This governs two things at once: the private work of becoming someone specific, and the public work of getting something built in a town that did not ask for it. Franklin's claim is that character is habit rather than knowledge, so it has to be drilled rather than resolved on, and that a project moves faster the less it looks like yours. He wrote the account as an instruction manual for his own descendants, and he left the failures in it.

Do

Drill one virtue a week and mark every lapse in writing. Franklin found that knowing right from wrong was useless against established habit, so he reduced virtue to thirteen narrowly defined items, guarded one per week in fixed order, and put a black mark in a ruled book for each daily fault, cycling the full list four times a year. The order was deliberate: Temperance first because a clear head makes every later virtue easier, then Silence so he could listen rather than perform. [Source: "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection"]

Rebuild what you admire from your own notes, then compare. To teach himself to write, he took an odd volume of the Spectator, jotted brief hints of each essay, put the original away for days, reconstructed the piece from the hints alone, and set his version against the original to find exactly where his vocabulary and structure failed. He also turned prose tales into verse and back purely to build range. [Source: "Beginning Life as a Printer"]

Form a small fixed group with rules that ban flat contradiction. The Junto was about a dozen tradesmen and thinkers meeting Friday evenings under written rules against direct contradiction and expressions of certainty, capped at twelve members to keep it intimate. Franklin called it the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics then in the province, and it ran for decades and produced most of his later civic wins. [Source: "Beginning Business in Philadelphia"]

Present the project as a number of friends' idea rather than your own. Franklin got the subscription library funded by attributing the plan to unnamed public-spirited gentlemen, and states outright that he used the tactic for the rest of his civic career to avoid the resentment neighbors feel toward someone visibly angling for status through their help. His note to his son is that credit withheld quietly tends to come back later anyway. [Source: "Business Success and First Public Service"]

Make the industry visible, not merely real. Plain dress, no idle diversions, and hauling his own purchased paper home through the streets on a wheelbarrow rather than having it delivered, specifically so no one could suspect him too proud to work his own business. Merchant credit followed the visible version as much as the actual one, and both established rivals were gone within a few years. [Source: "Business Success and First Public Service"]

Build the small working sample before asking anyone to fund the whole thing. He paved one strip of street near the market and privately paid a poor man sixpence a house to sweep it twice weekly, demonstrating the benefit before proposing a city-wide paving tax. For Pennsylvania Hospital he ran the financial version: a bill making the province's two thousand pound grant conditional on the hospital first raising an equal sum privately, which doubled every donation and unlocked the subscriptions. [Source: "Public Services and Duties"]

Ask an opponent for a favor instead of doing them one. Facing open hostility from a wealthy new Assembly member in 1737, Franklin asked to borrow a rare book from the man's library and returned it promptly with a note of thanks, on the reasoning that someone who has already done you a kindness is more inclined to do another. They stayed friends for life. [Source: "Poor Richard's Almanac and Other Activities"]

Write partnership terms out exhaustively before the partnership starts. Franklin staked capable printers with type and presses in other colonies for a cut of profits over a fixed term, and credits the model's consistent success entirely to writing the articles explicitly up front, which he says prevents the small jealousies that normally sour partnerships. Most partners eventually bought him out and went independent without a fight. [Source: "Interest in Public Affairs"]

Keep the people you are responsible for working. Building the Gnadenhut stockade, Franklin noticed his men were cheerful on working days and quarrelsome about the food on the rain-forced idle ones, and compares it to a sea captain who, out of real tasks, has the crew scour the anchor rather than sit. He fixed poor chapel attendance the same practical way, by having the chaplain hand out the daily rum ration immediately after prayers. [Source: "Franklin's Defense of the Frontier"]

Don't

Don't move on a promise you have not seen in writing. Franklin sailed to London on Governor Keith's assurance of letters of credit and discovered mid-voyage that no such letters were in the dispatch bag at all. Denham's verdict was that Keith had no real credit to extend and never intended to write anything, and Franklin spent eighteen months stranded, better at his trade and no better off financially. [Source: "First Visit to London"]

Don't fund somebody else's decline with money that isn't yours. Carrying roughly thirty-five pounds in trust for his brother's friend Vernon, Franklin let his heavy-drinking friend Collins borrow against it repeatedly until enough was gone that he calls dipping into it one of the first great errata of his life. Collins left for Barbados still owing it, and Franklin never recovered any of it. [Source: "First Visit to Boston"]

Don't run private grudges through a channel other people paid for. As a publisher Franklin held a hard line against printing libel or personal abuse regardless of who asked or what liberty-of-the-press argument they made, offering instead to print the attack as a separate pamphlet the author funded and distributed himself. He recommends the policy to young printers as good for both conscience and business. [Source: "Poor Richard's Almanac and Other Activities"]

