‘Diligence Is the Mother of Good Luck’

“Franklin and Electricity,” circa 1860, by Alfred Jones, for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. (Public Domain) 

Benjamin Franklin’s words about diligence appeared in his “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” which he issued annually for 25 years. Almanacs were popular among 18th-century readers, and this enterprise proved his greatest commercial success. But it wasn’t just “Poor Richard’s Almanac” that brought Franklin wealth and fame.

It was, in fact, diligence.

Diligence, the application of steady, energetic work to a task, is the byword explaining Franklin’s success in so many different endeavors. Other men of his time, such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, also practiced diligence, but it was Franklin who, in his “Autobiography,” shared the secrets to his success, including rules for living and self-improvement and a daily schedule aimed at maximizing productivity. Regarded as an early writer in that most American of genres, the self-help book, Franklin’s advice remains invaluable today.

In “What happened when I followed Ben Franklin’s schedule for a month,” freelance writer Stephanie Vossa, who describes herself as “someone who is obsessed with productivity,” recounts her efforts to follow the Franklin daily regimen. Here is that schedule:

5–8 a.m. Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness; contrive day’s business and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study; and breakfast.

8 a.m.–12 p.m. Work.

12–2 p.m. Read or overlook my accounts, and dine.

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2–6 p.m. Work.

6–10 p.m. Put things in their places, supper, music, or diversion, or conversation; examination of the day.

10 p.m.–5 a.m. Sleep. Powerful Goodness was Franklin’s deistic name for God, so this slot in the morning included time for meditation.

Rising, as Franklin did, at 5 a.m. left Ms. Vossa exhausted, so she took an additional hour’s worth of sleep in the morning. More accustomed to working in shorter stints, she also had difficulty adjusting to Franklin’s two blocks of four hours each scheduled for work, but she adapted by doing her more creative writing first in each block of time, then switching to editing. Franklin’s two-hour break for lunch and reading pleasantly surprised her; she stopped eating in front of her computer, and “the long break,” she writes, “was actually refreshing.”

After completing her experiment, Ms. Vossa mostly reverted to her former routine, though she did block out an hour for lunch away from her computer. What she retained, however, were Franklin’s bookend questions for his daily timetable. At the top of his schedule, he wrote, “The morning question, What good shall I do today?,” and at the bottom, “Evening question, What good have I done today?”

These tools of planning, reflection, and self-examination, as Ms. Vossa and countless others know, can make an enormous difference in our performance. In another online article, for example, “10 Lessons From Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule That Will Double Your Productivity,” Mayo Oshin asks how Franklin managed to get more done than his contemporaries, and then states that “the answer to this question lies in Franklin’s daily schedule.” The writer hits many of the points made by Ms. Vossa, but ends with a different one: “Don’t aim for perfection.” That was a lesson learned and recounted by Franklin himself in his autobiography, where he recognized that he had flaws, many of them, but his schedule and the list of 13 virtues he’d composed gave him “the satisfaction of seeing them diminished.”

Franklin bestowed a sense of purpose on each of his days, followed through on the tasks he had set for himself, and ended by taking inventory of his accomplishments.

And that is the very nature and definition of diligence.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.