Introduction – Greta Stechschulte

My motivation for my blog is to hold myself accountable for focusing on my self-selected virtues. By blogging about my virtues, I hope to better myself and strive for moral excellence. My relationship with Benjamin Franklin has been solely academic, as we learn about the basics of his life in school. While Franklin and I are from different centuries, he chose to focus on his virtues for his entire life in a similar way that I will be focusing on my virtues for the next two weeks. The blog will be a way for me to reflect on my progress and assess my pursuit of moral perfection in my five virtues.

The virtues I have chosen to blog about are cleanliness and tranquility, from Franklin’s virtues, and productivity, acceptance, and kindness, from my own list of virtues. I chose cleanliness because I tend to let my room get cluttered throughout the week, and then organize everything just for it to be messy again. A strategy I will use to achieve cleanliness is to take ten minutes everyday to tidy up my room, whether that’s making my bed in the morning, or putting away my clothes at night. Next, I want to work on tranquility, as I am not a particularly flexible person. I am stressed out a lot of the time and I want to find a way to feel more at ease in the next two weeks. To achieve tranquility, I will be meditating a few times a week and see how it affects my state of mind. I also want to work on productivity, but more specifically productivity of down time. When I give myself well-deserved breaks after completing a homework assignment or working for an hour or two, I usually spend that time mindlessly scrolling through my phone and not getting much benefit from it. With this experiment, I want to use that downtime to go on a walk, read, take a nap, or anything else that is a productive and relaxing way to spend my free time. Another virtue I want to attempt to perfect is acceptance. I am a perfectionist when it comes to academics, and I want to work on understanding that I am not perfect and that is okay. Whether I miss a few questions on a math test, or completely forget a homework assignment, I want to work on accepting that it is okay to be less than perfect. I will be focusing on acceptance mostly in regard to academics and tennis, and my strategy will be to keep a positive mindset. Lastly, I want to work on the virtue of kindness. I believe this is something important that everyone can focus on and I hope to work on spreading kindness myself. Each week I will complete three acts of kindness and blog about the positivity they spread and their effect on others and myself.

By participating in the virtue blogging experiment, I hope to discover strategies I can continue using to better myself in the future. While I predict it may not be easy to begin these new habits and work on five different virtues at the same time, I do think it will be worthwhile. In addition, by working on tranquility and acceptance, I hope to find more peace in my life and be less stressed out. While attempting to achieve moral perfection in these five aspects I aspire to spread positivity in other people’s lives and have a more positive outlook on my own.