedom to use both for what we think worthwhile. He did not set "being rich" against "being useful"; he treated the first as one of the conditions for the second.

For readers today, what helps is not calculating how far you are from "financial freedom", but looking clearly at whether your present income and spending support the life you want, or keep locking your time into things you do not really care about.

Try applying Franklin's whistle test to your last few large expenses, or to the things that take up most of your time: am I giving too much for this whistle?

 

Chapter 5: Curiosity and Experiment: How Can We Become More Inventive?

 

1. A Boy Who Wanted to Swim Faster

Franklin's first "invention" came when he was about eleven.

Growing up by the sea in Boston, he loved swimming and was very good at it. One day he thought: fish swim fast because they have fins. If a person's hands were larger, could he pull through the water faster?

So he made two oval pallets of thin wood, about ten inches long and six wide, with a hole for the thumb, rather like the hand paddles swimmers use today. Wearing them, he did swim faster, but his wrists soon tired. He also tried fixing something similar to the soles of his feet, like modern flippers, but was not satisfied, because in kicking, the push comes partly from the inner sides of the feet and ankles, not only from the soles.

His experiments were not over. Another time he was flying a kite beside a pond, and it rose very high. He wondered: could the kite pull him across the water? He tied the kite string to a stick, lay on his back in the water and held on. Drawn by the wind, the kite towed him slowly across the entire pond with hardly any effort on his part. He had asked another boy to carry his clothes round to the far side. The method might replace the ferry for crossing a river, he thought, though he never tried it again.

Decades later Franklin described both boyhood experiments in a letter to a friend. One cannot help smiling: the scientist who would later study lightning with a kite first used a kite to tow himself across a pond.

 

2. A Stove Without a Patent

Winters in eighteenth-century America were cold, and heating meant open fireplaces. But traditional fireplaces had a serious flaw: most of the heat went up the chimney with the smoke. Franklin observed that people sitting by the fire were scorched in front while their backs froze, and that cold air constantly rushed in through cracks in doors and windows to replace the air drawn up the chimney, creating icy draughts.

Around 1740 Franklin designed a new iron heating stove, later called the "Pennsylvania fireplace", or the Franklin stove. The idea was to set the stove out into the room rather than recessing it in the wall, so the iron plates radiated heat in all directions; inside, a winding passage made the hot air give up as much heat as possible to the room before escaping; and fresh air from outside was drawn in, warmed and then sent into the room. The same fuel produced more heat.

Later commentators noted that Franklin's original design had problems with drawing smoke, and others improved on it considerably. That does not alter its importance as an early attempt to improve home heating.

More notable was Franklin's attitude to his invention. Governor Thomas of Pennsylvania liked the stove so much that he offered Franklin a patent giving him sole right of sale for a term of years. Franklin declined, and his reason, recorded in the Autobiography, became one of his most quoted principles: "That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

An ironmonger in London later took his published description, made a few changes, which Franklin thought made it worse, and patented it in England, reportedly making a small fortune. Franklin did not go to law. He never wished to profit from patents, he said, and hated disputes.

He made many inventions in his life, including the lightning rod and bifocals described below, and patented none of them.

None of this means patents are bad. Today patents are an important way to protect inventors and encourage innovation. Franklin's choice reflected the fact that he already had a steady income, and also a belief of his own: that knowledge and invention are gifts people give one another.

 

3. Electricity Begins with a Glass Tube

Franklin's interest in electricity began with a chance viewing.

In 1743 in Boston he watched a travelling lecturer from Scotland give an electrical demonstration. Electricity was then a mysterious phenomenon with a touch of entertainment about it. Lecturers rubbed glass tubes or spun glass globes to produce static electricity, made hair stand on end and scraps of paper dance, and even gave shocks to a line of people holding hands. Franklin thought the demonstrations imperfectly performed, as the lecturer was not very expert, but the phenomena surprised and delighted him.

A few years later Peter Collinson, a London merchant friend, sent the Library Company in Philadelphia a glass tube and some accounts of European electrical experiments. Franklin started experimenting at once. Never before, he said, had anything so totally engrossed his attention. His house was continually full of people coming to see the experiments, so many that he had several more tubes blown and gave them to friends to experiment with themselves.

Over the next few years he made a great many experiments and reported the results in a series of long letters to Collinson in London. Collinson had the letters read at the Royal Society and later published them as a small book, Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America. Translated into French, German and Italian, it caused a sensation in Europe.

