The Art of Manliness · The Art of Manliness

Books, Routines, and Habits: The Founders’ Guide to Self-Improvement

July 1, 2025·45 min·4 clips

Cicero wrote a book on grief that taught the Founders happiness means being good, not feeling good.

Jeffrey Rosen describes how he came to read the Tusculan Disputations during COVID after noticing both Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had chosen it as their personal motto text. Reading Jefferson's twelve-hour daily reading schedule, which began before sunrise with moral philosophy including Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Enlightenment writers like Hutchison and Hume, Rosen found a unified classical-Enlightenment understanding of happiness as virtue: not the pursuit of pleasure but the exercise of reason over passion to achieve calm tranquility. Franklin's self-improvement project involved a list of thirteen virtues drawn from Pythagoras and Locke, tracked on a weekly chart with black marks for failures; he intended to write a book called The Art of Virtue but never completed it. The founders shared a structured daily schedule: Franklin woke at five, asked himself each morning what good he would do that day, worked in two-hour blocks, ate a working lunch, and ended each evening with self-examination. Jefferson maintained a similar rhythm from youth into old age, treating reading, physical exercise, and correspondence as inviolable commitments. The episode explores each founder through the lens of their specific character flaw. Adams struggled with vanity and acknowledged it explicitly in his diary, eventually reconciling with both Jefferson and Mercy Otis Warren after bitter political ruptures. Abigail Adams educated herself through the same classical texts recommended by John despite being barred from Harvard, and constantly exhorted her husband and children to subjugate their passions using Pythagorean self-examination and Stoic framework. John Quincy Adams, described as the most relatable of the founders, kept the most candid American presidential diary on record; after his son George Washington Adams died by suicide, he spent a year rereading Cicero and emerged to become the leading congressional abolitionist of his era, dying on the floor of Congress with his last words being a Stoic phrase: I am composed. Washington's greatness was rooted in extraordinary self-control over his natural temper; the moments history most admires him — presiding over the Constitutional Convention in near-silence, his speech at Newburgh — derive their power from visible self-mastery. Rosen's personal application of the Jefferson schedule — no emails until creative reading is complete — is offered as a concrete modern adaptation.

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