4 ideas
He gave strict attention to only one virtue each week, reasoning that a habit made firm would make the next ones easier, and cycled through the whole list four times a year. He never reached the perfection he aimed at, but concluded the attempt left him a better and happier man than he would otherwise have been.
At seventeen Franklin broke his apprenticeship to his brother James, a Boston printer, and ran away. He arrived at Philadelphia's Market Street wharf tired and dirty, carrying about a Dutch dollar in coin, bought three great puffy rolls, and walked up the street eating one with the other two under his arms, passing the door of Deborah Read, his future wife, who laughed at how he looked. He tells the episode so readers can measure how far he rose from that entrance, which makes it the book's baseline case of a self-made rise through trade, credit and reputation.
As a young printer Franklin made sure he was not only industrious and frugal in fact but was seen to be. He dressed plainly, avoided idle amusements, and personally wheeled home the paper he bought through the streets in a wheelbarrow. Merchants who saw this came to regard him as a safe risk, so they gave him credit and custom, and his visible reputation became working capital for the business.
When Franklin raised subscriptions for a lending library, he found that people resisted a proposal from a man who seemed to be seeking credit for himself. He presented the plan instead as the scheme of 'a number of friends' and found that it went forward smoothly. He concluded that giving up the present credit for an idea removes others' envy and so gets it adopted, and that the credit usually comes back later anyway.