One of Franklin's main contributions was a new theory of electricity. Before him, some believed there were two different electrical "fluids". Franklin proposed that electricity was a single fluid present in all bodies in a normal quantity. A body with more than its normal quantity was charged "plus", or positive; one with less was "minus", or negative. Charge was not created or destroyed, only transferred from one body to another. Modern physics understands electricity far more deeply than Franklin's single-fluid theory, but the terms "positive" and "negative" and the principle of conservation of charge are still with us.

He also coined or popularised many terms for the new science, including positive, negative, battery, conductor, charge and discharge. "Battery" originally described a group of linked Leyden jars, an early device for storing electric charge, because lined up together they looked like a battery of cannon.

 

4. Electric Turkeys and a Shocking Accident

Franklin's electrical experiments were not always solemn; some had a playful side.

In 1749 he and his friends planned an electrical summer party: a turkey killed by electric shock for dinner, roasted on an electrical jack, before a fire kindled by an electrified bottle, while healths were drunk in electrified glasses that gave the drinker a shock.

He did later kill turkeys with electricity, and observed that birds killed this way seemed to be uncommonly tender.

But one day in December 1750, while preparing to electrocute a turkey, something went wrong. He had charged two large Leyden jars and was talking to guests. Distracted for a moment, he touched the wire at the top of the jars with one hand while holding the chain connected to their outsides with the other. A powerful current passed through his body.

He described it afterwards in a letter to his brother. He saw a very great flash and heard a crack as loud as a pistol, though he did not himself remember either. He felt a universal blow throughout his body from head to foot, followed by numbness. His arms and the back of his neck stayed numb all evening, and his chest was sore for days. He began the letter: "I have lately made an Experiment in Electricity that I desire never to repeat." (A popular line has him saying he meant to kill a turkey and nearly killed a goose; it does not appear in his letter.)

The accident gave him a very direct sense of electricity's power and made him more careful in later experiments.

 

5. The Kite Experiment: What Really Happened?

By now Franklin had noticed many similarities between sparks in the laboratory and lightning in the sky. Both gave light of a similar colour, travelled in crooked paths, made a crack or noise, were conducted by metals, could melt metals, set fire to inflammable things, kill animals, and gave off a sulphurous smell. His notes listed a dozen such points.

Was lightning, then, a form of electricity? And how could that be proved?

In 1750 he proposed an experiment. On a high tower or steeple, set up an iron rod with a pointed tip, leading down into a sentry box insulated from the ground, with a man standing inside. When a thundercloud passed over, if the rod drew electricity from the cloud, the man could draw sparks from it.

The proposal reached France with his book. In May 1752 a French scientist named Thomas-François Dalibard, following Franklin's plan, set up an iron rod about forty feet high in the village of Marly, near Paris. During a thunderstorm the rod did indeed yield electric sparks. It was the first experimental demonstration that lightning is electrical. News spread; King Louis XV himself watched the experiment repeated, and Franklin's name rang through Europe.

Far away in Philadelphia, Franklin did not yet know. He was waiting for a church spire to be completed so that he could experiment from it. While he waited, he thought of something simpler: a kite.

According to the later account by the English scientist Joseph Priestley, whose information is believed to have come from Franklin himself, one day in June 1752, with a storm approaching, Franklin went to a field outside Philadelphia with his son William, then in his early twenties. They flew a kite made of a silk handkerchief stretched on cedar sticks, with a sharp pointed wire fixed to the top. The kite string was hemp; at its lower end hung a metal key, and below the key was a length of silk ribbon, which Franklin held. Dry silk acts as an insulator, so to keep it dry Franklin stood under a shed.

The kite went up, and at first nothing happened. Franklin began to be disappointed. Then he noticed loose threads of the hemp string standing erect and repelling each other. He put his knuckle to the key and at once felt a shock and saw a small spark. When rain began to fall and wet the string, making it conduct better, the sparks came more freely. He charged a Leyden jar from the key, demonstrating that what came down from the cloud was the same thing as electricity produced by friction in the laboratory.

It should be said that historians have long discussed the details of the kite experiment. Franklin's own account, published in October 1752, is very brief: it describes the method but gives no date or place. The fuller narrative comes mainly from Priestley, fifteen years later. A few scholars have even doubted that the experiment took place as described, though most historians believe it did.