Don't win by contradiction. Franklin dropped blunt contradiction for humble Socratic questioning after reading Xenophon, found it dangerously effective, then eased off the method itself while keeping one rule permanently: no "certainly" or "undoubtedly," only "it appears to me." He credits that single linguistic habit, held for fifty years, with much of his weight in public bodies despite being by his own account a mediocre speaker. [Source: "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection"]

Don't reason your way into what you already wanted. Franklin broke his vegetarian principle over a plate of fried cod by noticing that fish eat each other, and records the incident specifically to make the point about how convenient it is to be a reasonable creature, able to find a reason for anything one has already decided to do. Treat a suddenly persuasive argument for your own preference as a warning sign. [Source: "First Visit to Boston"]

Don't take a favor from someone whose business you will have to judge. Governor Denny courted Franklin on arrival with the Royal Society medal, compliments, and, after enough wine, escalating promises of recompense if he would ease things for the proprietors. Franklin answered that he needed no proprietary favors, could accept none as a sitting Assembly member, and would support any measure genuinely good for the people, which left him unencumbered when the real fight resumed. [Source: "Agent of Pennsylvania in London"]

Don't spend this year defending last year's result. When the Abbé Nollet published a book of letters denying his electrical findings outright, Franklin drafted a reply and abandoned it, reasoning that repeatable experiments stand or fall on their own regardless of argument, that much of the objection rested on a mistranslation, and that his time was better spent running new experiments. He never answered, and the theory won across Europe anyway. [Source: "Scientific Experiments"]

Don't dismiss the warning from the person who knows the ground. Franklin told Braddock plainly that a nearly four-mile marching column could be ambushed and cut like a thread into pieces unable to reinforce each other. Braddock replied that such fears might apply to raw militia but not to the king's regulars, and the ambush near the Monongahela unfolded almost exactly as described, with two-thirds losses among the advance force. [Source: "Braddock's Expedition"]

Don't skip the precaution you would blame yourself for. Franklin lost a four-year-old son to smallpox contracted naturally, states for the record that he always regretted not having the boy inoculated, and puts it in the book specifically as a caution to parents who skip inoculation out of fear of blaming themselves if it goes wrong. The regret for the omission turned out to be the heavier one. [Source: "Poor Richard's Almanac and Other Activities"]

Hold

You will not get all thirteen. Franklin never conquered Order and says so, blaming a tradesman's schedule set by other people and a memory good enough that disorganization rarely cost him anything he noticed. His image for the temptation is a man who stops grinding an axe head only partly bright and decides he actually prefers a speckled axe. Held, this lets you keep the practice after you have already broken it. Refused, you abandon the whole system the first week you fail at it. [Source: "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection"]

What you got wrong belongs in the account. Franklin uses a specific word, errata, and names them: neglecting Deborah Read while in London, the money wasted on Ralph, an advance on Ralph's mistress that ended the friendship, and exploiting his brother's secret indenture to break his apprenticeship. He does not convert any of them into a lesson that flatters him. Held, an honest ledger stays possible. Not held, the record quietly edits itself into a story about a man who was always right. [Source: "First Visit to London"]

Being right can still lose, and the shape of the rejection is information. The Albany Plan was killed by the colonial assemblies for granting the Crown too much prerogative and by the Board of Trade for being too democratic. Franklin's considered later view is that hostility from both extremes suggests the plan had actually found the true medium, and that adopting it would have removed the pretext for the tax dispute that followed. [Source: "Albany Plan of Union"]

The project you believed in most may be the one you never build. The Art of Virtue and the international Society of the Free and Easy were both real plans that business and public duty kept crowding out for a lifetime. Near the end of his life Franklin still maintained they were workable, and that one sufficiently committed person with a real plan and no diverting amusements can accomplish outsized things. He states the belief and his own failure to act on it in the same breath. [Source: "Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection"]

Most of what people buy, they overpay for. At seven Franklin spent all his pocket money on a whistle, was mocked for paying four times its worth, and turned the sting into a lifelong check applied to himself and to others: the courtier trading freedom and friends for royal favor, the miser trading comfort and goodwill for a growing pile, the spendthrift trading solvency for appearances. His claim is that most human misery traces back to exactly this error about price. [Source: "Appendix: Electrical Kite, The Way to Wealth, and The Whistle"]

The one line

Drill the habits instead of resolving on them, keep your name off anything you want funded, and hold an honest list of what you got wrong.