Happy 236th birthday, America. It’s the 4th of July. Enjoy your hotdogs, your parades, and your family-safe fireworks. Unless you live in Missouri, then forget “family-safe,” because you can set off pretty much anything with a wick in that state so long as it doesn’t contain enriched uranium.

Today is a day to take a break from the efficiency experts, the power bloggers, and the self improvement gurus, and get some sterling advice from a founding father. Let Thomas “I made your country with my awesome words” Jefferson school you on productivity with his Dozen Canons of Conduct in Life :

  1. Never put off to tomorrow what you can do today.
  2. Never trouble another with what you can do yourself.
  3. Never spend your money before you have it.
  4. Never buy a thing you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
  5. Take care of your cents; dollars will take care of themselves.
  6. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.
  7. We never repent of having eaten too little.
  8. Nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.
  9. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.
  10. Take things always by their smooth handle.
  11. Think as you please, and so let others, and you will have no disputes.
  12. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.