One more point must be stressed. In the kite experiment the kite was not struck by lightning. Franklin drew down electric charge accumulated in the storm cloud, not a lightning bolt itself. Had the kite been struck directly, a massive current would have run down the wet string, with consequences one dares not imagine. In 1753 the scientist Georg Wilhelm Richmann, repeating a similar experiment in St Petersburg, was killed by a discharge that travelled along his apparatus, the first person known to have died in an electrical experiment.

This experiment is extremely dangerous and must never be imitated.

 

6. The Lightning Rod: From Study to Rooftop

Proving lightning was electrical was only the first step. Franklin cared more about what could be done with the knowledge.

In the eighteenth century lightning strikes were a terrifying disaster. Church steeples were often hit and set on fire. In many parts of Europe it was the custom to ring church bells when a thunderstorm approached, supposedly to drive the lightning away. As a result, the bell-ringers standing in the towers were frequently struck themselves, and many died.

Franklin proposed a simple solution: fix a pointed iron rod at the highest point of a building and connect it with a wire running down into the ground. Lightning would then follow the rod and wire into the earth instead of damaging the building.

In 1753 he published instructions for installing lightning rods in Poor Richard's Almanack, explaining in plain language how ordinary people could protect their houses. He fitted a rod to his own house, with a little addition: he hung two small bells on the wire with a brass ball suspended between them. When a thundercloud passed over and the wire became charged, the bells would ring. It is said that his wife Deborah was sometimes frightened by the bells and wrote to her husband in London asking whether she could take them down.

Lightning rods were not accepted overnight. Some believed lightning was a sign of God's displeasure and that blocking it with a man-made device was irreverent. After an earthquake near Boston in 1755, one minister even preached that it had been caused by the city's many lightning rods drawing the electrical fire into the earth and provoking the Almighty.

Another dispute was more amusing still. Around 1777 the British argued over whether lightning conductors should have pointed tips or blunt, rounded ones. Franklin favoured points, which he thought would draw off charge more quietly. This was during the American War of Independence, and King George III, it is said, out of dislike for the "rebel" Franklin, ordered the rods on his palace replaced with blunt ones. Sir John Pringle, President of the Royal Society, who supported Franklin's view, is said to have resigned over the matter. But the historical record of some details, especially what the king actually said, is inconsistent, and some of it is probably later embellishment.

In any case, lightning rods were eventually adopted all over the world. The lightning protection we see on skyscrapers, television towers and historic buildings today can be traced back to Franklin's idea.

Did You Know?

Around 1778 the French economist Turgot wrote a Latin tribute to Franklin: "Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis", "He snatched the lightning from the sky and the sceptre from tyrants." It was engraved on many of Franklin's portraits and medals and became famous across Europe. Franklin was embarrassed. He wrote that such praise was too much: in the study of lightning he had only built on the work of others, and American independence was the work of many thousands of people.

 

7. A Scientist's Endless Questions

Franklin's curiosity was not confined to electricity. His letters and essays are full of questions and observations of every kind.

Why were English mail ships slower than American whalers?

Around 1768, while serving as a deputy postmaster general for the American colonies, Franklin heard a complaint: packet boats from Falmouth in England to New York took about two weeks longer to cross the Atlantic than merchant ships sailing from London to Rhode Island, though Falmouth was closer to New York.

Franklin asked his cousin, Timothy Folger, a whaling captain from Nantucket. Folger explained that there was a powerful current in the Atlantic flowing out of the Gulf of Mexico and running north-east along the American coast. American whalers, who hunted along its edges, knew it well and avoided it when sailing west. But the English packet captains did not know it, or did not believe in it, and often sailed against it, which slowed them down. When the whalers met packet ships, Folger said, they sometimes kindly told them, but the captains were too proud to be advised by simple American fishermen.

Franklin had Folger mark the current on a chart, then had the chart printed for the use of English packet captains. It is one of the earliest charts of the Gulf Stream. On later Atlantic crossings Franklin also took the temperature of the sea himself and found that the Gulf Stream was warmer than the surrounding water, which could help a ship tell whether it was in the current.

Why can a spoonful of oil calm a pond?

In 1773 Franklin was walking on Clapham Common, near London, where a large pond was ruffled by the wind. He took out a little cruet of oil, which, it is said, he often carried in the hollow of his walking cane, and dropped no more than a teaspoonful onto the water. The oil spread rapidly across the surface, over perhaps half an acre, and that patch of water became as smooth as a looking-glass.

