History
The Original Self-Help Bro
Did one of our Founding Fathers invent growth-hacking?
Nobody is more irritating than the know-it-all self-help influencers telling us how to get more out of our day. Where did they all come from?
Benjamin Franklin helped write the Declaration of Independence. He invented the Franklin stove. And the lightning rod. And bifocals! He played a leading role in shaping our country. It’s impossible to imagine what the United States would have been like without him.
It’s impossible not to admire him.
But also? He seems to have been the original growth-hacking dude. Thanks for all the ingenious ways you helped build our nation. But did you have to also stick us with a tradition of self-help bullshit?
Just listen to these quotes:
“Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” This is the exact same advice all the efficiency bros offer.
“Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.” Yep, he was an organization life hack dude.
“Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.” Doesn’t that sound almost like something an incel or Jordan Peterson might spout?
But don’t worry, good old Ben got up to plenty of venery. He had a reputation as a womanizer and never legally married anybody; his “wife” was already married to someone else. That’s right. He lived his entire “married” life with someone else’s wife.
He even came up with a sort of app.
He describes how he “made a little book” that he turned into a chart that he used to keep track of how well he kept to his list of personal virtues. Each day he marked how well he met his goals. If he were alive today, he’d have YouTube videos that would hawk his Virtue App.
He advised a vegetarian diet.
“When about sixteen years of age I happened to meet with a book … recommending a vegetable diet. I determined to go into it.” Yep. These people always want to recommend a certain diet, don’t they?
But then at some point, some cooked fish smelled so good that he was able to come up with a justification to allow himself to enjoy it. Since fish eat other fish, he decided it would be OK for him to eat them, too. Tell me this doesn’t sound familiar to you.
He belonged to a secret society.
The Junto had just 12 members, but each member was encouraged to start other secret clubs with the same aims. He found he could influence public affairs via the resulting channels without anybody realizing what he was up to. You can almost think of it as an influencing campaign on social media.
All in all, we have to admire Franklin, even if he does sound insufferable. At least he had real accomplishments. Do most of the lifestyle coaches out there telling us how we should order our days, how to organize our businesses, what we should eat and how we should conduct our relationships have similar solid accomplishments? Not so much.
I’ll agree to stop being annoyed by any growth-hacking coach who can accomplish a hundredth of what Franklin did.
Source: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Public domain content presented by the Independence Hall Association, ushistory.org.
If you like this sort of thing:
About me:
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me or throw me a fish! You can also find me on Substack, Twitter or LinkedIn.