Podcast: Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
How did the runaway fugitive Benjamin Franklin become a writer, printer, inventor, philosopher and diplomat and still find time to help found the United States?
Part of the answer is easy: he was a self-made polymath.
That means he trained himself to study and succeed in multiple skills and disciplines with surgical focus.
The key to learning across so many fields?
Habits.
Routine processes and procedures that still work to this day.
In fact, they’re more valuable than ever.
On this page, you’ll learn how Franklin built one of the sharpest minds in all of human history.
Even better:
You’ll learn how you can use the same habits and techniques to learn faster, think deeply, and integrate knowledge across multiple fields.
Let’s dive in.
What Makes Benjamin Franklin a Polymath?
The term “polymath” has been used for hundreds of years to describe a person of various learning.
But we’re not talking about productivity nerds, which is sometimes how the term is now used in our time.
Franklin, like Thomas Jefferson and other polymaths I’ve covered on this website, built expertise in multiple areas through the power of habit.
It’s important to understand this fact because Franklin was not born into privilege. He wasn’t a savant.
But the specific activities he engaged in make him one of the most influential minds of his time. He influences us to this day.
And his learning habits are proof that polymathy isn’t about talent. It’s about practicing the right habits.
Benjamin Franklin’s Most Important Learning Habits
As we get into my discussion of how Franklin learned, you might think that some of the habits I’m describing belong more to the realm of productivity.
Although that might be true, to succeed in everything from science and innovation to politics and diplomacy, Franklin’s biggest habit is the most important of all.
That’s because it creates reflective thinking. And when you have that, you learn from your own habits, enabling personal growth over time as you learn from your own journey.
With that point in mind, here are what I believe are the most important lessons about learning, overcoming obstacles and long-term focus.
One: The Focusing Power of Franklin’s Reading Deadlines
Franklin worked for a time in his brother’s printing shop.
To educate himself, he would quietly borrow books from apprentice booksellers and read them overnight. Then, before anyone noticed, he would return them.
As he wrote about this habit:
“Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned early in the morning, lest it should be missed or wanted.”
This early habit of reading against the clock focused his mind and deepened his memory.
He also chose books written in modern styles, which would influence his communication skills.
But the point is that Benjamin chose to become one of the most well-read minds of his era.
And when he read, he wasn’t just reading. He was training.
I’ve also read against the clock for years and deadlines are indeed powerful. Check out my guide to reading faster for more information.
Two: The Expansive Power of Conversation
Franklin didn’t just read books. He also read people.
That’s because he understood something that many people who want to become polymathic miss:
The right conversation with the right person can teach you more than a hundred books. Faster.
In order to make sure he was having plenty of the right conversations, Benjamin created the Junto in Philadelphia.
This was a weekly discussion group where a variety of tradesmen, writers and thinkers shared ideas.
It was not just a social circle.
Rather, the Junto was a living, breathing social system that allowed its members to learn from one another.
As Jessica Borger recently wrote in a scholarly paper titled The Power of Networking in Science and Academia, networking remains just as important in our time. If not more so.
As Franklin wrote with reference to the importance of relationships:
“A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.”
Three: Accumulating Knowledge Through Questioning
Franklin wrote a lot and was clearly highly opinionated.
But Walter Isaacson highlights in his excellent biography, Franklin wrote that knowledge “was obtained by the use of the ear rather than of the tongue.”
To make sure he had plenty to listen to, Franklin stimulated conversation through questions.
If you’d like to emulate the process, check out my full guide on how and why you should question everything.
The key is to understand that Franklin didn’t ask questions to impress others.
He used dialogue to help refine his thinking, uncover new perspectives and help himself and others understand more.
All the reading to deadlines he did surely helped stimulate his curiosity and stockpile a number of questions.
But the deliberate practice of questioning helped make the process automatic, literally forging it into a habit thanks to what scientists call procedural memory.
Make questioning while you meet with people and as you study a habit of mind. It will help you think differently, learn more and experience tremendous growth.
And the best part is that the more you practice asking questions, the better your questioning will become.
Four: Setting Rules and Keeping Them
Just as reading to deadlines focuses the mind and memory, developing codes of conduct frees the mind to pay much more open attention to what you want to learn.
