Willpower

to make a fresh start, he eventually wore holes in the paper. So he drew his red-ink charts again, in a sturdier notebook with leaves made of ivory (which spread open like a fan). After completing a course, he could wipe off the pencil marks with a wet sponge, and the ivory charts proved remarkably durable. Nearly half a century later, when he was a diplomat flirting with ladies in Paris, he still had the charts and liked to show them off, causing one French friend to marvel at touching “this precious booklet.” Unlike his self-help successors (including the ones who borrowed his name for the FranklinCovey 31-Day Planner), Franklin never tried marketing an international line of notebook organizers, perhaps because he was too busy in Paris trying to get help for George Washington’s army. Or maybe because his fondness for female company made it difficult for him to promote virtues like Chastity. Besides those lapses, Franklin had a terrible time keeping the papers on his desk in Order, which meant more black marks. As he put it in Poor Richard’s Almanack:
    ’Tis easy to frame a good bold resolution;
But hard is the Task that concerns execution.
    No matter how hard he tried, Franklin never could have kept that notebook clean, because some of the goals were bound to conflict at times. When, as a young journeyman printer, he tried to practice Order by drawing up a rigid daily work schedule, he kept getting interrupted by unexpected demands from his clients—and Industry required him to ignore the schedule and meet with them. If he practiced Frugality (“Waste nothing”) by always mending his own clothes and preparing all his own meals, there’d be less time available for Industry at his job—or for side projects like flying a kite in a thunderstorm or editing the Declaration of Independence. If he promised to spend an evening with his friends but then fell behind his schedule for work, he’d have to make a choice that would violate his virtue of Resolution: “Perform without fail what you resolve.”
    Still, Franklin’s goals seem fairly consistent by comparison with modern ones. He focused on the old Puritan virtues of hard work and didn’t aim for much fun (at least not on paper). He didn’t resolve to enjoy long walks on the beach, volunteer with a nonprofit group, promote recycling in his community, and spend more quality time playing with his children. He didn’t have a bucket list of tourist destinations or dreams of retiring to Florida. He didn’t resolve to learn golf while negotiating the Treaty of Paris. Today there are more temptations—including the temptation to want them all at once.
    When asked by researchers to list their personal goals, most people have no trouble coming up with at least fifteen separate ones. Some can dovetail well and support each other, like a goal to quit smoking and a goal to spend less money. But there are inevitably conflicts between work and family goals. Even within a family, the demands of taking care of children may clash with those of maintaining a good relationship with one’s spouse, which may help explain why marital satisfaction declines when a couple gives birth to their first child and goes back up when the last child finally moves out. Some goals bring conflict all by themselves, like Franklin’s virtue of Moderation: “Forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.” Many people have the goal of holding their temper if they are wronged. When something unfair happens to them, they manage to restrain themselves from saying or doing anything, but then afterward they may feel bad because they failed to make their point or stand up for themselves, or because the original problem remains unresolved. By practicing Moderation they violate another of Franklin’s virtues, Justice.
    The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action, as the psychologists Robert Emmons and Laura King demonstrated in a series of studies. They had people list their fifteen main goals and mark which ones conflicted with which others. In one study, the subjects kept daily logs of their emotions and physical symptoms for three weeks, and they gave researchers access to their health records for the previous year. In another study, they wore beepers that went off at random points during the day, prompting them to answer questions about what they were doing and feeling. They also returned to the lab a year later to furnish additional information on