Fascinated, he repeated the experiment elsewhere and reported it to the Royal Society. More than a century later, scientists used similar experiments to estimate the size of oil molecules. Franklin knew nothing of molecules, but his observation is regarded as one of the early records in the study of surface chemistry.

Can one pair of glasses see both near and far?

In middle age the eye loses its ability to focus, so one pair of spectacles is needed for close work and another for distance. As he grew older, Franklin had to carry two pairs and keep swapping them, which he found very inconvenient.

So he had an optician cut the lenses of both pairs in half and fit a half of each into a single frame: the upper half for distance, the lower half for reading. He could look up to see far and down to read without changing glasses. These were "double spectacles", or bifocals.

In 1785, at seventy-nine, describing them in a letter to a friend, he mentioned a particular advantage. At dinner in France, his spectacles let him see both the food on his plate and the faces of the people across the table. And seeing a speaker's expressions, he said, helped him understand their French, which he did not hear well. We will return to this in Chapter 8.

Can glass make music?

Europe at the time enjoyed a kind of performance in which glasses filled with water to different depths were played by rubbing their rims with wet fingers, producing ethereal tones. Franklin heard such a performance in London and loved the sound but thought the arrangement awkward.

In 1761 he designed a new instrument. Glass bowls of graduated sizes were mounted in order of pitch on a horizontal iron spindle, turned by a foot treadle. The player touched the edges of the spinning bowls with wet fingers to play chords and melodies. He called it the "armonica".

The glass armonica became a craze in Europe; it is said several thousand were made. Mozart composed music for it late in his life, and Beethoven and other composers also wrote for it. Franklin loved the instrument himself and said that of all his inventions, the armonica gave him the greatest personal satisfaction.

Could he make a better catheter for his sick brother?

In 1752 Franklin's brother John suffered from bladder stones and had to use a catheter regularly. Catheters were then rigid metal tubes and very painful to use. Franklin designed a flexible silver catheter, made of small silver segments jointed like the scales of a snake, with a wire inside to stiffen it for insertion, after which the wire could be withdrawn to leave the tube flexible. He had a silversmith make it and sent it to his brother.

How many people can hear one voice?

In 1739 the famous English preacher George Whitefield came to Philadelphia and preached in the open air to crowds of thousands. Franklin had his own views on religion, but he admired Whitefield's oratory and became his friend.

One evening Whitefield preached from the top of the courthouse steps, with the crowd filling the street. Franklin, standing at the back, wondered how far his voice could carry. So, as he listened, he slowly retreated down the street until he could no longer hear clearly, which brought him near Front Street by the river. Then, imagining a semicircle of listeners with each person occupying two square feet, he calculated that more than thirty thousand people could have heard him. This, he said, reconciled him to newspaper reports of Whitefield preaching to twenty-five thousand people in the fields, which he had previously doubted.

Did You Know?

Hearing Whitefield also produced a comic moment. Whitefield was collecting for an orphanage in Georgia. Franklin disapproved of the location and had silently resolved to give nothing. In his pocket were a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars and five pistoles in gold. As the sermon went on he began to soften and decided to give the coppers. Another stroke of oratory made him ashamed of that, and he decided on the silver. The finish was so admirable that he emptied his pocket wholly into the collector's dish, gold and all. He added that a friend at the same sermon, suspecting he might be moved, had emptied his pockets before leaving home; towards the end, he asked a neighbour to lend him money to give.

 

8. Using Blindfolds to Test an Extraordinary Claim

Franklin's scientific spirit showed not only in invention but in how to test whether a claim is true.

In 1784, aged seventy-eight, Franklin took part in a remarkable investigation in Paris. A German physician named Franz Anton Mesmer had become a sensation there. He claimed to have discovered an invisible "animal magnetic fluid" pervading the universe and the human body; illness, he said, came from an imbalance of this fluid, which he could correct with movements of his hands and magnetised objects. His treatments were highly theatrical. Many patients went into convulsions, wept, laughed or fainted, and then declared themselves cured. Parisian high society flocked to him.

King Louis XVI appointed a royal commission to investigate. Its members included Franklin, the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, whose name later became attached to the guillotine.

