The Art of Manliness - #357： How to Be a Creative Genius Like da Vinci

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast leonardo da vinci

00:00:19.040 has become the ultimate archetype of the creative genius besides his famous paintings including the

00:00:23.820 mona lisa da vinci had insights into anatomy and optics that would take science a few hundred years

00:00:28.260 to verify and while leonardo's genius seems like a gift from the gods my guest today argues that it

00:00:33.320 was actually a result of years of human effort and toil today on the show i had the pleasure of

00:00:37.580 speaking with famed author walter isaacson about his latest biography on leonardo da vinci we begin

00:00:41.980 the show talking about what has drawn isaacson to write about innovative individuals like da vinci

00:00:46.100 benjamin franklin and steve jobs and how isaacson has discovered through his writing that it's the

00:00:50.340 intersection of science and humanities that all great innovations are made we then dig into the

00:00:54.680 life of da vinci and lessons we could take away from him walter tells us about da vinci's famous

00:00:58.220 notebooks what he kept in them and makes the case that all of us should be carrying around little

00:01:02.140 notebooks for ideas too we then dig into the myth of the solitary genius and how leonardo collaborated

00:01:06.680 all throughout his life on some of his greatest works we then discuss one of the great paradoxes

00:01:10.680 of da vinci's life that he can be both intensely focused and hugely flighty and how both sides of

00:01:15.500 this character were key in his genius we enter conversation talking about how we can develop the

00:01:19.760 same kind of power of intense concentration and observation that da vinci wielded even our distracted

00:01:25.100 digital world after the show's over make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is

00:01:28.780 slash da vinci that's just one word da vinci where you find links to resources where you delve deeper

00:01:32.960 into this topic all right walter isaacson welcome to the show thank you thanks for having me so i know

00:01:42.920 a lot of our listeners are familiar with your work got a new book out about leonardo da vinci before we

00:01:47.420 get to this latest biography i'm curious about your writing career biographer and the topic you've

00:01:53.440 chosen it seems like are innovators you've done a biography on benjamin franklin steve jobs albert

00:01:59.280 einstein you even have a biography sort of a called the innovators what's the draw what what got you

00:02:04.720 started down that path you know i realized over the course of my career that i'd met a lot of smart

00:02:10.480 people but that smart people often don't amount to much the question is how do you be innovative

00:02:15.720 and so i tried to write a book about what is creativity and how do you achieve it and i do it through

00:02:21.940 biography because i want to show whether it's a benjamin franklin steve jobs or leonardo da vinci

00:02:27.880 how being able to cross disciplines to see patterns across nature to love both art and science

00:02:34.460 to love both uh the humanities and engineering that's what makes people see patterns like steve jobs did

00:02:43.080 like franklin and leonardo da vinci did and that's what helps them sort of think out of the box be more

00:02:49.940 innovative gotcha latest book da vinci was fantastic it's just super thorough and what i imagine this

00:02:55.740 was a challenge because the subjects of your other biographies they were alive in either the 20th

00:03:00.560 century or within the past 200 years so there were a lot of primary source documents to go to letters

00:03:05.760 pamphlets they wrote etc da vinci lived 500 years ago and this is when the printing press was just

00:03:11.920 invented so how were you able to get inside the mind of da vinci and see where his creative genius lies

00:03:19.400 leonardo left us 7200 pages of his notebooks that's more than i had from steve jobs that's more than i

00:03:27.620 probably get from any of my friends right now papers are wonderful technology for the storage and

00:03:33.740 retrieval of information and so we can see as his mind goes across page after page making sketches for

00:03:41.260 the last supper then trying to figure out how outward gestures and facial expressions relate to inner

00:03:48.060 emotions but then also connecting the nerves to the spinal cord to the muscles of the face because

00:03:55.740 he wants to go deeper with anatomy on figuring out how our expressions work all of these things are in

00:04:01.940 his notebooks and so i decided to base this book on a reading of all of his notebook pages and among the

00:04:10.980 many little uh things that inspired me to do is to remember we should all keep notebooks we should all

00:04:17.020 jot down our to-do lists and keep them in a notebook so that years later we can remember the type of

00:04:23.460 connections we made when we saw different things and were these commonplace books notebooks that he was

00:04:28.580 using these were things that were you know sort of leather bound some of them he kept on his belt when

