Franklin Ran A/B Tests on His Own Soul
Benjamin Franklin wanted to become a better person, so he did the least romantic thing imaginable. He made a list. Thirteen virtues — temperance, silence, order, resolution, the rest — and a little grid, a week per virtue, a black mark in the box every time he blew it. He was basically running instrumentation on himself. Logging events. Watching the dashboard for the metric to move.
Most people find this faintly ridiculous. Self-improvement as a spreadsheet. But Franklin understood something the people rolling their eyes don’t: character is not a mood. It’s a system, and systems get improved by measurement, not sincerity.
The deists believed in a clockwork universe — discoverable, regular laws. What gets forgotten is Franklin turned that lens inward. If the cosmos is a mechanism with rules, so are you. You’re not a soul that occasionally misbehaves, you’re a process with failure modes, and the failure modes are observable if you bother to observe them. He didn’t pray to get better. He tracked himself to get better. The whole Enlightenment fits in the gap between those two verbs.
I do a cheap version and I’m not embarrassed about it. I count problems solved. I count days I shipped. When I wanted to fix my focus I didn’t journal about my feelings, I logged when I drifted and looked for the pattern. Turned out my drift had a schedule, the way a flaky test has a schedule. You can’t fix what you won’t measure, and you can’t measure what you’re too proud to write in a box.
The part people miss: Franklin admitted he never actually hit the virtues. Order beat him for life; he was a brilliant, cluttered man to the end. But he said the attempt made him “a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” That’s the engineer’s relationship to a metric exactly. You’ll never hit 100% uptime. The number is there to pull you, not to be reached. A target you actually hit was set too low.
The trap is thinking measurement is cold. People picture the instrumented life as joyless, all grids and no grace. Opposite. The unmeasured life is the one ruled by mood — disciplined Tuesday, feral Thursday, no idea why, because you logged nothing. Franklin’s grid wasn’t a cage. It was a flashlight. It showed him where he actually was instead of where he vaguely felt he was.
So when I want to change something real about how I work, I don’t start with resolve. Resolve is a feeling and feelings don’t survive a hard week. I start with a counter. Make the thing visible, give it a number, and let the number do the moralizing you were going to do badly anyway.
Franklin treated himself like a thing he was building. He was right to. You are the longest project you’ll ever ship, and you don’t even have a log file open.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.