Steve Shipside - Benjamin Franklins The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation

Copyright Infinite Ideas Limited, 2008

The right of Steve Shipside to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by

Infinite Ideas Limited

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Oxford

OX1 3LD

United Kingdom

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ISBN 978-1-904902-84-3

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BRILLIANT IDEAS

Turning the pages of Benjamin Franklins The Way to Wealth is a bit like going into the attic of your parents house and sifting through all the old family belongings. There are so many aphorisms and bite-sized bits of homely wisdom that you begin to wonder if this was what your granny read before going to bed every night of her life. Early to bed and early to rise,no gains without pains, little strokes fell great oaks,God helps those that helps themselvesits as if every drop of sound and solemn common sense you ever heard had been distilled into the pages of one slim volume. As a true classic its also clear, on reflection, that this advice is as valid now as it was back in 1758 when the book was published. Creditors still make killings off unwary borrowers and working smarter, not harder, is still the way to business success. So why would you read a modern interpretation of an already stick-thin tract? Two reasons, really. The first is that, like everything else in the attic, The Way to Wealth has picked up a little bit of dust on the way. Groats and grindstones generally play little part in our daily lives these days. Similarly work tends to revolve around management, delivering services, knowledge work rather than spinning and knittinghewing and splitting. Apologies if any senior hewing and splitting executives out there feel slighted by this. More importantly, Franklin was writing in an era when manual labour and the delivery of products rather than services were the primary activities. As such he doesnt dwell much on knowledge management, outsourcing or even delegation. What is surprising, then, is how much of his homespun wisdom still applies to those fields (with a little extrapolation).

But most of all the problem posed by The Way to Wealth is that it is, as Franklin himself puts it, a harangue. Its told as a tale within a tale, with the advice within being delivered as a sermon by a fiercely anti-materialistic disciplinarian called Father Abraham. In the book the narrator is a writer called Richard Saunders who recognises that Abrahams words are in fact his own advice (or as he acknowledges, the collected advice of generations) being read back to him.

By making himself a character in the text, and having that character be lectured, Franklin makes it clear he is aware that so much good advice delivered in one chunk is like having your ear bent. By your grandparents. Which is never that comfortable and leaves me, for one, with the uneasy feeling that Im being told how to invest money that I had previously earmarked for gob stoppers and sherbet dip dabs.

That tone alone is enough to have modern adults quietly putting the book down after only a few lines. Which is a pity because Franklin reserves a little surprise at the end which explains why he has the advice delivered by the daunting Father Abraham rather than by himself. Despite being written as a harangue, The Way to Wealth is a very human book about very human strengths and weaknesses. If this modernisation helps keep alive even a small part of that homely wisdom in the context of todays high-tech world then Franklin would have approved. Only he woul dnt have put it that way, of course. Hed probably have nodded sagely and muttered something along the lines of many a little makes a mickle. And how right hed have been.

As Franklin puts it, sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is always bright. These days wed most likely skip the key/rust analogy and simply say use it or lose it.

Franklin was literally an expert on the potential of used keys, having once attached one to a kite and flown it into a thunderstorm as part of an experiment into electricity. Indeed, as a physicist and inventoras well as a musician, writer and politicianyou could say he was an expert on energy of all kinds.

DEFINING IDEA

Cultivate all your faculties;

You must either use them or lose them.

~JOHN LUBBOCK, ENGLISH BIOLOGIST AND POLITICIAN

The idea that the brain can be exercised and even trained to perform better is one that has long fascinated scientists and continues to be a source of heated debate today. What we know for sure is that learning is partly a function of brain cells making connections with each other as they fire, so that as we repeat a task and those cells fire repeatedly they wire together a bit like an electronics circuit. When you repeat an activity, that circuit kicks in and performs better and faster than your initial attempts. It has also been observed that different parts of the brain can be retrained. For example, the visual cortex doesnt cease to function in blind people just because there is no visual information to process; indeed there is evidence that it is active in interpreting Braille. So the argument goes that the brain can be trained like a muscle to get stronger and stay stronger for longer.

Medical studies into brain training have mainly focused on older adults (the group most concerned with losing brain power) and have shown that these older adults will show improvements in memory and attention when they are given thinking games and tasks.

In Japan the concept of brain training has taken off and become a major industry with the Nintendo game Dr Kawashimas Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? selling millions of copies in the Japanese market alone in its first year. The idea is that you play a series of daily tasks involving logic and maths and are rated with a brain age to see how your brain gets younger depending on the mental agility you show as you become better and faster at the games. The brand has since been exported, as well as widely imitated, and brain-training games are now available as console games, mobile phone applications or even good old-fashioned books.

There are just a couple of provisos, though. The first is that with all the emphasis on older adults there isnt so much data on benefits for young people and the second is that, as with any specific learning task, youre not training the brain to be a more intelligent brainjust one thats better at completing the tasks its being set. Which leads some to wonder whether the goal of their grey matter is to leap over the hurdles Dr Kawashima chooses to set in its path.