Autobiography

One of the best time-enduring autobiographies, Franklin's work full of interesting insights into life and gives a great look at the man behind the public persona. The autobiography is unfinished, and I found that the first three-quarters had a lot of usable insights while the last quarter focused more on his public work which was harder to decipher. Franklin’s writing is clear despite the norms of writing in his age, and his anecdotes are salient; but at times the writing still takes a lot of concentration to read since it is in an older, much more verbose style. Aside from the style I got a lot of interesting insights from him, most notably insights into character-building and self-discipline that Franklin was so known for.

In the middle of the autobiography Franklin describes a method for developing personal virtue. He first gives a great line of reasoning behind cultivating virtue independent from religious dogma; the core of his philosophy is that virtue is good because it provides good consequences, and that religion is but a formalized system for guiding people toward the good consequences by advocating for personal virtue. Franklin goes on to outline a set of 13 “virtues” he wants to cultivate such as temperance, resolution, order, and commits to reviewing daily whether he has violated any “virtue” and how many times and notes it down on a notebook. Thus he builds a spreadsheet of violations, and each week he focuses on one “virtue” so as to not exhaust his mental discipline (but still notes mistakes in the other “virtues”). I’m going to be trying this kind of self-examination and create some of my own values that I want to cultivate, as it seems to be a simple and feasible way to build mental discipline.