How to Age Like Benjamin Franklin

2. Be bold.

Many people grow more timid as they age. They no longer tackle the impossible, indulge in the frivolous or tilt at windmills. Not Franklin. With each passing year, he grew more, not less, bold. At age 69 and living in London, Franklin was insulted one too many times by British pooh-bahs. He flipped sides and became a full-throated American rebel.

Two years later, with the Revolutionary War raging, Franklin was asked to represent the young United States in France. It was a dangerous mission, beginning with the ocean crossing. Should the British capture Franklin, he surely would have been arrested and possibly hanged.

Yet he accepted the assignment without hesitation. His philosophy of public appointments — never ask and never refuse — helps explain his decision, but he had other reasons. Life is like a good play, he told a friend. Endings matter. “Being now in the last act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with.” He was not about to play the part of the distinguished yet irrelevant elder statesman. He wanted to go out with a bang, and the mission to France was just the sort of fireworks he craved.

3. Embrace doubt — and humility.  

Franklin was that rare and wonderful human who grew more, not less, intellectually nimble with each passing year. Well into his 80s, he continued to change his mind about vital issues, such as slavery. At age 81, he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. (He was old enough to be the grandfather of many of the other delegates.) There, in the tense closing hours, he urged his younger colleagues to embrace their doubts and sign the document. “Having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being oblig’d, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise … the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.”

4. Stay purposeful and active.

Franklin remained active well into his 80s. Rarely did he dwell upon his own mortality. “It has always been my maxim to live on as if I was to live always,” he told a friend. “It is with such feeling only that we can be stimulated to the exertions necessary to effect any useful purpose.”

In his 70s, he helped edit the Declaration of Independence and served as U.S. representative in France, securing vital funds for George Washington’s Continental Army. In his 80s, he was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and president of the American Philosophical Society, as well as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. He was busier than ever.

5. Find joy in the little things.

Toward the end of his life, Franklin hosted a visitor, Andrew Ellicott, at his Philadelphia home. When Franklin began to heat some water so he could shave, Ellicott offered to help. Franklin demurred. He was going to do it himself or not at all. “He was determined not to increase his infirmities by giving way to them,” Ellicott recalled. To his astonishment, Franklin worked the razor with the ease and skill of a much younger man.

Shaving was one of those small pleasures that made life worth living, Franklin said. “I think happiness does not consist so much in particular pieces of good fortune that perhaps accidentally fall to [a person’s] lot as to be able in his old age to be able to do those little things which was he unable to perform himself would be done by others with a sparing hand.”

Franklin was determined to do what he could for as long as he could. And to the end, he partook in life’s quotidian pleasures: reading, conversing with friends, enjoying a glass or two of his beloved Madeira wine. Franklin cherished these small delights; amass enough of them, he believed, and the result was outsize happiness — at any age.