I share his opinion what we measure,

[jrineakter]

Then he says that he quickly realized, Benjamin Franklin, that it was much harder to do than he had imagined. He said to himself: "Well, actually, it seems simple, because if I know evil and I know good, I just have to act and there you go, I'll stop evil", but he realized that it was harder than he imagined, because, he said or he said, habits take advantage of inattention. So, for him, in fact, it's just because basically we have habits, we're not attentive and so we act badly, when we should act well. So, his solution was to set up a system to be as attentive as possible and so that being moral, therefore, doing good, becomes a default behavior. So, that is to say that he wanted to get into the habit of being a moral person, of having perfect morality. And he wanted to do this out of habit.

So, what he did… I find his system very interesting, very clever and very simple. He defined 13 virtues. I'm not going to list them all. If you're interested, you can find all of these virtues on the internet. There was, for example, temperance, the fact of not consuming food or drink to excess; silence, knowing how to be quiet and listen; sincerity, therefore, not lying, really saying what you think; tranquility, not being constantly doing things or thinking about things, being quiet, calm; humility, that, he added later, was his 13th virtue. He explains in his autobiography that he started with 12 virtues and that he added a 13th precisely which was humility, because he sometimes had a tendency to brag a little, etc.

And actually, what he was saying is, he'd rather have more than less. He didn't want to lump a bunch of virtues together under one theme, he really wanted to break them down so that they iraq whatsapp number data were pretty easy to follow. Because what he wanted to do was be specific, and he focused on one at a time. So every week he had one virtue and he would go from one virtue to another, week to week.

And the key to all of this, because he wanted to build a habit, and on this,we can easily put our attention on what we measure. What we don't measure, well we're going to say to ourselves: "That's okay, I have nothing to complain about."

I'll give you a simple example. If you allow yourself to eat chocolate whenever you want, without measuring, you'll say: "Oh, I eat chocolate every two or three days." On the other hand, if you start measuring, marking it off, every time you eat chocolate, you'll realize that in fact you eat it every day, but you're lying to yourself.

So the idea was, for him, to do a daily examination. And so, he had a table with the virtue of the week which was at the very top, a short description of the virtue, and the days of the week. And if he didn't respect the virtue, for example the virtue of temperance, if he didn't respect it, well he would put a cross... no, a point. He, he made a point to say "I failed" in his little notebook. And he would focus on the virtue of the week, but in the evening, he would still ask himself: "OK, did I respect the other virtues?" without that being the focus, but to see if he had a lot of points on his sheet.

And he said, "I was surprised to see that I was full of flaws," like all of us actually. As soon as we measure, we're going to say to ourselves, "Oh, well, I'm far from perfect." And he used this system for years, he says that it helped him to really focus on his moral progression. So, if it helped him, we're talking about Benjamin Franklin, one of the people who did the most in his life, if it helped him, it can help us, there's no doubt about it.

So, I decided to implement it. So, I chose six virtues, which I will probably tell you about in another episode, and I have been following them for two months. So, I implemented a system close to his, and it helps me. It helps me because it allows me to measure things. The idea is to keep it simple, because if you build a system that is too complex and too difficult to follow, it is a little bit, I think, doomed to failure, because you will simply give up. But by simply following it, well it takes a few minutes a day. And between us, our moral perfection deserves that we devote a few minutes a day to it.

So, I invite you to think about that. You can find a lot of information on this exercise that was made famous by Benjamin Franklin. For the rest, I admit that I was not very excited by his autobiography, because, well, there you go, some passages are interesting, but it's true that what interested me more was this aspect of morality.

I'll leave you with a quote from Blaise Pascal, the famous 17th century French mathematician and philosopher, who said that a person's virtue is measured not by their exceptional efforts, but by their daily behavior. There you go, I'll let you think about that. But basically, it means that we can't judge morality, virtue, we can say the morality of someone, by looking at what they do in an exceptional way, but we can judge the morality of someone by looking at what they do every day. And it's true that sometimes we tend to praise a person who does a beautiful moral thing, when the rest of the time, this person is full of vice. So, let's focus on morality as a habit and not as an isolated act. There you go.