In 1783, George Washington faced a choice that could have ended the American experiment before it began. The Revolutionary War had just been won, but the young republic teetered on collapse. His officers were unpaid, furious, and even considering marching on Philadelphia! Many urged him to seize power and become a king or dictator.
What Washington did next would become the stuff of American legend.
There are a handful of moments like this that are responsible for turning 13 fragile colonies into the world’s strongest republic. They are battle-tested, literally, and serve as useful mental models you can use today—whether you’re leading a team, building a business, navigating politics, or simply trying to live with integrity.
Power Restraint
George Washington
It’s March 1783. The Revolutionary War is technically over after Yorktown, but peace is not yet signed. The Continental Army is camped at Newburgh, New York—cold, broke, and furious. Officers have gone years without pay. Congress, under the weak Articles of Confederation, has no money and no real power to tax. Rumors swirl that the soldiers will be sent home empty-handed.
Two anonymous letters circulate through camp, urging the officers to issue an ultimatum: pay us or we will refuse to disband. The second letter is darker, hinting the army might march on Philadelphia itself. Many officers whisper that Washington could become king or dictator and finally deliver justice. Victory has handed them the guns. Now comes the real test.
An unofficial meeting is scheduled to discuss the developing situation.
Washington learns of the letters on March 10. He could ignore them. He could let the unauthorized meeting happen without him. He could even step forward as the strongman the army craves. Instead, he does the opposite. He cancels the unofficial gathering and calls an official one for March 15 at the Temple of Virtue.
He condemns the anonymous summons as “inconsistent with the rules of propriety… unmilitary… subversive of all order and discipline.” He calls the idea of turning arms against their own country “shocking” and something “humanity revolts at.” He begs them, in the name of their honor and the new nation, to reject any man who would “open the flood gates of civil discord.”
The officers listen, but the tension remains thick. Washington senses it. He says he will read them a letter from a Virginia congressman. He reaches into his coat pocket, unfolds the paper… and pauses. He can’t see the words. He pulls out a pair of spectacles that most of the officers have never seen him wear. In a quiet, almost apologetic voice, he says: “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I have grown gray in your service and now find myself growing blind.”
The room breaks. Officers who moments earlier were ready to defy civilian authority now weep. The conspiracy collapses. Washington has voluntarily surrendered the power he could have seized.
Power Restraint is the spine of the entire story. At every decision point—cancelling the meeting, writing the speech, revealing his vulnerability—Washington deliberately limited his own authority rather than reaching for more.
He recognized that unrestrained power destroys the very thing it claims to protect. When a leader clings to power after victory, revolutions turn into new tyrannies. Restraint proves that the leader serves the republic, not himself. It builds trust in institutions instead of personalities. It sets a precedent that no one is above the law. And it protects liberty: once a strongman takes permanent control, the people lose the ability to replace him peacefully. Washington’s choice ensured the American experiment would not die in its cradle.
When victory or opportunity hands you more power, ask: Am I building something that can outlast me, or am I becoming indispensable? Restraint builds trust in systems over personalities.
Thirteen years earlier, in March 1770, another Founder faced an entirely different kind of pressure, this time in the streets of Boston.
Rule of Law
John Adams
At the time, Boston was a city on the edge. Tensions between colonists and British soldiers have been boiling for months. On the night of March 5th, a confrontation explodes outside the Custom House, the headquarters for collecting taxes. A mob of angry Bostonians taunts and pelts a small group of British soldiers with snowballs, rocks, and sticks. In the chaos, the soldiers open fire, killing five colonists. The event instantly became known as the Boston Massacre.
The city erupts in outrage. Patriots demand blood. Pamphlets and newspapers call the soldiers murderers. Almost every lawyer in Boston refuses to defend the British soldiers in court. It would be professional suicide.
But John Adams steps forward. At 34 years old and already a leading voice for defending the rights of the American colonies against British overreach, He agrees to defend Captain Thomas Preston and the eight soldiers. He knows this decision could destroy his reputation, his law practice, and even his personal safety. Why would he do this?
Adams defended the soldiers because he believed impartial justice was more important than tribal loyalty. He was willing to be hated by his own side in the short term to protect a principle that would later define the new nation.
