I highly recommend The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. His writing style completely transported me to the time and place of early America. He led a truly interesting and inspiring life which I think HN readers would find fascinating. I think he embodied the entrepreneurial spirit.
He was an towering intellect and positively influenced any situation he was placed in - the odometer, the mapping of the gulf stream, counterfeit detection for paper bills are so far removed from his background in publishing, and later role as statesman - I can't think of anyone since who had such an striking impact; certainly no contemporary leaders who will be remembered so fondly 200 years from today.
>I can't think of anyone since who had such an striking impact
We ask for people to be more and more specialized. But problem-solving skills are a lot more universal than the specialization frenzy of today assumes.
I think the biggest hurdle to having universal geniuses nowadays is being allowed to work on problems where you're not certified or specifically educated on them in some sense.
We don't just let anybody have a crack at a problem anymore. How can you work on an odometer if you're not an automotive engineer? How can you work on anti-counterfeit measures if you're not a fraud expert?
IMO problem-solving abilities don't merely work well across disciplines, you might actually be able to detect similarities between problems across domains if you've worked on both domains.
I had read the whole book many years ago. Found it in a second hand book shop.
It was quite interesting. He was talented and accomplished in many ways.
His famous letter to a young man on the pros and cons of marriage vs. choosing a mistress was interesting and highly controversial, probably both at that period, and also in later decades and centuries.
I found his style very modern - it reads really well even today.
I remember reading his Autobiography as a young student and I was thinking - well, if this is the kind of people who where the Founding Fathers, then no wonders US became a world superpower.
Another recommended read would be the 'newer' version - by another big thinker, inspired by Franklin - Charlie's Munger 'Poor Charlie'a Almanack':
Thank you!
I almost gave up because there was a lot of formatting issues when sending epub3 or kindle versions to my Kindle using Calibre. What saved me was using epub3 format and sending it through Send-To-Kindle. Now it looks terrific.
1) seeding his former apprentices with funding in exchange for a small amount of equity in their new printing ventures,
2) forming non-profit organizations to address public needs (such as subscription libraries, fire departments, and street sweepers)
3) forming groups of like minded tradespeople who were interested in improving themselves and their communities through ventures like 1) and 2)
...then one might even say that Benjamin Franklin was a kind of 18th century YCombinator
That's where I learned he was a self-righteous pompous prick who was probably shunned by his peers and never invited to the good parties. Kicked out of his own family when he was a young self-righteous pompous prick and never reconciled, he undertook the weeks-long journey from Boston to Philadelphia (including a shipwreck and washing up on the islands off the shore of Brooklyn, New York) he eventually ended up bonking his landlord's daughter and had to flee to live in the UK for a while (remember, he was British not American, just like all the other white men in the 13 colonies at the time) . Also, he was a proselytizing vegan teetotaller.
I also learned a lot of interesting history they don't teach in school, like how he was involved with an effort to form an alliance between the English colonies and the Iroquois Confederacy for the defense of North America but the collective colonial governments rejected the alliance and favoured bringing in overseas troops to conquer the Iroquois instead. He was a really smart guy as well as a self-righteous pompous prick, and he would certainly not have fit into today's USA what with his "radical left" "socialist" "woke" views. Not sure he fit into his contemporary society either because of those views.
