The Benjamin Franklin 13 Virtues Chart, and Where It Broke

2026-10-04 · Yesterself

The chart is easy to find and easy to misread. Thirteen rows, seven columns, a virtue and a one-line precept at the head of the page. It circulates as a productivity template, which is roughly what it was, except that the man who built it also left a candid account of running it for years and losing to one of its own rows.

He describes the system in Part Two of his Autobiography, written in 1784 when he was seventy-eight. The project began in his twenties, so the account is a retrospective across fifty-odd years by a man with nothing left to prove about it.

The thirteen, with their precepts

Each virtue carries a short precept underneath, and that is the part most copies discard. A name on its own is an argument waiting to happen.

1. Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
2. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
3. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
4. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; that is, waste nothing.
6. Industry. Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
9. Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
11. Tranquillity. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
12. Chastity. His precept concerns the use of sex, and ends with not injuring anyone's peace or reputation.
13. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

The sequence is a dependency chain rather than a ranking. Temperance comes first because a clear head is the precondition for the vigilance everything else demands. Humility was a late addition, after a Quaker friend told him he was generally thought proud and overbearing.

The page

He made a small book with a page allotted to each virtue. Each page was ruled in red ink into seven columns, one per day, headed with the day's letter, and crossed by thirteen red lines, each beginning with a virtue's initial. Every evening he examined the day and put a small black spot in the cell where a fault belonged.

The first version was paper, and he scraped old marks out with a knife until the holes wore through. He moved the tables onto the ivory leaves of a memorandum book, where pencil marks wiped off with a wet sponge. The record was built to be erased, not kept.

How a week ran

One virtue at a time. In the first week he guarded strictly against any offense against Temperance and left the other twelve to their ordinary chance, though he still marked their faults each evening. If the Temperance line came through clean, he judged the habit strong enough to add the next row on top of it. His image was a garden: you do not weed every bed at once.

Thirteen weeks made a complete course, and four courses filled a year. That is why there are thirteen virtues rather than ten or twenty.

The examination had a fixed slot in his daily scheme, in the evening, beside supper and putting things back in their places. The first result he reports is not triumph. He was surprised to find himself much fuller of faults than he had imagined, and then satisfied to watch the spots grow fewer.

Where it broke

Order defeated him, and he says so without hedging. He found himself incorrigible in it. Partly because he had not been accustomed to order as a boy, and his memory was good enough that disorganization rarely cost him anything he noticed at the time. The structural reason is more interesting. The scheme assumed a man who owned his own hours. A journeyman printer could keep it, he wrote; a master printer, who must receive people of business at their hours rather than his, could not.

Then the speckled axe. A man buys an axe head and wants the whole face ground as bright as the edge. The smith agrees, on condition the man turn the wheel. He turns, stops to check, turns again, and at last says he will take it as it is. He thinks he likes a speckled axe best. That, Franklin says, is how a fault is usually abandoned: not by deciding to keep it, but by tiring and rebranding the result as taste.

His verdict is one of the plainest sentences in the book. He never arrived at the perfection he was ambitious of and fell far short of it, yet judged himself a better and happier man for the attempt. In old age he still felt the want of Order very sensibly. The courses thinned too, from four a year to one, then one in several years, then none. He carried the little book anyway.

Running a thirteen-week rotation now

That candid half is what makes the other half usable, and the part that reliably fails is the return trip. A course only pays if you read week one at the end of week thirteen, and almost nobody does. Yesterself is a journaling app built around that problem. It works as correspondence with yourself: each morning it delivers one letter drawn from your own past writing, and any sentence can be postmarked to a future date and arrives on that day. Postmark your precepts to the first day of the next course and the standard you set comes back to be judged rather than remembered. There is no account, no email and no password; your identity is twelve words you hold, and the server stores text it cannot read. It is not released yet, so the waiting list is the only thing to join.

Borrow the structure, and be careful with the bookkeeping.

• Write the precept, not just the name. Patience is unmarkable. Let the other person finish the sentence is markable. If you cannot say what would count as a fault, the row fills with mood instead of events.
• Use fewer than thirteen if you have fewer than thirteen. Nine items give a nine-week rotation. Thirteen exists to divide fifty-two, not because there are thirteen virtues.
• Mark instances, not scores. A dot means the thing happened once. A grade out of ten is a verdict on you, and verdicts are what turn this brittle.
• Put three words beside the dot. Franklin's grid recorded that a fault occurred, not what it was. A spot annotated second drink, tired is reviewable in three months. A bare spot is not.
• Expect one row to be your Order, and name it early. When a row stays speckled through two courses you have two honest options: rewrite the precept until it fits the life you actually have, or accept the row and stop paying it attention. Both beat grinding the axe.
• Close each week with a sentence, not a total. Spot counts do not compare across weeks. You get better at noticing faults, so a rising count can mean sharper attention rather than worse behavior.
• A missed day is a missed day. It is not a debt and there is nothing to backfill. Franklin's own courses dropped to one every few years and he did not treat the gap as a verdict.

At the end of the thirteenth week, read the whole course before starting the next one. Not the counts, the annotations. That hour is the only place where a record turns into something you know, and it is the step his own thinning courses suggest went first.

One caution he did not need and we do. Scoring your own character every evening can slide from useful noticing into something harsher. If a practice like this leaves you feeling worse rather than more observant, put it down; if that persists, it is worth talking to a doctor or therapist. This is not medical advice.

The chart's reputation is that it made Franklin great. His own account says something smaller and more usable. A rotation kept his attention on one thing at a time, the record told him things about himself he had not known, one row never came clean, and he counted the whole thing worth doing anyway.

Common questions

What are Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues?

Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquillity, Chastity and Humility. Each one carries a short precept in his Autobiography that fixes the behavior he meant, and that precept is the part most reproductions of the chart drop.

How did the 13 virtues chart actually work?

A page per virtue, ruled in red ink into seven day columns crossed by thirteen virtue rows. He gave one virtue a week of strict attention while still marking a small black spot for every fault against any of the thirteen, so thirteen weeks made one course and four courses filled a year.

Which virtue did Franklin fail at?

Order. He wrote that he found himself incorrigible in it, blamed a childhood without the habit and a memory good enough to hide what disorder cost him, and said that in old age he still felt the want of it very sensibly.

What is the speckled axe story?

Franklin's image for giving up. A man wants the whole head of a new axe ground bright, turns the smith's wheel himself until the work exhausts him, and finally decides he likes a speckled axe best. Franklin used it for how people settle for a fault and call it preference.

Is it worth copying the chart today?

The rotation is worth borrowing and the scoring is what turns brittle. Write a plain precept for each item, mark instances rather than grading yourself, and close each week with a sentence instead of a total.