This is why Rule of Law is such a powerful mental model — it forces you to do the hard, unpopular thing in the precise moment where it matters the most.
He understood that when passion and mob justice replace facts and due process, the integrity of the system is weakened. Rule of Law protects the innocent, restrains the powerful, and prevents cycles of vengeance that destroy societies. It forces people to rise above tribal fury and creates trust that even your enemies will get a fair hearing. Adams’ unpopular choice helped prove that the American cause was based on principle, and not just another mob.
Six years later, as the colonies moved from protest to full-scale revolution, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson would give that struggle its most powerful philosophical backbone.
Natural Rights
Thomas Jefferson
It’s June 1776. Philadelphia is stiflingly hot. The Second Continental Congress has just voted that the colonies should declare independence from Britain. A five-man committee is formed to write the document; John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Livingston. But the group quickly agreed that 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson should draft it alone. In just seventeen days, working at a small portable desk he designed himself, he produced one of the most consequential pieces of writing in history.
The Declaration of Independence was written heavily through the lens of Natural Rights. Jefferson did this deliberately.
He wrote,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” (From The Declaration of Independence)
Basically what he’s saying is rights do not flow from kings or governments — governments exist only to secure rights that people already possess by nature. When government becomes destructive of these ends, the people have the right to alter or abolish it.
We probably take this for granted today, but at the time, this idea was quite new. For centuries, the dominant view was that rights were granted by the monarch or the state. By making rights natural and unalienable, he placed the individual above the government. This single mental model justified the break with Britain, inspired later movements to expand liberty, and set the moral standard against which every future American government would be judged — even when the Founders themselves failed to live up to it. Without Natural Rights as the North Star, the Revolution would have been just another power grab instead of an experiment in self-government.
You can apply the Natural Rights lens in your own life by treating every person as inherently sovereign, possessing unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness. Never act as though their freedom depends on your permission. When an authority forgets it exists to serve people, trust and liberty begin to erode.
Jefferson gave the Revolution its justification in 1776. Eleven years later, with independence won but the young nation on the brink of collapse under the weak Articles of Confederation, another one of the Founders would confront a different threat: the destructive power of factions inside a free society.
Faction Control
James Madison
In the fall of 1787, the Constitutional Convention had just ended in Philadelphia. James Madison, exhausted but determined, returns to New York to fight for ratification. While most of the country debated the new Constitution in taverns and newspapers, Madison sat down and wrote one of the most important political essays in history in just a few days: Federalist Paper No. 10.
He addressed the problem honestly: groups driven by passion or ideology are inevitable wherever liberty exists. This is a byproduct of having freedom, in particular, the freedom of expression. Even when the groups turn out to be bad, you can’t censor them without destroying freedom itself. The only real solution, Madison argued, is to control the magnitude of their effects by creating a large, diverse republic. In a big country filled with many competing interests, no single faction can easily dominate the whole. Build an umbrella around a bunch of competing factions, and those factions will check each other.
Madison understood that a pure democracy always ends in the tyranny of the majority. By contrast, a large republic made up of smaller states makes it far harder for any one state to steamroll everyone else.
At every stage of his thinking—from months of studying failed ancient democracies to drafting the Virginia Plan to writing Federalist Paper #10, Madison deliberately rejected the old idea of trying to eliminate factions. Instead, he designed a system that would limit their worst effects, while remaining exposed to their best effects. This is starting to sound like our favorite book, Antifragile.
Use the Faction Control mental model in your own life by deliberately surrounding yourself with diverse perspectives, interests, and people instead of creating echo chambers. Intentionally unify those factions, like a republic, so that no single faction, ideology, or loud voice can dominate. The more diverse interests you include, the harder it becomes for any one idea to prevail, without general consensus from other factions.
In the same push to ratify the Constitution, Madison teamed up with another Founder, Alexander Hamilton to determine how that republic would actually function day-to-day.
Countervailing Ambition
James Madison & Alexander Hamilton
It’s February 1788 in New York City. The ratification fight for the new Constitution is hanging by a thread. Several key states are on the verge of rejecting it. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are racing to publish a series of newspaper essays that will become the Federalist Papers. In essay #51, Madison drops an incredible insight that will shape American history.
