Franklin on the thirteen virtues
📚SOURCE
💎PERMANENT NOTES
🧵SYNTHESIS
In his twenties 🏛️ Benjamin Franklin decided to become morally perfect, and went about it like a printer. He drew up thirteen virtues, each with a one-line rule: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, humility. He reasoned that attacking all of them at once would fail, so he took one a week, in an order where each would make the next easier, and went round the full list four times a year.
The instrument was a little book. One page per virtue, ruled into seven columns for the days and thirteen rows. Each evening he put a black mark against any fault. The aim for the week was a clean line for that week's virtue, with the others left to their ordinary chance.
What makes the passage worth keeping is the report afterwards. He found himself much fuller of faults than he had imagined. Order beat him entirely. Humility was added late, after a friend told him he was thought proud, and he says he never got the reality of it, only a fair appearance. And he says he never arrived at perfection, but was a better and happier man for the attempt than he would have been without it.
✨KEY IDEAS
"I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection."
One virtue gets a week of strict attention while the rest are left to ordinary habit.
He marks faults and leaves successes blank, so a good week is an empty row.
Order defeated him, and he tells a story about a man who decides he prefers his axe speckled.
He never reached the goal and judged the attempt worth it anyway.
📝READING NOTES
Public domain. One sentence quoted, in his spelling. The rest is paraphrase. I started the book on 26 May, after Lisbon, and stopped halfway on 21 June. This is the part I kept.
An abandoned book, honestly
The first half is lively and the middle is a long list of civic projects and people I could not keep straight. I gave it four weeks and let it go. A source can be worth one chapter. This is the chapter.
What is clever about the scheme
- He limits attention. Thirteen goals, one in focus.
- He orders them. Temperance first because a clear head helps everything after it.
- The record is daily and takes a minute.
- He expects to fail. The book has a page per virtue because he assumes there will be marks.
What is wrong with it
- The marks become the object. By his own telling he wore holes in the paper scraping old marks out, then moved to ivory leaves he could wipe. That is a man maintaining a scorecard.
- Humility on a checklist is a joke he half sees. He says that if he had overcome his pride he would probably have been proud of his humility.
- The list is one man's. Silence and frugality are a tradesman's virtues. Kindness is not on it.
- Thirteen is too many. Nobody attends to the other twelve by chance.
What I did with it
Ran 🧪 Franklin's chart for one value a week for three weeks in June, using my own values in place of his virtues. Abandoned, and the experiment note says why. I will not repeat it here, except that Franklin's ivory leaves stopped seeming funny.
The wider claim is 💎 A scorecard helps until it becomes the goal, still a seed. The habit tracker in the daily note is the same instrument and I keep it, so I do not get to be smug. The difference I am testing is that mine records what happened and his graded what he was.
Quote note: 💬 I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project. See also 📖 James on habit, who is kinder about lapses, and 📖 Lally on how long a habit takes, who would tell Franklin that a week is nowhere near enough.
Questions it left me with
- When does a record start to change the thing it records? Sooner than I assumed.
- Would the chart have worked with three values and not eight?
- What will carrier scores do to carriers, once carriers can see them? Same question, bigger room.
🗣️IN SHORT
- In : The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the section on his plan for moral perfection
- Franklin argues that : character can be improved by method, one fault at a time, with a daily written record
- by stating that : he listed thirteen virtues, gave each a week of attention in turn, marked every lapse in a small ruled book, and though he never became perfect he judged himself better for trying