April 21, 2025 |

Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues Challenge

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Recently, I stumbled upon reference to Benjamin Franklin’s “13 Virtues” and an exercise on how to incorporate this type of practice into one’s own way of living. Franklin created his virtues in an attempt to arrive at “moral perfection” and you can use his methodology to craft your own challenge to enable growth, wellbeing, and change in your own life.


Here’s the exercise:


  1. Create your list. Pick subjects that you believe will make the most improvement in your life and for which you believe you are particularly in need of improvement. These could be business-focused, creating connections, health and wellness, or simple attitude-shifts on which you would like to engage.
  2. Focus on the first element of the list and keep it at the forefront of your daily thoughts and practice for a week.
  3. After one week, move to the next item on the list and focus on that for a week.
  4. Repeat until you have gone through your list, then start with item one again.
  5. Do this 4 times, and you have completed a full year of practice.


This system helps engrave behaviors into your way of doing things and allows you to practice and develop skills on a single element four times per year.



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