Madison wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
What this means is that humans are flawed and selfish, so you need a strong government to control the people and stop them from harming each other. But because the people running that government are also flawed and selfish, you must build in strong internal controls (checks and balances) so the government doesn’t turn around and oppress the very people it’s supposed to protect.
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” - James Madison
They connected the personal interest of the officeholder to the constitutional powers of that office. The president wants to expand executive power? Congress (which wants to protect its own power) will push back. Congress tries to overreach? The president vetoes and the courts can strike it down. The Senate blocks the House? The House blocks the Senate. No branch can grow too strong without the others instinctively fighting to protect their own turf. This is more commonly referred to as checks and balances.
Countervailing Ambition is at the heart of this story. Madison and Hamilton deliberately engineered the government so that the natural self-interest and ambition of every officeholder would push against the ambition of every other officeholder.
They understood that good intentions and noble promises had failed under the Articles of Confederation. Hoping everyone would suddenly become virtuous was naive. So they built a machine that would work even when people acted selfishly — by making each branch’s ambition the check on every other branch’s ambition.
This model showed how the new government could survive its own leaders’ selfishness.
Months earlier, on the very last day of the Constitutional Convention, 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin faced a different crisis — one that would decide whether the whole document would even be signed.
Pragmatic Unity
Benjamin Franklin
It’s September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia. The Constitutional Convention has dragged on for four brutal months. Delegates are exhausted, divided. Small states vs large states, North vs South, slavery compromises. Many are ready to walk out. The whole project is on the verge of collapse.
Benjamin Franklin, the oldest delegate at 81 and too weak from gout to stand and speak, has a short speech prepared. A colleague reads it for him while Franklin sits quietly.
“I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve… but I am not sure I shall never approve them. Having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions… On the whole, sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults… because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.” - Benjamin Franklin
Then he points to the half-sun painted on the back of George Washington’s chair.
“I have often… looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
He urged every delegate to sign the document, even though none of them liked every part of it. Most of them did. Franklin understood something the younger, more ideological delegates struggled to accept: Progress requires swallowing hard truths and giving ground on non-essentials so that the essentials can survive. A flawed union is better than no union at all. His humble, elder-statesman insistence on unity turned a convention that was falling apart into the birth of the United States Constitution.
So how do we apply this lens in our own lives?
Sometimes, you gotta take the 70% win.
Accept the flaws you can’t fix right now, and keep the whole thing moving forward. The cost of walking away is sometimes higher than the cost of compromise.
But both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington understood that even the best-designed government would eventually fail without one final, essential ingredient: the character of the people who lived under it.
Civic Virtue
Benjamin Franklin & George Washington
Franklin and Washington were both uniquely obsessed with personal character.
At age 20, Franklin created his famous “13 Virtues” project, where each week, he focused on one virtue and tracked his daily performance in a little book. He called it a “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” He continued this practice for decades.
Washington, for his part, spent a lifetime cultivating dignity, self-discipline, and a sense of duty. From his early days copying the rules of civility as a teenager, through eight years of war, and his two terms as president, he was famous for putting country above self. As commander-in-chief, he refused pay. He stepped down from power twice when he could have held it. His personal restraint that we discussed earlier became the gold standard against which others measured themselves.
Civic Virtue was at the core of their entire lives. They both believed that laws and constitutions were the foundation of the republic. This doesn’t contradict the earlier models. Madison and Hamilton came up with checks and balances precisely because they knew people are not angels, and those checks on power handle the everyday selfishness that is natural in humans.
But Franklin and Washington warned that if selfishness becomes widespread and character collapses across society, even the strongest checks will eventually be overwhelmed. A republic can survive flawed leaders for a while; it cannot survive a people who no longer value self-restraint, honesty, or the common good.
Follow the example of Franklin and Washington, and build strong personal character through discipline, integrity, humility, and a willingness to put duty above convenience. Do this until it becomes who you are, and then keep doing it. The Founders bet everything on the idea that ordinary people, living with extraordinary character, could keep this republic alive for centuries. When you choose to live with virtue, you’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the greats, proving that this grand experiment is still worth it.
— Dante
P.S. For the full breakdown, watch the YouTube video.