That’s why Benjamin was a fanatic for creating rules.
But he didn’t just create them.
He wrote them out, tested them, enforced them and evolved them over time.
For example, he crafted thirteen rules around a list of virtues. You can find them in his autobiography, specifically the section where he talks about his goal of achieving moral perfection.
But he didn’t stop at self-discipline for himself.
When he formed the Union Fire Company from a group of volunteers, he wrote bylaws. If members broke the rules around attending meetings or taking care of equipment, they paid fines.
Likewise with the Junto. Members followed written rules to help ensure an environment where their mutual focus on learning from one another thrived.
You might think Franklin’s approach is a bit old-fashioned. But in our time, internet companies like stickK enable people to set up commitment contracts. If they don’t achieve goals they’ve set for themselves, the company will send a certain amount of the users money to a charity or other designated party.
Although your mileage may vary from setting rules for yourself, habitually setting up codes of conduct and sticking to them can create a framework for learning.
Personally, I use rules as accelerators for my learning goals often, such as rewarding myself for getting through difficult books I don’t want to read. For example, I won’t let myself get a book for pleasure until I’ve finished one that I’ve committed to completing for my research.
I find that accountability works best when it’s unavoidable, visible and public. That’s one reason I made a video about my in-progress bookshop Memory Palace project.
Although many challenges have made me want to give up along the way, my rule that I finish the projects I start helps me push through. As does making the projects I start public.
Five: Masterful Note-Taking
As a student of multiple topics, Franklin developed his own shorthand.
These days, you can learn Gregg shorthand relatively quickly, sparing yourself the hassle of creating a system from scratch.
But the larger point is to learn how to take notes effectively.
For picking up this powerful study skill, you can consult my guide to note-taking.
You can also explore one of the core techniques Thomas Jefferson used, an approach now called the Zettelkasten method.
Whichever method you choose, it’s helpful to understand that many of Franklin’s notes were not main points copied out verbatim.
He formulated the ideas in his own words, often reconstructing the ideas in the form of Socratic dialogues.
Franklin even invented names for different personas and had these characters help him explore and refine a variety of ideas.
You can think of this approach as an advanced form of active, transformational note-taking. If you want to be as polymathic as Franklin, avoid passive reading and seek the active synthesis of ideas by engaging them deeply in your own words.
Six: Writing to Learn
Franklin didn’t stop at reformulating his notes. He treated long-form writing as a laboratory for learning.
As a self-taught teenager marked by the most common traits of an autodidact, Franklin copied essays he admired.
Then, he would attempt to rewrite them from memory a few days later.
Even more importantly, he studied grammar and rhetoric to help him craft better persuasion skills. As he wrote:
This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engaged in promoting.
Franklin also wrote correspondences with people around the world. When he could not learn from available journals or his social circle, he wrote to thinkers across Europe.
They helped him design his own experiments, and his habit of regularly communicating in writing through the mail was tremendously fruitful.
Writing also helped provide Franklin with a fantastic memory for quotes and short sayings packed with wisdom.
And of course, writing made him incredibly wealthy. This habit literally bought him more books and more time to read them. He retired from his business at just 42 years of age.
Seven: The Synergy of Synced Habits
Although we often think of polymaths as people who have established mastery in multiple domains, Franklin unified his skills wherever possible.
His strategies for competing with a fellow newspaper printer named Andrew Bradford reveal synergistic thinking.
To do this, Franklin built a multimedia empire over time. He combined the ownership of multiple printing presses in various regions with also creating and owning products.
On top of owning the presses that printed his own catalogs, magazines, almanacs and newspapers, Franklin also wrote content for them.
From there he conquered distribution, meaning that he could profit by taking care of mailing his own products.
These strategies compounded the value of the habits he used to accomplish and maintain all of these processes.
As you work on your own development as a polymath consider the many areas where you can build new skills on top of the foundational abilities you’ve already developed.
In the terms Peter Burke offers in his book, The Polymath, Franklin was a centripetal polymath. This means that he built his many skills to support a singular vision.
Other polymaths might stack on skills more randomly. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but you’ll wind up missing the benefits of syncing your habits synergistically the way Franklin did.
