One of my favorite biographies that I have read, Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci gave me a newfound appreciation of history’s greatest polymath. While Leonardo had accomplished some incredible works in the fields of anatomy, painting and engineering, what really struck me was how prolific and prescient he was across a vast number of disciplines. Here’s a sample of every subject he touched:
- Painting
- Sculptures
- Geology
- Mathematics, particular squaring the circle
- Anatomy
- Optics
- Animal studies
- Military engineering
- Fluid dynamics
While Isaacson had a great number of lessons at the end of the book (I would encourage readers of this post to read the book yourself and see), I had my own takeaways from reading about his life:
- Be relentlessly curious: What made Leonardo the consummate polymath was not his natural genius; it was his ability to question everything. He often spent countless hours questioning natural phenomena that 99% of people would simply brush aside. For example, would anyone think about the mechanics of tongue muscles, especially in woodpeckers? Leonardo did, and he spent quite some time thinking about the unique biomechanical intricacies of the tongue.
- With the ubiquity of AI and the Internet in our day and age, there is little excuse for being ignorant about a subject that we are curious in. Observing the environment, recording questions and researching continuously is how we can level up our understanding of the systems that surround us
- Analogies are underrated thinking tools: Leonardo did not have formal education, like many other people at that time. However, his lack of training actually helped him enormously, as he used analogies to draw comparisons between different subjects and make conjectures. One example of this is his comparison of hydraulics and how blood moves in our body, or the structure of bronchi in our lungs and the division of a trunk into branches in a tree. This was the key for Leonardo to bridge between disciplines. One of my favorite examples of this cross-disciplinary thinking is the famous Salvator Mundi painting, where he combined his knowledge of optics with painting a glass sphere that looks remarkably realistic.
- Isolation is not how you develop genius: I had the perception that Leonardo, and many other puported ‘geniuses’ were lone wolves. However, this biography shed light on how social Leonardo’s life was. He spent time with many of his contemporaries working on other pieces of Renaissance art. When he was rabbit-holing into an area, he often spent the time to talk to masters in that particular subject. He must have realized that first-principle based thinking takes a while; asking an expert takes minutes.
- Projects are never really finished: One of the most striking stories in this biography is the analysis surrounding St. Jerome in the Wilderness, a painting that Leonardo started in 1480 but includes anatomical details in the neck muscles that Leonardo could have only learned 10+ years after he started. The conjecture that Isaacson makes is that Leonardo actually returned to many of his paintings after he learned a new thing about a subject. This was important for me to realize, as it significantly impacted how I view my personal projects. They are always a work in progress!
- Spend your time in the details: He spent ages on things that are not particularly interesting, but that helped him get a far better understanding of the fundamentals of a subject. For example, he was obsessed over flight and noted down the wing patterns of dragonflys, the shape of a bird’s wing and how birds land. Another example was his obsession over the muscles that create smiles as a means to capture the psychological complexity of his subjects in portraits. No normal person would spend hours on these types of questions.
- Write notes: Leonardo is most famous for the copious amount of notebooks he created. This is the way that we are able to reconstruct his life and thoughts. Isaacson laments in his book about the lack of physical evidence of people’s thoughts in the 21st century now that everything has been digitized. There is still something raw and pure about writing on a piece of paper
- Test everything: While the scientific method wasn’t solidified by this time, Leonardo often tested his hypotheses with crude, but effective experiments. A famous experiment is how he designed wings for his ornithopter after spending countless hours observing bird flight. He realized during his experiments that birds actually rotate their wing to provide an angle of attack that provides more lift, which influenced his ornithopter designs. His ability to document mental models and refine them through real-world experimentation should be considered a model for all of us when we are trying to decipher phenomena.
- Vision without execution is hallucination: This is by far my favourite quote in this book. Leonardo was notorious for not completing many of his projects; in fact, he often got into trouble with his patrons over his tardiness. This is a good lesson for many of us who start projects or begin commitments but never follow through. Even the smallest of plans that end in something shipped is better than a perpetually-shaped project. One of Leonardo’s regrets was creating a magnificent horse sculpture for Count Ludovico Sforza of Milan in clay but he delayed the implementation in bronze. Sforza at a later point dedicate the metal to war efforts, which ultimately and led to the French invasion of Milan, with Leonardo’s dear horse sculpture becoming target practice for the French.
Leonardo is a fascinating character that many of us can take lessons from as we try to create solutions that bridge disciplines in today’s world. We also have a new power at our finger tips that would have made our dear polymath jealous. Let’s try to use them to e