Reader Daniella just sent this to me, which is quite cool -
I read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin a bit back, and I was very impressed with it. This was my second attempt at reading it - the first time, I didn't think it was worth reading since the language was hard to get through and the book was mostly anecdotes that I wasn't getting much from.
What I didn't realize was, the book was written at two very different time periods in Franklin's life. He wrote the first half as kind of a rough set of notes just for his family. Then about 10 years later, he finished it.
The second half of the book is where the gold is. Well, there's a number of interesting points in the first half, but I found the second much more practical and enlightening. Also, he cuts down on the slang and the English modernizes a bit for he second half. I'd recommend it.
Ben's time-tracking and goal-setting was interesting for me to see - makes me realize that there's not so much that's new in the world, and I've done a hell of a lot of reinventing the wheel. I liked how he singled out a bunch of virtues to work on explicitly, and that inspired me a bit to make some refinements.
At Amazon, it's currently free on the Kindle and cheap in paperback, so you probably want to grab a copy on Kindle if you've got one, and think about it in paperback - "The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin."
Thanks for linking that image Daniella, yeah, I enjoyed Ben Franklin's autobiography quite a lot. Lots of gems in there.