Outside of a minority of Americans who put philandering at the top of their list of sins, most would agree that Benjamin Franklin was one of America’s first great success stories.  A lot of different people have different reasons for admiring Ben Franklin.  Some admire him because of his example of entrepreneurship and dedication to hard work.  Others admire him for his system of virtues and the example of self improvement he left behind.  Certainly no one can deny Benjamin Franklin’s humble beginnings as the fifteenth child of a Boston candle and soap maker – not to mention his very brief education which was discontinued when he was ten – to his rise to prominence as one of the founding fathers of our nation.  Regardless of political affiliation or position on the political spectrum, Benjamin Franklin remains one of the great American heroes who stood for what was right in everyday life for the majority of the people in America and also leaves behind the example of a great role model.

Franklin’s autobiography, though unfinished, provides us with much more than a story of a man who once lived; it provides us with a roadmap to success.  In it we find several examples about how frugality, industry, and resolve can make a man who was born largely poor and not privileged with a formal education into a national hero and an independently wealthy individual. 

Following Franklin’s example, we learn that it is self dedication and an interest in self improvement that ultimately gives us our start in the right direction.  He writes in his autobiography of his fondness of books in youth, saying, “From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.”  We should remember that Franklin barely received two years of education.  However it was this love of reading and a general thirst for knowledge that kept him going and rising to the highest rungs of society.  So noticeable was this dedication to self education, Benjamin Vaughan, a British commissioner whose role was to smooth negotiations between Britain and the United States during the drafting of the Treaty of Paris, wrote him a letter in 1783, late in Franklin’s life, encouraging him to complete his autobiography for the example of self education it set. “School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark”, Vaughn wrote. “…but your apparatus is simple, and the mark a true one; and while parents and young persons are left destitute of other just means of estimating and becoming prepared for a reasonable course in life, your discovery that the thing is in many a man’s private power, will be invaluable!”

Franklin’s dedication to self-education caused him in 1727, at the age of 21 to form a group called the Junto.  This group was a group of what Franklin referred to as his “most ingenious acquaintances.”  They would meet every Friday evening to discuss morality, philosophy, and politics and required members to write an essay once every three months on a subject of their choosing.  The group would then hold a debate which was moderated by a president who, without bias, would ensure the debate sought out truth rather than a fixed agenda. This group was eventually responsible for founding the first subscription library in the colonies and the American Philosophical Society.

Also out of this Junto developed an early American version of another modern standard – paper currency.  In 1729, according to Franklin’s autobiography, there became a clamor for the printing of more paper currency.  At the time, the colonies were dependant on British currency which was scarce and often unregulated as to its actual worth between colonies.  Franklin writes that in 1723 there was a small sum of paper currency struck and that he observed the great deal of good that it did for the community in terms of  “increasing the trade, employment, and number of inhabitants in the province”.  The debate moved Franklin so greatly that he wrote an anonymous pamphlet on the need for paper currency called “The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency” This pamphlet caused enough of a stir in the area that the Pennsylvania House passed a measure putting it into effect and since his friends in the House suspected Franklin had something to do with the pamphlet, awarded his printing shop with the contract to print the money.

Franklin’s example here shows us how his raw ambition sparked so many opportunities in his life.  His quest for knowledge and learning and his ability to apply what he had learned to the world around him enabled him to go already in these few examples much farther than one would expect the son of a candle maker to go at that time.

While his example of self education might be enough to attribute to his success, Franklin was also aided by his ability to observe the world around him in an extremely clear manner and connect things which others might have missed entirely.