00:04:33.300 he walked around town and uh he would put anything in his shopping list he would put a recipe for making

00:04:40.800 blonde hair dye when he was in his 30s because he was very beautiful had wonderful curly hair well-built

00:04:48.240 physique and i think he was probably worried about going gray and so he puts a recipe for boiling nuts and

00:04:53.740 oil to make a hair dye he puts the questions he wants to answer like how would you measure the size of

00:04:58.920 the sun or what does the tongue of a woodpecker look like and then he would do sketches of people

00:05:05.120 that would end up being studies for his paintings so they had everything from words to shopping lists

00:05:12.260 to pictures yeah and he also spent a lot of his time just doing like trying to square you know a square

00:05:18.380 circle right well one of the challenges is um transforming shapes if you're an artist or an engineer

00:05:26.080 you want to say how would one shape move and be a slightly different shape but be the same volume

00:05:32.300 or be the same area and the most ancient of uh problems in that sort is called squaring the circle

00:05:39.120 which is how do you take a circle of a certain area and say i'll make a square that has the exact same

00:05:45.500 area and that's hard to do because pi is an irrational number to do it just with a ruler and a protractor

00:05:51.680 but leonardo spent oh five decades of his six decade life you know ever since he was a young kid

00:05:58.340 to his dying last notebook page looking at ways to square so and a lot of you as you highlight in the

00:06:04.520 book a lot of da vinci historians like they criticized him for that like he was wasting his time on this

00:06:09.740 when he could have been doing other things but you argue that was that was all part of the process of

00:06:13.680 him becoming the genius that he he was yeah i mean he did anatomy drawings he did squaring of the

00:06:19.520 circles in math he did engineering tried to build flying machines and some art critics will say well

00:06:25.420 if he hadn't wasted his time doing that he would have painted more paintings well sure he may have

00:06:29.720 painted more paintings but he wouldn't have painted the mona lisa he wouldn't have been leonardo da

00:06:34.340 vinci that ability to know the patterns of nature to know not just useful things like how many muscles

00:06:41.620 and nerves uh control the lips and that that helps you with the mona lisa but to also have a 0.90

00:06:47.720 profound philosophical feel for how we're connected with nature that also ends up uh with the mona lisa

00:06:55.160 as opposed to just being a craftsman who can churn out paintings so i thought it was interesting you

00:06:59.760 argue that you know da vinci was a genius yes but he wasn't born with that gift that he had to work

00:07:05.380 for it what what led you to that conclusion well you know you look at his notebooks and you say oh my

00:07:11.120 goodness this guy's human he's made a math mistake here or he's human he's actually not finished this

00:07:17.360 painting or he was drawing a dissection of the human heart and he pauses and then draws his

00:07:23.280 you know companion salai his male companion around the heart which is sort of endearing uh so he's not

00:07:30.720 like an einstein who can take you know tensor calculus and use it to describe the curvature

00:07:36.300 of space and time he's not one of these people with grand mental processing power but he's somebody

00:07:44.800 who has a curiosity and a sense of observation where he just is curious about everything there

00:07:52.480 is to know about everything that can possibly be known and that is something you and i can relate

00:07:59.520 to better we're never going to use tensor calculus to describe space time but we will be able to pause

00:08:06.180 like leonardo did on any given day and say how do the birds of a uh how do the wings of a bird flap up

00:08:15.220 or down faster when it's taking off the common why is the sky blue the commonplace things that um

00:08:22.980 you and i quit wondering about after we get over the age of 10 but people like leonardo still wondered

00:08:29.720 about so his genius was a little bit more self-made it was a little bit more self-willed it wasn't as if

00:08:36.300 he was touched by the heavens with some amazing mental processing power so i think another popular

00:08:44.340 idea of da vinci that's out there is that he was sort of this lone genius eccentric genius working alone

00:08:50.540 in his workshop in florence and but as you highlight in the book for most of his career he was working in

00:08:57.420 collaboration can you describe some of the you know the collaborative process that da vinci used to

00:09:01.620 you know turn out paintings or come with innovations in engineering and etc he realized that creativity

00:09:06.880 was a team sport and it's something i've written about when i wrote about being innovators which is

00:09:12.400 how people collaborate in order to innovate uh leonardo was from a very young age part of a workshop

