To me, the process of writing a blog holding me accountable for the virtues I have picked out is very important. There were several motivating factors behind this, including wanting to better myself, not only for myself but for the community around me. This blog will allow me to keep track of my progress, and make sure that I am doing my best to carry out these virtues. My relationship with Ben Franklin is mostly just my admiration for him. Franklin had a very busy life filled with new inventions and opportunities and people and whatever else you could possibly think of, but he was also able to achieve the life he wanted by sticking to his virtues. I believe that his motto of doing everything little by little is so great because it is so reasonable.
The five virtues I have chosen to work on myself are temperance, sincerity, health, tranquility, and forgiveness. For temperance, I will try my best to be more laid back, and not get so worked up all of the time. I will try to stay calm when I would usually freak out, it will take time but I believe that I can do this. For sincerity, I will do my very best to be the most sincere I can. I tend to find myself not meaning things when I say them, or doing something that I know is not right, so I will really be focusing on this one. For health, I really want to work on this. I have been a pretty healthy person starting this school year, I go to workouts 4-5 times a week, walk whenever I can, eat healthy (when I can get myself to), but sometimes I think that my mental health is the one I need to work on. I tend to be a very happy person, but most of the time I am beyond stressed out. To work on this I will take 30 minutes each day to really focus on myself and doing something that makes me happy, and takes my mind off of whatever it is that is stressing me out. For tranquility, I find myself to be very laid back, most of the time. I like to stay out of drama and not have anything to do with it. Sometimes though, I will stand up for my friends when I know they won’t stand up for themselves. I find that to sometimes get myself involved in drama that is completely unnecessary, so I will do my best to help my friends but also know my worth and not become involved in the unnecessary drama. Lastly, I will really work on forgiveness. I tend to hold grudges where they are not needed, and I find it to get in the way of my happiness. I believe that everyone deserves a second chance, and knowing that everyone makes mistakes including myself, I think it is unfair to not forgive. It does suck having to let something go that has really bothered you, but in the end it is so much better.
My hopes for this experience are to improve myself and my mindset. I hope that by having this blog I will be able to keep myself accountable, and continue to better myself. All of my virtues are very simple, but very important to life, and I believe that I will really be able to improve myself with them. I hope this will help make my life a little brighter, and everyone else’s around me. My prediction for this is that I will be able to improve, but I do not think that I will be able to reach the ideal sense of perfection, just because of the short two-week period we have to do this. Overall though, I think I will see a lot of improvement and growth within myself even if it is just two weeks.