Don't Take Credit Up Front
Benjamin Franklin decides to start a library in Pennsylvania, but he runs into difficulties:
The objections and reluctance I met with in soliciting the subscriptions, made me soon feel the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be supposed 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 myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on more smoothly, and I ever practis'd it on such occasions; and, from my frequent successes, can heartily recommend it. The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterwards be amply repaid.
So a problem Franklin runs into is that he wants to start a public project, but no one wants to help him because they all think he's just trying to make himself look good! So instead he says that it is a project of his "friends". Then in due time, he says, the truth will come out.
