It was the library campaign—the first of Franklin’s several public projects for Philadelphia—that gave Franklin a deep insight into one of the crown virtues of networking. The resistance he encountered, he tells us, made me soon feel the Impropriety of presenting one’s self as the Proposer of any useful Project that might be suppos’d to raise one’s Reputation in the smallest degree above that of one’s Neighbors, when one has need of their Assistance to accomplish that Project. I therefore put my self as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a Scheme of a Number of Friends, who had
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