I am quite taken by the idea of Benjamin Franklin’s 13 Virtues and, in particular, his really neat method for reminding himself of them and reviewing the extent to which he was complying with his intentions each day. I came across the idea when this article popped up in the automated feed of my Pocket app (which I use to capture interesting odds and ends from the internet).
Franklin’s 13 Virtues were: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity and humility.
It would be hard to argue that adhering to these virtues would not be a good thing (okay, absolute chastity may not be a necessity but excessive pursuit of, or thoughts about, opportunities not to be chaste would probably be unhelpful). Understandably, the list does have something of an 18th century feel to it, but my instinct is that these things are pretty much timeless, at least up to a point.
The really neat part is how Franklin reminded himself of these virtues and kept track of his behaviour. He did this by having 13 cards, each one bearing a grid with the 13 virtues as rows and the days of the weeks as columns. Each card also had one of the virtues as its heading. He carried one card with him each week, rotating through the pack of 13 over the period of one quarter year. So each week he had a single virtue which acted as his primary focus (the one that headed the card he carried) and a simple, reminder of the whole set of 13. He reviewed the card he carried regularly and, at the end of the day, marked off in the relevant row/column his adherence to that virtue on that day. At the end of a week he had a simple visual record of how well he had lived his life in accordance with the virtues and then at the end of each quarter year he could take a longer timescale look at things.
I’d like to spend a little time mulling over the 13 virtues to decide whether any of them could be usefully replaced with other virtues, and then it would be really quite cool to print up a set of cards. I am imagining a playing or credit card size with the grid of virtues and days on one side and the single key virtue stated on the reverse, perhaps with a suitably evocative picture. Alternatively, I can imagine this as a small pdf document that is designed to be viewed on a smartphone screen (actually, it would work really nicely as an app – if only I knew how to make one!). If I had such a set of cards (or similar) I don’t know whether I would find the time to complete the review each day. I already complete a mini-journal to remind myself what I did each day (now into my fourth year) and have recently started completing a short end-of-day review pro-forma on my iPad, so having ANOTHER type of review going on is probably excessive (‘probably’? – I must surely mean ‘obviously’). But, I do like Franklin’s idea a lot – beautiful simplicity and clarity.
Edited to add that I have just discovered a series of articles about Franklin’s virtues on the Art of Manliness website. These date back to 2008 which perhaps explains why I haven’t noticed them before despite regularly visiting AoM and listening to the AoM podcast!
Tim O'Hare 