Ben Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was also a renowned polymath and a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, Freemason and also a postmaster.
dabtvsaseworld presents you with the great things he did that you can copy.
At the age of 20, in the quest for trying to improve himself and his community, he conceived a bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.
To achieve this, he created a list of thirteen virtues and set out to understand and master one of them in a week.
After this, he was able to learn how difficult it to be virtuous. Yet, he did not allow this negativity to get the better of him, instead he embarked on another self improvement scheme which was more accessible than leading a perfect virtuous life.
At the age of 21, he founded a club, Junto (a latin word) which in English means “to join”. The club had twelve members some of which are a mathematician, shoemaker and mechanic who met every Friday evening at a tavern in Philadelphia.
This club was a club for mutual improvement and the members aimed to become better citizens and for them to contribute positively towards the society.
At such meetings, they discussed issues which were related to morality, politics and philosophy. At the end of the day, they presented and debated the essays that they had written.
This time around, with the help of his friends, he succeeded. They went ahead to build a library, fire brigade, a hospital and a school, all of which are still remembered today.
The members of Junto met for nearly four decades and according to Franklin, it “was the best school of philosophy, morality and politics as then existed in the province.”
About ten years after the first meeting of the Junto, Franklin wrote that, “The noblest question in the world is, “what good may I do in it?” More than three hundred years later, the importance of this question is undiminished.
We live in a society where most people are now lovers of themselves. If we decide just like Franklin to look for things that would reduce decadence and follow things that would make our society better, then our society would become a better place.
It should be noted that in line with this, at Havard, a group of undergraduates have started a like minded club called the Franklin Fellowship where the twelve students in the club meet weekly to discuss topics that could help save the world.
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