Benjamin Franklin

Every week for most of his adult life, Benjamin Franklin opened a small ledger and graded himself on thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He tracked each one with a dot for every failure, working through them in rotation, one virtue per week, so that he cycled through all thirteen four times a year. The ledger is in his Autobiography. He kept it for decades.

• Born: January 17, 1706, Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: April 17, 1790, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (age 84)
• Era: American Enlightenment; Founding Father
• Major works: Poor Richard's Almanack (1732–1758), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (published posthumously, 1791)

Franklin was the fifteenth of seventeen children, largely self-educated, and apprenticed to his brother's printing shop at twelve. He ran away to Philadelphia at seventeen with almost nothing. He built, from those materials, one of the most productive careers in American history — scientist, printer, diplomat, inventor, civic organizer, and writer. The Franklin stove, bifocals, the lightning rod, the flexible urinary catheter: he invented things when he noticed problems and then moved on to the next problem. He invented bifocals in his seventies, when his own vision began to fail.

In 1731 he founded the first public lending library in America — the Library Company of Philadelphia — on the argument that knowledge should not be available only to people who could afford to buy books. He negotiated the French alliance that turned the Revolutionary War. He was the only man to have signed all four of the founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Alliance with France, and the Constitution.

He wrote Poor Richard's Almanack for twenty-six years, filling it with practical wisdom that stuck because it was earned in actual experience: Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. Well done is better than well said. These lines survived not because they were clever but because they were accurate.

His aphorisms are short because he respected your time. They are memorable because he understood how minds work. They have survived three centuries because they are still right — and because they came from a man who graded himself every week against a standard he set for himself, not one he inherited.

These words are for the builders and the learners — the people who believe that character is something you develop one decision at a time.