Individual skill

franklin-decision-ledger

Run a hard two-option decision through Benjamin Franklin's 'moral or prudential algebra' — the weighted pro/con method he described to Joseph Priestley in 1772 — including the part everyone skips: striking out reasons that cancel, and letting the ledger sit before deciding. Use when weighing job offers, relocations, build-vs-buy, take-the-promotion, shut-it-down decisions, or any 'I keep going back and forth'. Produces a completed decision ledger with a leaning, its strongest counter, and a revisit date.

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# Franklin Decision Ledger Skill

In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Franklin laid out why hard decisions feel
impossible: the reasons for and against are never "present to the mind at the same
time" — whichever set you thought about most recently feels decisive. His fix, which
he called **moral or prudential algebra**, is a ledger kept over days, with weights,
where reasons of equal weight are struck out in pairs until one column visibly
outweighs. This skill runs the full method — not the flattened pros-and-cons list it
degenerated into.

## What This Skill Produces

- A two-column **decision ledger** with every motive the user can surface, weighted
- The **cancellation pass**: equal weights struck out in pairs, remainder shown
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