I am currently listening to a Ben Franklin book on CD that I picked up at my library. The book quotes a good deal of Franklin’s writing during his life. One of particular interest to me is his thirteen virtues. Ben was a avid pursuer of self improvement projects. In fact, the author of the biography credits Ben with creating the entire “self improvement” industry.
After he recorded the Thirteen Virtues below, he created a tabular notebook with 13 rows and 7 columns. Each row represented a virtue, each column represented a day. He made 13 copies of the table described above, intending to complete one table per week. He used the notebook to track his progress towards achieving each virtue. Ben approached this matter “like one who must rid their garden of weeds”, which is to say one at a time. So for each week he focused on one, and only one virtue, ignoring the others. His hope was that with each passing week he would adopt an additional virtue and by the end of the 13-week program he would be a better person for it.
Makes me think of my own development plan at work and also whether I should be making my own self improvement programs in my personal life as well.