00:09:20.920 in florence and they did many things they soldered the copper ball that gets put on the dome of

00:09:27.300 of florence's cathedral they you know do paintings like the baptism of christ in which four or five

00:09:34.560 of the painters in the studio each do a different part of it so throughout his life leonardo has a

00:09:41.720 studio of students and associates who work with him and one of the problems like he did two versions

00:09:48.720 of a painting called virgin of the rocks is figuring out what parts of the painting were truly done by

00:09:54.380 leonardo and which by his partners and yet that's almost asking the wrong question because the

00:10:01.640 question is how did they collaborate to make such a good painting most famously vitruvian man that you

00:10:08.340 know the naked guy standing in the circle in the square spread eagle leonardo did that drawing totally

00:10:14.420 by himself but he did it during a few week period where he's working with three of his best friends to

00:10:21.180 figure out how would you do church designs and make humans proportional to the design of the church

00:10:29.520 and so they all do drawings as well and you look at that collaboration that results in leonardo

00:10:36.160 drawing vitruvian man did da vinci care about who got credits like i know during the renaissance this is

00:10:41.460 a time when artists started asserting themselves a bit more and wanting to take more credit before just

00:10:47.340 the the patron would get all the credit for the art was da vinci like that would was he really like

00:10:51.720 not really leonardo did not focus on getting credit or even getting payment sometimes from his work he

00:10:59.900 sometimes kept it kept his works including the mona lisa and did not deliver it to the patron who

00:11:06.120 paid for it he kept it you know throughout his life so he could perfect it also he doesn't sign his

00:11:11.960 paintings there's a painting going on sale uh on november 15th called salvador monday which is the

00:11:18.600 last leonardo painting in private hands it's going to be auctioned off and there's a little dispute about

00:11:25.300 you know was it really how much of it was leonardo because he never signed his work he never sort of

00:11:31.440 wrote i have now finished salvador monday and i'm selling it to so and so uh so i don't think

00:11:38.100 he was one of those artists who did it for fame or fortune i think he did it to please himself

00:11:46.260 but michelangelo would be a contrast to that he was very sensitive michelangelo was very reclusive

00:11:52.920 had very had no real close friends he sort of stayed off on his own was not particularly friendly to

00:11:59.580 leonardo da vinci and so like when he does this statue of david he goes off and holds off by himself

00:12:06.440 uh doing that statue of david uh and yes he's got a little bit more of the agony in him

00:12:13.280 uh about his life leonardo is very comfortable with himself so you mentioned earlier that leonardo

00:12:18.660 was one of the very one of his geniuses was blurring the lines between science and art curious how

00:12:25.220 did his what ways did his science explorations inform his art well they're very specific ways such as

00:12:32.900 having done page after page of how the muscles touch the lips and which nerves control the muscles

00:12:39.580 he starts sketching in 1503 what will be the world's most famous smile he begins to paint the

00:12:46.600 mona lisa uh but also uh his anatomy science was done to help inform his art like he would dissect

00:12:56.980 the muscles of the neck and then perfect his painting saint jerome in the wilderness but being

00:13:02.320 leonardo he would then drill down and pursue anatomy simply for its own sake simply for curiosity i mean

00:13:09.360 after getting all the muscles of the face and the neck which is what he might need for a painting

00:13:14.120 he dissects the human heart he dissects the liver he dissects the spinal cord and every bit

00:13:20.140 of the human body he makes layered drawings of the whole human body so it's an inspiration for most of us

00:13:27.220 that leonardo starts off being curious about things that might be useful for his art but then

00:13:35.040 pursues curiosity for curiosity's sake i call it the tongue of the woodpecker phenomenon which is

00:13:41.480 he didn't need to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looked like in order to do a flying machine or

00:13:46.960 paint a painting he needed to know because he was leonardo he was just curious about everything

00:13:51.760 and he did make insights into anatomy that you know wasn't confirmed to a couple hundred years

00:13:57.320 later yeah one of his insights on anatomy for example is how the heart valve works the insight comes

00:14:02.020 from having watching how a river uh when it uh the water hits an obstacle how it swirls and curls

00:14:10.020 and he says the heart valve opens and shuts because of the swirl of the water not because of the

00:14:15.380 pressure of the blood those are great discoveries and so by seeing patterns across nature he may not

