Benjamin Franklin’s Secret to Greatness | Founding Fathers Series Part 2

What does it mean to be truly self-made?

Benjamin Franklin was more than a Founder—he was the original American success story: inventor, writer, scientist, diplomat, and a man constantly working to improve himself.

In this episode, I reveal Franklin’s secret to greatness, and why his life still embodies the American promise that talent, hard work, and self-discipline can help a person become something extraordinary.

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Dinesh D'Souza is an author and filmmaker.  A graduate of Dartmouth College, he was a senior domestic policy analyst in the Reagan administration.  He also served as a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  

He is the author of many bestselling books, including "Illiberal Education," "What's So Great About Christianity," "America: Imagine a World Without Her," "The Roots of Obama's Rage," "Death of a Nation," and "United States of Socialism."  

His documentary films "2016: Obama's America," "America," "Hillary's America," "Death of a Nation," and "Trump Card" are among the highest-grossing political documentaries of all time. He and his wife Debbie are also executive producers of the acclaimed feature film "Infidel."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Self made men existed before America, but they were rare.
After the American Revolution, they became much more common. They
came from everywhere. They're still coming. Benjamin Franklin was and
remains the prototype. One of his recent biographers, Walter Isaacson,
put it this way, quote he was the most accomplished
American of his age and the most influential in inventing

(00:38):
the type of society America would become. Franklin's life, no
less than his ideas, conveys the indomitable spirit of both
invention and just as important self invention that define Americans
and make them almost instantly distinguishable even today by people
around the world. Born in Boston in seventeen oh five,

(00:59):
the youngest son and a family of seventeen children, Franklin
was at various times America's leading scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer,
and publisher. It's hard to imagine one person could accomplish
so much in one life. He conducted early experiments and electricity,
devised bifocal glasses, designed a new type of stove, organized

(01:20):
lending libraries, formed Philadelphia's first fire department, and founded the
college that became the University of Pennsylvania. His own formal
education was two years of high school. His informal education,
what he taught himself and learned from others, never ended.
His Poor Richard's Almanac, which to spense practical daily wisdom
and wisecracks an equal measure, was the most popular publication

(01:43):
of its day. If there was something important going on,
Franklin was in the middle of it. He was the
guiding spirit of the American Founding. He desperately tried to
keep America out of a war with Britain, offering the
British government every kind of compromise to avoid the conflict.
But when his efforts were rejected and he realized separation
from the mother country was inevitable, he threw his heart

(02:06):
and soul into the revolutionary cause, the struggle for independence.
As the American envoy in France during the war, he
was more responsible than any other person in bringing the
French to the American side. Without this alliance, it's unlikely
the rebels would have won. It's more likely, in fact,
that they would have lost, and all the Founders, including Franklin,

(02:27):
would have been tried, convicted, and executed as traitors to
the British crown. When the new country won its freedom, Franklin,
then in his eightieth year, in his eighth decade, near
the end of his life, was again on Center's stage,
helping to guide the quarreling delegates toward a new constitution,
a novice ordo seclorum, a new order for the ages,

(02:50):
he called it. At a low point in the great
Philadelphia debate over the nation's founding document, when everyone, including Washington,
was willing to give it up as a bad job,
Franklin and single handedly saved the enterprise and revived the
spirits of the delegates by summoning them to an inspirational prayer.
And it was Franklin who summed up the event for
posterity when asked what kind of government the Convention had

(03:13):
created equipped a republic if you can keep it. Franklin
viewed America itself as a great invention, a new kind
of nation for a new kind of man. Even so,
Isaacson concludes, quote, the most interesting thing that Franklin invented
and continually reinvented was himself. His brilliant autobiography reveals Apollamath,

(03:34):
who was endlessly curious and endlessly and pleasantly surprised by life.
He was also never quite satisfied in a way that's
quintessentially American. He sought to make it whatever he was
working on better. So he saw construction workers with axes
building a fort and timed them to see how long
it took. Inquired into the art by which Native Indians

(03:56):
concealed their fires, conducted experiments, and published his observations on electricity.
Franklin took his curiosity and turned it on himself. He
viewed his own life not simply as a story of change,
but rather as a continuing quest for self improvement. He
describes in his autobiography how he made a list of
what he termed the seven virtues temperance, industry, sincerity, and

(04:18):
so on, and then enumerated them in a single column
down the left hand side of a page. At the top,
he listed the seven days of the week. His plan
was to take the first virtue and practice it for
one week straight. He noted his progress each day with
a check mark. If he could practice a virtue for
seven days without a lapse, he reasoned he would internalize it.

(04:39):
It would become a part of his character, and, as
his life suggests, it worked. This wise, self deprecating, life
loving man was an American original, and yet he was
also the progenitor of an American type, one who follows
his own pat Benjamin Franklin. Types from all over the
world came and droves to America because this was the

(05:00):
place where they could best pursue their passion. In America,
class didn't matter, country of origin didn't matter, level of
education didn't matter. All that mattered was talent, hard work,
and luck. In America, you could make of yourself what
you will, and you still can, just as Benjamin Franklin did.
He is the original embodiment of the American idea of

(05:21):
the self directed life, and idea that still defines the
American experience.