What We Can Learn From Franklin’s Daily Schedule
There’s no mystery to how Franklin fit all of his skills development and maintenance activities into his day. He lays out the process in his autobiography.
If you look at his illustration above, you’ll see an early version of what we now call “time boxing.”
But more important than giving his time organization habits a name, not that he did not cram. He crafted space for asking questions, removing clutter and thinking reflectively.
When you design your day around thinking, you’ll live more deliberately.
Your mind will have more space for focusing on what you want to learn. And your mind will be freer to integrate what you’re learning.
To emulate Franklin’s process:
- Begin and end each day with one reflective thought
- Protect and assign your thinking time
- Plan and track your exact behaviors, not just what you accomplish
In other words, manage the meaning of your time. This will help align your activities into habits worth having.
Franklin’s Greatest Achievements as a Polymath
Everyone will have their own favorite accomplishment from Franklin’s incredible life.
Here are the ones that stand out most to me.
Science and Innovation
Franklin’s most famous experiment proved that lightning was electricity.
But he didn’t rely on intuition. He studied the topic deeply, including different ways to test his hypothesis safely.
He used some of the habits we’ve discussed above to contact other inventors and scientific-minded people.
As a result, he:
- Invented the lightning rod, preventing destructive fires.
- Created bifocal lenses, solving a personal problem that still helps people around the world.
- Charted the Gulf Stream, helping massively improve Atlantic navigation.
Franklin went beyond curiosity and the relentless consumption of information we see today.
He tested what he learned, applied it and shared his results, inspiring many other “citizen scientists” to do the same.
Politics and Diplomacy
As a student of classical philosophy, Franklin understood the political theories of his time incredibly well.
His self-directed reading habits included international law so that he could practice the highest level of public service.
As a result, he helped:
- Draft the Declaration of Independence.
- Negotiate the Treaty of Paris.
- Serve as a cultural and political ambassador between America and Europe.
Although some people attribute Franklin’s success to charisma, that’s not the full story.
He studied people carefully in addition to being a practitioner of rhetorical tools of persuasion. He turned everything he learned into skills that he leveraged.
Philanthropy and Civic Initiatives
Franklin used his knowledge and business acumen to serve others.
The list of examples is long, but includes:
- Founding lending libraries.
- Establishing volunteer fire departments.
- Organizing street cleaning and mutual aid groups.
All of these came from Franklin’s passion for people.
But their success was aided by the habits that structured his interdisciplinary study efforts.
Writing and Publishing
As a writer and publisher myself, Franklin has inspired me for years.
Everything from his habit of reconstructing what he’d read from memory to building a multimedia conglomerate has given me insight into how to enjoy success of my own.
Franklin’s lifelong writing habits led him to:
- Create Poor Richard’s Almanack, where he shared his practical wisdom and philosophy.
- Establish a lucrative career in printing, publishing and distribution.
- Tackle politics through satire by writing dozens of pseudonymous essays
Stacked, Not Scattered
If there’s one major lesson to take from Benjamin Franklin’s learning life, it’s that he leveraged the power of structure and balance.
His achievements were the product of interleaving:
- Curiosity
- Study
- Systems development
- Experimentation
- Analysis
- Sharing
It was like a perfect circle.
And one that anyone can emulate.
But if you find that your mind is scattered, I suggest getting some memory training.
That might sound like a leap in logic, but if you’ve enjoyed the insights about Franklin you’ve read today, I have good reason to believe that Franklin’s memory was sharp.
It’s part of the explanation for why he could pay attention to what mattered and prioritize the right habit stacks at the right times.
To help you get your memory sharper so you have more focus and clarity, consider signing up for my free course.
Its exercises will help you improve your working memory so you can process more ideas faster.
And prioritize them like Franklin.
So what do you say?
As far as I can tell, Franklin wasn’t born a polymath.
Nor did he wait to be taught.
He used daily discipline, deadlines, intentional habits and a relentless drive to help others enjoy an incredible life of learning.
His polymathy was forged.
And that means you can forge your own polymathy too.
Start with one habit, one question and one page in a journal.
And keep going. Before you know it, learning multiple skills and fields of knowledge will fill your entire being with accomplishment and joy.
