Meet Benjamin Franklin: The Man Who Invented the Self-Improvement Club

The apprentice who ran

Born in Boston in 1706, the fifteenth of seventeen children, Franklin was apprenticed at twelve to his older brother James, a printer. When James refused to print his writing, the sixteen-year-old invented a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood, slid her letters under the print-shop door at night, and watched his brother publish them to acclaim. When the trick came out, the beating was severe enough that he broke his indenture and ran — arriving in Philadelphia at seventeen with, by his own account, very little.

A club for getting better

In 1727 he founded the Junto: a small group of tradesmen and artisans who met on Friday evenings to debate morals, politics and natural philosophy, and to ask what each of them had read, observed, or could do for the others.

Out of that one club came a startling amount of a city. The members pooled their books, which became the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731 — a subscription library, the first of its kind in America. Then a volunteer fire company. Then a hospital, an academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Philosophical Society. He did not invent institutions so much as notice that a group of ordinary people meeting regularly could build one.

The patents he never filed

He wrote that in his Autobiography, explaining why he refused a patent on the Franklin stove — and he kept to it. The lightning rod, the stove, bifocals: no patents, no royalties, given away. He had already made enough from printing and Poor Richard’s Almanack to retire from business at forty-two, and spent the remaining forty-odd years on science, invention and public life.

The 1752 kite experiment established that lightning was electrical. The lightning rod that followed saved an unknowable number of buildings and lives, and earned him nothing.

Thirteen virtues, tracked in a notebook

The Autobiography also contains one of the first self-improvement systems on record: thirteen virtues — temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, humility — worked one at a time, with a ruled chart and a mark for every daily failure.

He is candid that he never mastered them. Order in particular defeated him for life. He kept the chart anyway.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you want to build something with other people rather than alone. The Junto is the ancestor of every mastermind group, this one included — and he will ask what you have done for the others at the table lately.