I discovered Ben Franklin's Autobiography in my late teens. The chapter that inspired the way I've pursued self-improvement ever since has the startling title: "the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection."
Franklin was a methodical man. He defined twelve virtues to work on. He resolved to monitor his results on all of them every day, but each week he made a special effort on one of the virtues.
The core idea here is excellent. Determine which of your behaviors you want to change. Then track your progress. Make changes so you get better. That's what Franklin did. You'll find the specific methods he used in the book.
I've taken that basic idea and changed it slightly. I added scorekeeping, both for individual days and for the week. That's because the concept of "beat yesterday/last week" works very well for me.
I've also changed the factors I monitored many times over the decades, depending on what needed work at any given time. For example, sometimes I've monitored word count or exercise and other times I've tracked business behaviors like sales calls. Franklin never changed his system much (at least as far as we know) but he did make one important change.
His thought his system was working until a Quaker friend told him that there were people who thought he was "proud". So Franklin added "Humility" to his list of virtues and began methodically working on it as well.
How did he do? Here's the answer in Franklin's own words: "I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal of success with regard to the appearance of it."
Boss's Bottom Line
Consciously working on improving yourself will make you a better boss and human being. You'll never get perfect, but you will get better.
Thanks to Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog
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