The commission's question was simple: did the patients' reactions come from "magnetic fluid", or from their own imagination and expectations?

To answer it they designed a series of experiments that were highly novel for the time, some conducted at Franklin's house in Passy, outside Paris. For example:

They blindfolded subjects and told them they were being "magnetised" when nothing was being done. Many subjects reacted strongly anyway.

Conversely, they magnetised subjects without their knowledge, and the subjects showed no reaction.

They "magnetised" one of several trees and had a boy said to be especially sensitive embrace the trees one by one while blindfolded. He fainted under a tree that had not been magnetised at all.

The commission concluded that they could find no evidence that "animal magnetic fluid" existed. They did not deny that patients really did react, or that some felt better. Their judgement was that these reactions could not prove the existence of a magnetic fluid, and were more likely due to imagination, expectation and imitation. In other words, what they rejected was Mesmer's explanation of the phenomena, not the patients' experiences themselves.

Historians of science often cite this investigation as a famous early example of blinding in experiments. Its central idea remains a basic principle of medical research today: to judge whether a treatment itself works, we need to exclude, as far as possible, the influence of patients' and researchers' expectations.

 

9. The Secret of Curiosity: Where Do Questions Come From?

Looking back over Franklin's inventions and discoveries, they seem to span a huge range: electricity, weather, oceans, optics, music, medicine, heating. But look at how he worked and some common features emerge.

First, the questions often came from everyday nuisances: a smoky fireplace, lightning burning down houses, swapping between two pairs of glasses, his brother's painful catheter, slow mail ships. None were grand, but all could be observed, tried and improved.

Second, he was willing to ask others, even people of lower status. His knowledge of the Gulf Stream came from a whaling captain; the English packet captains, out of pride, missed it.

Third, he began with an idea that could be tested, then designed an attempt that was as simple, safe and repeatable as possible. Is lightning electricity? Then draw charge from a cloud and see if it charges a Leyden jar like laboratory electricity. Does "magnetic fluid" exist? Blindfold the subjects and see whether they react when nothing is done.

Fourth, he shared his results. He wrote up his experiments for London, printed lightning-rod instructions in his almanac, published his stove design freely, and printed the Gulf Stream chart for ship captains. Much of the wide influence of his inventions came from his readiness to share.

Fifth, he was not afraid of failure or of being laughed at. He nearly electrocuted himself, his stove design was later found flawed, and some of his ideas were proved wrong. None of this stopped him trying.

People today often think innovation requires special talent, or must produce something no one has seen before. For Franklin, innovation was closer to a habit: when you meet a problem, spend a little time trying something rather than accepting that "that's just how it is". The habit does not guarantee important inventions, but it does make improvement more likely.

Its limits are obvious too. Experiments need time and basic safety. If every hour of your day is filled, or trying things costs too much, it is hard to keep going. Franklin was able to give a good deal of his time to observation and experiment partly because of his financial security. Without it, many attempts might never have begun.

 

10. Run a Small Experiment in Your Own Life

People Like Us

Grace Liu is a retired secondary-school physics teacher, sixty-two, who moved to Manchester a few years ago to help her daughter look after her grandson. English winters are damp and cold, and the heating bill in her daughter's house was a monthly headache for the whole family. Rather than just complain, Mrs Liu brought out the spirit of her old classroom experiments. She bought two cheap thermometers, put one in the sitting room and one in the bedroom, and recorded the temperatures and when the heating went on and off, morning and evening. After two weeks she had found several problems: a gap in the sitting-room window was letting in a draught; there was no reflective panel behind the radiators, so much of the heat was going into the walls; and the bedroom radiator was on all day when nobody was at home. She sealed the window gap with draught-proofing strip, fixed foil insulation panels behind the radiators, and agreed new heating times with her daughter. The next month's bill was lower. When her grandson came home from school and saw his grandmother drawing temperature graphs in a notebook, he asked what she was doing. She smiled: "I'm learning from an old man called Franklin. He also spent a lot of time working out how to keep a house warm."

Chinese tradition speaks of "investigating things to extend knowledge", and of "seeking truth from facts", which rejects empty talk detached from reality. In the Song dynasty, Shen Kuo recorded in his Dream Pool Essays a vast range of observations of nature and craft, including the remark that a magnetic needle "always points slightly east, not due south", one of the earliest known records of magnetic declination. In the Ming dynasty, Song Yingxing compiled The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, documenting agricultural and craft techniques in detail. Like Franklin, these scholars were curious about the things around them, and recorded and shared what they observed.

