THE WAY TO WEALTH

By Benjamin Franklin’s

Turning the pages of Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth is a bit like going into the attic of your parents’ house and sifting through all the old family belongings. There are so many aphorisms and bite-sized bits of homely wisdom that you begin to wonder if this was what your granny read before going to bed every night of her life. ‘Early to bed and early to rise…’,‘no gains without pains’, ‘little strokes fell great oaks’,‘God helps those that helps themselves’— it’s as if every drop of sound and solemn common sense you ever heard had been distilled into the pages of one slim volume. As a true classic it’s also clear, on reflection, that this advice is as valid now as it was back in 1758 when the book was published. Creditors still make killings off unwary borrowers and working smarter, not harder, is still the way to business success. So why would you read a modern interpretation of an already stick-thin tract? Two reasons, really. The first is that, like everything else in the attic, The Way to Wealth has picked up a little bit of dust on the way. Groats and grindstones generally play little part in our daily lives these days. Similarly work tends to revolve around management, delivering services, knowledge work rather than ‘spinning and knitting…hewing and splitting’.

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