You’ll master some things which free up time for you to learn other things. Things that worked for you in the past might not work anymore. You will probably need to adapt it.Īs you go through life, your situation will change. When you see something that works for someone else, try it. They can’t tell you exactly how things will work for you. The way other people do things can give you ideas for what to try. I’ve learned and continue to learn a lot from his autobiography. I admired Benjamin Franklin tremendously. The lesson I would take to share is to get started early on developing the habits that will serve you for life. I only noticed this the last time I dipped into the autobiography, a week or so ago. There were more lessons in orderliness when I joined the Marines after high school. When I was in high school, I had to be organized to manage my studies at Bronx Science, my job, my household chores, and my social life. I was fortunate to develop the discipline of orderliness early. He said he had a very good memory and so he didn’t “feel the want of it.” But he also wrote that when he was older and his memory was not as good, he wished he had paid more attention to order when he was young. He wrote about how he’d didn’t develop habits of orderliness when he was young. Years later I mated this lesson with advice from Peter Drucker and Jack Canfield to structure self-improvement projects in 90-day increments Learn Earlyįranklin wrote the section of his autobiography that deals with self-improvement when he was about my age. But others have been just for fun, like learning about opera or gardening. Some of my projects have been to get better at business and writing. That’s served me well for half a century. I took that as a lesson to always have a learning or growth project going on. I noticed that when he outlined his ideal day, there was one item that was part of his morning routine called, “prosecute the present study.” One lesson I took away from Franklin was one he didn’t write about specifically. I’m still doing that today though the details have changed from time to time. But he also said it was much harder to do if you had to coordinate your work with other people’s schedules.įranklin’s example taught me to plan my day in time blocks, with specific work assigned to those blocks. He said it was relatively easy to keep to that when you had full control of your own schedule, as he did when he was a journeyman printer. Plan Your Dayįranklin outlined his plan for an ideal day. But I owe the inspiration to Ben Franklin. My checklists and scorecards have changed dramatically in 50 plus years. I began keeping score of how I did on important things. That meant that he completed an entire course of the virtues in 90 days. Each week, he chose one virtue for special attention. He attacked the project by keeping a record of his sins against each of those virtues every day. They were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. In the autobiography, Franklin outlines his “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He outlined 13 virtues he wanted to master. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned from it. And I still have my original Classics Club edition.īenjamin Franklin’s Autobiography is one of the books that shaped my life. I still go back to the book for wisdom and inspiration. I discovered the book because it came in the mail from the Walter J Black Classics Club, as one of that club’s monthly selections. B enjamin Franklin’s Autobiography is one of the first and the best of those books. Bookshelves groan under the weight of books about people who rose to great heights from humble beginnings.
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