Ben Franklin used a system of improvement that we can learn from. The idea is simple: focus on one thing at a time.
Ben Franklin used a system of improvement that we can learn from. The idea is simple: focus on one thing at a time.
Happy Friday, everybody. You're listening to another Friday Refill episode of Developer Tea. Nothing that we say on this show is particularly new. A lot of what we're talking about is discussed in books, in philosophy, hundreds of years gone by most of the time. And so it should come as no surprise to you that when we talk about this stuff on Fridays, when I try to give you something to think about, it's probably something you've heard before. But it bears repeating. It's worth repeating. Some of the things that are so easy to forget. And I find that a lot of the time when I'm recording these episodes, I'm doing it as much as repeating a mantra back to myself as I am to you. And this is something, in today's episode, this is something that I need to hear. And I'm trying to take that outside perspective and give myself some advice. Very often I find that when I do this, other people, they tend to need the advice too. Maybe not everybody who's listening to this, but some of you will. And that advice is very simple today. When you are trying to improve, do it in one area at a time. When you are trying to improve, which is pretty much all of us, most of the time, we're probably trying to improve on something. When you're trying to improve. Do it in one area at a time. Now, why is this? Well, it's pretty clear. We've talked about focus on this show as a overarching theme for the vast majority of episodes. Focus will come up. And limiting our focus to fewer things is more kind of in line with the way that the human brain works. And we're going to be more effective. If we try to improve in one area at a time. And realistically, if we were to try to improve in every area at all times, it's most likely that we will run into a few conundrums. We'll run into a situation where if we're trying to optimize for one particular aspect of our personality, for example, well, making one decision is going to be better than another decision, which might be optimizing for another. A different aspect of our personality. And so it makes sense to kind of play this game of roulette. To cycle through the various kind of virtues, for example, that we want to practice. And I choose that word virtues because I want to revisit something that I'm fairly certain we've already talked about, but we'll talk about it again today because it is relevant. It's Ben Franklin's virtues. Yeah. 13 necessary virtues that can be found in his autobiography. And I'm going to read them out. They're temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. And I am reading, by the way, from a blog post on Farnham Street. And I'm going to read just the excerpt, a little bit of the excerpt. And I encourage you to go read the blog post that goes a little bit more into detail. About each of those virtues that Franklin listed out. Franklin advised, right? This is straight from the blog post. My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time. And when I should be the master of that, then to proceed to another and so on till I should have gone through the 13. And as the previous acquisition, if some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arranged them with that view as they stand above temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up. And guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquired and established, silence would be more easy. And my desire being to gain knowledge. At the same time that I improved in virtue. And he goes on to say essentially that all of these are kind of stacked on purpose. We're starting with temperance because temperance kind of feeds into the others. We talked about something very similar to this on the show, which is the idea of stacking your skills. You can do this in virtues, the way that Franklin is laid out here, but you can also do this with your hard skills, right? You can learn something that kind of cascades into learning other things. That makes sense. Right? So, makes learning other things either more valuable or easier. So, why are we talking about this with reference to focus or focusing on one thing? Well, you notice that Franklin pointed out that he's going to kind of cycle through these, these 13 virtues and start back at the beginning whenever he's gone through all 13. And the idea here is that you're practicing one at a time. And the practice that you're doing for one bleeds into the next. And that you're in a position where you're going to do one at a time. And that you're able to focus, right? He specifically calls out the idea that he didn't want to be distracted. And so, there's so much in this. And I highly recommend, by the way, that you read his autobiography. It's quite long, but it's worth the read. So, there is, there's a lot here to unpack. And it's not just Franklin that does this. But when we're trying to improve in an area, whether it's technical or virtuous, right? Or soft, soft skills or our values that we want to practice. It helps us to be able to focus in one area. And to evaluate ourselves on that area, right? So, there are certain times, for example, in your career, there's certain times in your life. So, even certain times of the year, various seasons where practicing a particular thing might be better suited to that time period, to that phase of your life. And that's what we're trying to do. And that's what we're trying to do. And that's what we're trying to do. And that's what we're trying to do. So, this is the kind of the basic homework that I want you to take home here. Look at the things that you've been trying to do all together. The things that you've been trying to be. The variety of virtues that you're trying to practice. What I find is that when I'm trying to practice multiple things, when I'm trying to be multiple things to multiple people, I also can't seem to rest well. I can't rest well. can't seem to turn off my monkey brain, if you want to call it that. I can't turn off the racing thoughts and sit down and simply let the day go. And so once I start practicing this idea of focusing on one thing at a time and being okay, not improving in every possible area of my life, but instead choosing, choosing to be exclusive to one area, giving everything that I have, all of my attention to that person, to that moment. I find that my rest, my weekends, you know, all of these things that we talk about on Fridays, all of them tend to improve. So as you move into your weekend, think about those things, all those things that you've been trying to be. What are the things that are distracting or pulling one thing from the other? I want you to choose one of those things and consciously let go, the other one, consciously let go of the rest. If there's multiples and instead focus on how you can improve in that one area. Thanks so much for listening to this Friday refill episode of developer T. I hope you enjoyed this week's episodes. We did have a little bit of an audio hiccup on that first part of the interview with Katie Milkman. Uh, but hopefully you all got the, the, uh, corrected version of that episode. Of course, we will have three more episodes. We'll be back with another episode of developer T. So until then, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Enjoy your tea.