#62 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

**David Senra** (0:00)
Imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with, I sit down to write them for you. Having emerged from the poverty and obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a state of affluence and some degree of reputation in the world, and having gone so far through life with considerable share of felicity, actually I had to look that word up, felicity means happiness, the conducing means I made use of, my posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own situations, and therefore fit to be imitated. Okay, so that's the beginning of the book that I want to talk to you about today, which is The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. And the part I just read to you is actually a letter that he's writing to his son, William. At the time, Ben is in his 60s, and he's kind of explicitly stating the goal of his autobiography, which is in parallel the goal of this podcast. He's saying, hey, I've had a lot of fortunate experiences in my life, I've learned some things, and I'm gonna tell you the things I learned, so if you like them, if you find them agreeable, you can actually imitate and adapt into your own life. So if this is your first time listening to Founders, welcome, my name is David. The concept behind this podcast is pretty straightforward. Every week, I read a biography or an autobiography of an entrepreneur, and I just try to pull out ideas that we can all use in our life.
So before we get into the rest of the book, it may seem a little strange that I picked Ben Franklin as a subject for a podcast on entrepreneurship, but he very much was an entrepreneur. So I always talk about this idea that I think it's very useful to collect ideas, because you never know when you're going to use them.
Case in point is, several years ago, I was listening to or watching this podcast that used to exist. It's called Foundation. It was created by the founder of DIG, Kevin Rose. And on the podcast, he actually is interviewing Elon Musk. And he asks Elon the question, you know, that you started companies really early, you were very young.
How did you, like, did you read, like, how did you learn business? Like, how did you, did you read a lot of business books?
And what Elon said, the answer to that question stuck in my mind for several years, and it influenced my decision to start this podcast. And he says, I didn't read very many general business books. I like biographies and autobiographies. I think those are helpful. He then he talked about, he said, I liked both Franklin's autobiography, which the book we're covering today, and the biography by Isaacson, that's Walter Isaacson, the author. And then Elon elaborates, like, why, what's useful about learning about Ben Franklin. He says, he was an entrepreneur. He started from nothing. He was basically a runaway kid. He created this printing business. He also did science and politics. He's one of the people I most admire. So I knew it was only a matter of time till I would do a podcast on this book. I also did it a long time ago before this podcast was just focused on on entrepreneurs. I read Isaacson's book on Ben Franklin, did a podcast on it, but then I deleted it because I didn't know what direction to go in. So I may wind up rereading that and doing like a Benjamin Franklin part two. But for the meanwhile, the autobiography is a perfectly good tool to use to get some ideas directly from the mind of Ben Franklin. So I'm just going to move through some of these are going to be stories. Someone's just going to be quotes like this is just an aphorism on vanity. And he says, most people dislike vanity and others, whatever share they have of it themselves. But I give it a fair quarter whenever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor.
So let me read that sentence again. He says, most people dislike vanity and others, whatever share they have of it themselves. So people don't like you to take pride in your own accomplishments, even though we all do that ourselves. We just don't want to display it outwardly. But I give it a fair quarter whenever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor. So he has a little counterintuitive point. He's saying, I understand you don't like this, but I actually think it's beneficial for people to have pride in their accomplishments. So I found that thought interesting.