They share Franklin's emphasis on observing concrete phenomena rather than staying at the level of concepts. The difference is that the traditional idea of "investigating things" was often tied to moral or political understanding, while Franklin applied observation and experiment directly to concrete things that could be improved, whether lightning protection, heating or reading.

For readers today, what helps is not waiting for a "big problem worth innovating on", but finding a small, recurring nuisance in your daily life or work that can be tried on a small scale, and running a small enough experiment.

You might try these steps:

Step one: write down a small recurring nuisance. For example, "I can never find my keys in the morning", "Our electricity bill is always higher than the neighbours'", or "Our weekly meeting always overruns".

Step two: make a guess you can test. For example, "If I put a key dish by the door, maybe I'll stop losing my keys."

Step three: design a small, safe trial that can be completed in a week or two, and record the results.

Step four: depending on the results, decide whether to continue, adjust, or try a different idea.

Step five: if you find something that works, tell the people around you who might find it useful.

Experiments like these will not make you Franklin. But they will let you meet life's problems as he did, with curiosity and a willingness to try.

 

Chapter 6: Managing Time and Attention: How to Live a Day Well

 

1. A Daily Timetable from Three Centuries Ago

In the Autobiography, Franklin left a daily timetable he designed for himself while practising the thirteen virtues, especially Order. Following his description, it can be set out like this:

Time	Scheme	Daily question
Morning, 5–7	Rise, wash and address Powerful Goodness; contrive the day's business and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study; breakfast	What good shall I do this day?
8–11	Work
Noon, 12–1	Read, or overlook my accounts; dine
2–5	Work
Evening, 6–9	Put things in their places; supper; music or diversion, or conversation; examination of the day	What good have I done today?
Night, 10–4	Sleep

(Adapted from the scheme of employment in Franklin's Autobiography.)

Several things about this timetable are interesting.

First, it begins and ends with a question. At five in the morning: "What good shall I do this day?" Before bed: "What good have I done today?" The day is framed by these two questions. The morning question gives it direction; the evening question gives it a review.

Second, it does not fill every minute. At midday there are two hours for reading, accounts and dinner. In the evening there are four hours for putting things in their places, supper, music, diversion and conversation, and only then the examination of the day. Sleep gets a full six hours, which in an age of candlelight was not little.

Third, it separates different kinds of activity. Early morning is for planning and study; the morning and afternoon for work; midday and evening for reading, rest and company. Each kind of activity has a roughly fixed place.

Franklin noted beside the timetable that he especially valued one phrase from the precept of Order: "Let each part of your business have its time."

The heart of such an arrangement is not maximum efficiency, but reducing the drain of deciding afresh every day what to do next. When a task has a relatively fixed time, other things find it harder to elbow their way in.

 

2. What If Your Plans Keep Getting Disrupted?

Franklin admitted, though, that he did not manage to keep to this timetable strictly.

In Chapter 1 we saw his explanation: a master printer must see customers whenever they come, and he cannot decide when that will be. He admitted that Order gave him more trouble than any other virtue. Practical affairs constantly upset his plans, and he could not always live by the schedule he had written. But he still felt that a rough plan was better than none.

This is instructive. Many people draw up detailed time plans and give up after a few days, often because once the plan is disrupted they feel the whole thing has failed and abandon it.

Franklin's attitude was different. He treated his timetable as a "default setting": when nothing unexpected happened, he followed it; when something did, he dealt with it and then tried to return to the plan. A plan is not a taut rope that is ruined when it snaps. It is more like a riverbed: the water may sometimes overflow, but it eventually returns to its channel.

 

3. "Dost Thou Love Life?"

Franklin left many sayings about time. Perhaps the best known is this one from Poor Richard:

"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of."

It equates time with life itself. To waste time is to waste life.

He also wrote: "Lost time is never found again." "Never leave that till tomorrow, which you can do today." "Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy." "Since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour."

These sayings have something in common: they are short and memorable, ideal for an almanac page that people glance at while checking the date. Franklin knew that the best way to remind people to value time was not a lecture but a line they could recall at any moment.

But read only these sayings and it is easy to misunderstand him, as if he were an "efficiency fanatic" who worked every waking minute and never rested. Look back at his timetable: four hours each evening for amusement, music, conversation and rest; six hours of sleep; two hours at midday for reading and dinner. He valued time, but he did not regard rest and recreation as waste.