00:14:22.700 have known initially well why do i care about how swirls of water work but it helps inform everything

00:14:29.440 from the curl of the river that flows from the mountains to the back of the mona lisa to the curls and

00:14:36.520 swirls and and swirls of blood from the heart to the aorta that show how the heart valve works

00:14:42.880 so that's what makes him a genius is loving to see patterns in all sorts of fields yeah and he also

00:14:49.260 deciphered how light hits the retina and with that information he was able to you know change

00:14:54.880 perspectives in his painting that people weren't doing sure you have a sort of accelerated perspective

00:15:00.880 in the last supper because of his understanding of optics and perspective but most amazingly the lips of

00:15:07.800 the mona lisa have the tiniest black and white details that turn down at the end of the lips

00:15:12.940 but the shadows and colors turn up at the end of the lips because he knows that you see detail

00:15:18.520 at a different part of your retina than you see shadows and colors so as your eye wanders across

00:15:24.380 your face the smile turns on and off it becomes an interactive smile so that's another way that

00:15:30.300 his science connects to his art so in the book you highlight da vinci's maxim in life it was just

00:15:35.680 direct experience right he wanted to experience things firsthand which he did but then you show

00:15:40.680 in the book that as he developed as an artist and as a scientist he started to incorporate theory how

00:15:46.160 did how did da vinci balance scientific theory and direct scientific you know experimentation yeah

00:15:51.780 that's a great question because it makes him a forerunner of the scientific revolution and the

00:15:57.060 enlightenment he had the good fortune to be born out of wedlock which meant he wasn't sent to a

00:16:01.720 university or a latin school and he becomes what he calls a disciple of experience meaning

00:16:07.600 whenever anybody says something he tries to figure out can i test that how do i know it's right

00:16:12.340 but then he also becomes a disciple of books because gutenberg's printing press has come into play

00:16:18.340 and he can get any book he wants and everything from euclid to poetry and so he becomes a voracious

00:16:24.240 reader and so what he does is sort of a back and forth process that we now take for granted

00:16:29.940 which is he'll have a theory a read of a theory such as why water gets to the top of mountains and

00:16:37.380 flows down as streams and then he'll say let me devise ways to observe or test that and see if that's

00:16:44.260 right and then if his observations or experiments show that there's something wrong he revises his theories

00:16:51.500 sometimes nowadays we forget to revise our theories when we get new facts but leonardo was always going

00:16:57.680 back and forth between having theories about how things worked and even reading other people's

00:17:04.840 series about how things work and then testing those series theories based on facts yeah and the other

00:17:11.320 kind of insight i got from reading about da vinci's life in your book was his use of analogies to form

00:17:17.560 new insights so he would see the veins in the human body and the veins in a leaf and then you know

00:17:22.720 in a leaf and say that's similar and he would try to find some connection sometimes that led him the

00:17:27.380 wrong down the wrong path but making those connections started him to go down new paths and come up with new

00:17:33.280 ideas yeah i mean analogy is sort of a rudimentary form of theorizing for example he looks at the way rivers

00:17:43.660 have tributaries and then he calculates that the size of each of the tributaries adds up to the

00:17:49.980 size of the main river when they flow in and he says well that's same and true of blood vessels as he

00:17:55.400 dissects the human body and then he'll look at a tree and realize trees have branches and it becomes

00:18:01.660 leonardo's law of branching as he understands how branches relate to the size of a trunk and there's a

00:18:09.120 wonderful notebook page where he has this craggy old warrior that he loves to draw and but there's a tree

00:18:14.800 that sort of grows into the warrior's torso and it sort of shows the branchings of the tree and the

00:18:21.020 branching of the warrior's veins so it's his way of saying let me make an analogy as you said sometimes

00:18:28.000 he got it wrong he made the analogy that maybe waters that flow from the top of mountains as sort of

00:18:35.280 mountain streams the water gets up there the way the blood gets to our nose and we even have a nosebleed

00:18:41.480 it gets pumped up through our bodies or and he said pumped up through the earth and then comes out his

00:18:49.360 streams but he tests that and he looks at it he does his geology and he realizes well that's not how it works

00:18:56.180 so he comes up with a new theory which is that the water evaporates it becomes rain and that's how mountain

00:19:01.920 streams form so you see even within this one notebook a notebook that happens to be owned by bill gates