In 1726 Franklin decided to pursue moral perfection.  This task, while sounding nearly impossible and easy to over simplify, was taken upon by Franklin in the most extreme of senses.  He compiled what he thought was a complete list of a common thread of virtues which stood out to him in all of his reading.  These virtues were temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. In order to make these virtues into habits, Franklin noticed that trying to accomplish all of these at once would be foolish.  Instead, he decided to focus on one at a time.  Because of system being focused on the virtues individually, he also placed them in an order he assumed would lead to his mastery of all the virtues through one influencing the other.  Realizing that his system was almost complete, he set in place a system of daily examination so he could track his progress in mastering each virtue.  His system was put into motion with a little book he created and carried with him everywhere.  It consisted of 13 pages, one for each virtue, and on each of the pages a slot for each day of the week.  Franklin’s thinking was to add a dot each time he violated the virtue he was practicing, with his goal ultimately being to see a clean book by the time he was finished.  He practiced each virtue for one week, meaning he went through four courses of the system in a year.  Franklin writes later about the amount of difficulty this project presented to him, but with his determination to see it through he eventually saw his marks diminish until eventually there were none.

I’d ask my reader at this point to try and recall the last time they heard of anyone today attempting a self-imposed feat with this much enthusiasm and dedication?  Odds are that it hasn’t happened, but it should have.  As a society today we’re so focused on traditional means of advancement and achievement in our careers and through formal education that we seldom look to improve upon ourselves and to mold ourselves into fuller, more decent people. As Vaughn was quoted earlier as saying “School and other education constantly proceed upon false principles, and show a clumsy apparatus pointed at a false mark,” we ought to follow Franklin’s example and educate ourselves to be fully educated, rather than to be considered smart in the eyes of society.

Ultimately, the relevance of Benjamin Franklin in modern society relies on the story he left behind.  We often hear stories of celebrities born into poverty and then skyrocketed into fame because of a number one album or a sports contract, but Franklin’s story is one of pure entrepreneurship and dedication to an end goal in life.

Franklin constantly worked.  One might argue that our society forces us to do the same.  While this is factual, Franklin worked differently than the society of today tells us to.  Today we work on our careers and our relationships; we work on getting a mandatory college degree so we can work on our mandatory careers.  Franklin’s example shows us that with the right dedication and right motivation, we can accomplish anything that our dreams desire.  His example teaches us to put aside for a moment everything that society is telling us to become and focus on ourselves and what we really want out of life.  If Franklin listened to what society told him, he would have never began to publish anonymous papers in his brother’s newspaper, nor would he have left his brothers apprenticeship in Boston for Philadelphia.  He made his own way in the world and was praised steadfastly for this later on in life.  Franklin once wrote in regard to his brother beating him during his apprenticeship with him, “I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life.”

Dedicating to ourselves as Franklin did will probably prove difficult as well.  We clearly as a society do not have enough hours in the day amid all of our common distractions.  Television and the internet being both in this category of distractions we can only imagine that if we didn’t have these we would be better off in Franklin’s eyes. He was a noted polymath from his experience as a printer, a statesman, a diplomat, and postmaster and among several other things fluent in six languages (English, French, Spanish, Latin, German, and Italian).  Franklin accomplished these feats through his focus and ability to avoid distractions.  During his autobiography Franklin describes not wanting to play chess with a friend because of the time it wasted.  Instead, he proposed a game to accompany the matches.  Because he and his friend were both learning Italian, Franklin proposed that “the victor in every game should have a right to impose a task, either in parts of the grammar to be got by heart, or in translations, etc., which tasks the vanquished was to perform upon honor, before our next meeting.”  In this, Franklin still managed to learn and better himself without wasting a considerable amount of time.  It is this, dedication to oneself, which we are lacking today.  If we could manage to bash on amid our daily distractions we would each be better for it.

In closing, it should be apparent that Franklin’s model for self dedication has the potential to produce staggeringly positive results.  His works, universal as they are, have a lasting impact on generations of Americans.  They seek to inspire us and our entrepreneurial spirit.  They seek to humble us by teaching us humility.  Franklin’s lessons reach through time to teach us that we’re always capable of bettering ourselves and our communities if we just take the time to do it.  Franklin wrote in his Poor Richards Almanac, “If you have time don’t wait for time.”  I think we all can take something away from that.