His almanac also says: "Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure." Leisure, deliberately planned rest and enjoyment, is a different thing from idleness, in which time simply slips away.

 

4. A Prank about Saving Candles

Franklin also wrote a famous humorous essay about time.

In 1784 he was living in Paris. One morning he was woken by a noise in the street at six o'clock and was astonished to find his room full of sunshine. At first he thought someone had left the lamps burning; then he realised that the sun simply rose that early.

In the essay he pretends, with a straight face, that when he told his friends about this "important discovery", none of them believed him, since Parisians usually got up at noon and had never seen the sun at six in the morning.

He then made an elaborate calculation. Suppose there were a hundred thousand families in Paris, each burning candles for seven hours a night more than necessary, hours that could have been replaced by sunlight. How many candles might be saved in the half-year from 20 March to 20 September? He arrived at an astonishing figure: over sixty-four million pounds of candles, worth more than ninety million livres.

To realise these savings he made several "proposals": a tax on every window fitted with shutters to keep out the light; rationing the candles each family could buy per week; guards to stop carriages from travelling after sunset; ringing all the church bells at sunrise; and, if that was not enough, firing cannon in every street to wake the sluggards and make them open their eyes to their true interest.

The essay was published in a Paris newspaper as a letter from "a subscriber". It is obviously satire, aimed at the late-rising, candle-burning habits of Parisian society.

Because of it, Franklin is often called the "father of daylight saving time". That is a misunderstanding. He never proposed putting clocks forward by an hour, only that people get up earlier. Daylight saving in the modern sense came much later. In Britain, a builder named William Willett campaigned for the idea in the early twentieth century, and Britain did not adopt British Summer Time until 1916, during the First World War, mainly to save fuel.

Still, Franklin's essay did touch on a real issue: our daily habits often fail to match natural rhythms, and that creates unnecessary waste.

 

5. Two Columns: Franklin's "Moral Algebra"

Managing time is not only about arranging each day; it also involves making important decisions. Much time is wasted in indecision, turning a matter over and over without settling it.

In 1772 the English scientist Joseph Priestley, the same man who later described the kite experiment, faced an important choice in his life and wrote to Franklin for advice. Franklin did not tell him what to choose. Instead he described a method he often used himself, which he called "moral" or "prudential algebra".

Difficult decisions are hard, Franklin explained, chiefly because when we consider them, all the reasons for and against are not present to the mind at the same time. Sometimes one set presents itself, sometimes another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternately prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us.

His solution was to divide a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing "Pro" over one and "Con" over the other. Then, over three or four days' consideration, he would jot down under each heading short hints of the different motives that occurred to him for or against.

When he had them all together in one view, he would try to estimate their respective weights. Where he found one reason on each side that seemed equal, he struck them both out. If he found one reason pro equal to two reasons con, he struck out the three; and so on. Eventually he would find where the balance lay. If, after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new of importance occurred on either side, he would come to a determination accordingly.

Franklin admitted that the weight of reasons cannot be taken with the precision of algebraic quantities. But when each is considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before us, we can judge better and are less likely to take a rash step. He said he had found great advantage from this kind of equation.

The two-column list seems commonplace today; many people have used it. But Franklin's version has some details worth noting. First, he suggests collecting reasons over three or four days rather than in one sitting, to avoid being swayed by a passing mood. Second, he does not simply count reasons on each side; he compares their weight and cancels them out. Third, he openly admits that the method is imprecise: a tool to aid thinking, not a formula to replace it.

 

6. Today's Distractions Far Exceed Those of Three Centuries Ago

The distractions we face today are far greater than in Franklin's day.

In his time, his work was interrupted by customers coming through the door. Customers left eventually, and came only so often. Today we are interrupted by an endless stream of messages, emails and notifications on our phones. Messages can arrive at any moment, many tasks have no clear beginning or end, and attention is easily pulled away.

People Like Us

Lily Lin, the marketing worker from Chapter 1 who scrolled her phone at bedtime, has a similar problem at work. She arrives at nine every morning and opens her computer intending to write an important campaign proposal. But the work chat already has dozens of unread messages, so she answers a few; there are emails in her inbox, so she deals with them; then she glances at the industry news. By the time she looks up it is half past ten and she has not written a word. The afternoon is one meeting after another, so the proposal has to wait until she gets home in the evening. She feels busy every day, yet the important work never gets done.

