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LM: #353: What I’ve learned from Leonardo da Vinci
I heavily studied Leonardo da Vinci while researching for my upcoming book, Finish What Matters (tomorrow is the last day to buy the Preview Edition).
Besides the many fascinating anecdotes in the book, what I’ve learned about how Leonardo thought:
- Write down anything you think. He was unafraid to write entire arguments with himself, to test what he believed.
- Write down what you learn. Much of the dazzling observations in his notes are simply written down from books he had access to. This was out of necessity, but no doubt helped him retain the information.
- Make connections. He was constantly making observations of one thing by talking about another thing and how it was or wasn’t related.
- Visualize what’s in your head. He was unafraid to draw what he imagined in great detail.
- Be okay with being wrong. Importantly, he wrote and drew plenty of things that were wrong (flying machines that wouldn’t work, naive understanding of female reproductive anatomy). But he still thought those things through with what he had.
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- Make observations, not memorizations. He placed experience and observation above all, so even though he was wrong sometimes, he was also centuries ahead on other things.
- Embrace an inductive approach. His notes are thousands of tiny observations that built up to bigger observations. He’d write the same information over and over in different ways, like a true inductive.
- Manage your curiosity. He didn’t always go straight down rabbit holes. He’d write a to-do list of what he wanted to look into.
- Push the limits. He left a lot unfinished, but often because he was trying ambitious or experimental approaches that would have been innovative had they worked – and sometimes they did.
It’s easy to remain mystified by the illustrations, paintings, and myths, but Leonardo was just a man, and he had real ways of being we can all apply.
Aphorism: “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” —William Arthur Ward
Cool: The President’s Inbox is a non-partisan podcast with deep analysis of global events.
Best,
David
P.S. Tomorrow is the last day to buy the Preview Edition of Finish What Matters.