This is not entirely a question of willpower. Our environment is full of things that demand an immediate response, while important work rarely has that pull. Messages have alert sounds, red unread counters and people waiting for replies; the proposal sits quietly in its folder and makes no sound at all.

 

7. Give the Most Important Work an Uninterrupted Slot

Franklin's approach offers a fairly simple response: not to demand total freedom from interruption, but first to set aside a period for the most important work that is hard to break into.

In his timetable, five to eight in the morning was such a period: planning the day's business and pursuing his current study. Customers had not yet arrived, the household was not yet up, and the city was quiet.

The period need not be long, nor in the morning. For some people, the first thirty minutes after starting work, or a fixed half hour in the evening, is enough. What matters is to let as little as possible intrude during that time.

Lily later made a small adjustment. For the first hour after arriving at the office, she put her phone on silent in a drawer, closed the chat app on her computer, and did only one thing: write the most important proposal or report of the day. She told colleagues in the group chat in advance that if anything was truly urgent, they could call her desk phone.

In the first week she failed on two days, because her manager called her into a meeting as soon as he arrived. She did not give up. She asked her manager whether the morning meeting could move to ten o'clock, and he agreed. A month later she found that the work she finished in that one hour often amounted to more than a whole morning used to.

 

8. The Limits of This Approach

The limits are clear.

If your work requires constant responsiveness, as in customer service, healthcare or on-call engineering, a fixed "do not disturb" period is hard to achieve. If there is a baby at home or an elderly relative to care for, time is often cut into fragments and a solid block is hard to find.

In such cases, blaming yourself for "lack of discipline" rarely helps. It is more practical to see which interruptions can be reduced in advance and which cannot be avoided for now, and adjust only what you can control. Perhaps you cannot find an hour, but you can find fifteen minutes; perhaps not every day, but two or three times a week.

Franklin himself said his timetable was often upset. He did not give up; within the limits of what he could control, he tried to keep the important things from always being squeezed out.

 

9. How Ancient Chinese Thinkers Viewed Time

Chinese tradition has many famous sayings about valuing time. "An inch of time is worth an inch of gold, but an inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time." "If you do not strive in youth, you will grieve in vain in old age." The poet Tao Yuanming wrote: "The prime of life does not come twice; a day cannot dawn a second time. Strive while you may; the years wait for no one." Like Franklin's maxims, these lines remind us that time is the most precious thing we have, and the easiest to lose.

"The whole day's plan lies in the morning" stresses how much the morning shapes the day, almost exactly matching the five-to-eight slot in Franklin's timetable.

Standing by a river, Confucius sighed: "It passes on like this, never ceasing day or night," lamenting time's irrevocable flow.

The nineteenth-century statesman Zeng Guofan set himself twelve daily rules, including rising early, reading one book at a time without distraction, keeping a diary, being careful in speech and not going out at night, and checked himself against them each day. In spirit this is very close to Franklin's timetable and his book of virtues.

These ideas share Franklin's belief that a day's time is not to be left entirely to chance but needs some arrangement. The difference is that traditional formulations often linked such arrangement with moral cultivation or ritual propriety, while Franklin treated it as a practical way of reducing chaos. He did not expect perfect execution every day; he only hoped the important things would not always be crowded out.

 

10. Begin with a Question, End with a Question

For readers today, what helps is not drawing up a detailed timetable from morning to night, but choosing one thing that matters to you and often gets squeezed out, and giving it a short, fixed slot.

Beyond that, you can borrow the simplest and most overlooked part of Franklin's timetable: the morning and evening questions.

After getting up, spend one minute asking yourself: "What is the one thing I most want to do well today?"

Before sleep, spend another minute asking: "What did I do well today? What can I do better tomorrow?"

These questions need no paper and no tools. They simply give the day a beginning and an end, so it does not slip quietly away in a blur of busyness.

And if you face an important decision you cannot settle, try Franklin's two columns: spend three or four days writing down the reasons for and against, then compare their weights and cancel them out. It will not make the decision for you, but it will make your thinking clearer.

Time, Franklin said, is the stuff life is made of. We cannot make a day longer, but we can keep its most important part from being swallowed by things that do not matter.

 ( To be continued)