00:19:08.360 the codex lester and beginning with one theory about how there's an analogy between our body and the earth

00:19:15.540 but then revising that theory when his experiments show that the earth doesn't work exactly the way the

00:19:22.060 veins in the body work so one thing also i was fascinated about in the book is that da vinci he was a master painter

00:19:27.860 you know some of the greatest paintings he did but it seemed like throughout his career it's like not

00:19:33.480 what he wanted to be known as it was always an afterthought right when he wrote that letter to

00:19:38.440 the baron to you know get a patron ship you know the fact that he was a master painter i was like oh i

00:19:43.180 also paint but he said all this other stuff that he could do what do you think was going on there why

00:19:47.700 was even though why was it seemed like da vinci was kind of fighting against his innate talent of

00:19:52.520 painting what what was what do you think was going on there well part of what's going on is that

00:19:56.980 he's a human this was just as he's turning 30 you may actually have many listeners who either

00:20:03.600 dreading that upcoming milestone or remember that milestone very unnerving of turning 30 and he's

00:20:11.640 messed up two paintings by during his 20s that he doesn't finish paintings that his father helped

00:20:17.540 him get the commissions for adoration of the magi and saint jerome and so he goes to milan he decides

00:20:24.100 i don't want to be a painter right now i want to be an engineer and so he writes this 11 paragraph

00:20:29.140 job application letter where 10 paragraphs are i can make weapons of war i can divert courses of

00:20:35.320 rivers i can design great buildings all these engineering feats and only at the end does he say

00:20:40.520 i can also paint as well as any man so i think you know sometimes when we look at historical figures

00:20:48.040 we have to realize how human they are and even look into ourselves and say yeah do you remember

00:20:53.220 when we thought okay we were going to be a playwright but now we're going to try to be

00:20:56.660 you know a designer of a web app or something we we we go through parts of life where we get

00:21:04.260 discontented about what we're doing it all does come together at the end though where leonardo realizes

00:21:10.280 that art and engineering aren't that different they're both about creating beautiful strokes

00:21:17.480 that uh show us the wonders of the infinite beauties of nature and in that resume like he was like that

00:21:24.220 letter he was it was a lot of puffery because he had he hadn't done any of those things that he said

00:21:28.820 he could do very human yeah anybody ever do resume inflation yeah he talks about diverting the course of

00:21:35.180 rivers he's not quite done it by the time he writes that letter but he goes on to work with

00:21:39.460 machiavelli and caesar borgia and the people in florence to say okay here's how you would dig ditches

00:21:46.700 to divert the course of the arno river and they actually work on it and dig the ditches it doesn't

00:21:52.220 fully materialize so it's another lesson from him uh sometimes it was steve jobs called the reality

00:21:59.880 distortion field which is you imagine you can do things you push people to do things they think are

00:22:05.480 impossible and sometimes you actually get them done so yeah in that job application letter he hadn't

00:22:11.000 done many weapons of war diverted many rivers but uh it's him saying okay i think i can do this the

00:22:18.000 other thing i didn't know about da vinci before reading your book but now i do is that a lot of his

00:22:22.940 career and the way he made a lot of his money was creating these elaborate um presentations i mean

00:22:29.600 there i imagine they were just like half like renaissance halftime shows is what bingo he was 0.52

00:22:35.500 doing like you know big pageants big plays and we forget there was no tv there was no super bowl there

00:22:42.220 was no internet or movies back then and so when it was time in the evening for people to be entertained

00:22:49.200 there'd be pageants and plays and outdoor spectacles and so leonardo helped do the scenery for those

00:22:55.840 he helped do the ingenious devices like bringing the angels down from the rafters and one of those

00:23:02.100 ingenious devices was an aerial screw which we now think of as the first helicopter because leonardo

00:23:07.900 blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality and goes on to figure out well could that aerial screw

00:23:13.280 i used in that play actually be something that would transport a real human and so whether you're

00:23:20.300 looking at the last supper with the accelerated perspective and exaggerated gestures uh and it

00:23:26.680 looks all of a sudden like a theater set when you look at it that way or when you look at some of the

00:23:31.880 devices and engineering he built and realize that they began uh as devices for the theater and you look at

00:23:39.040 some of his drawings and realize they're drawings for costumes in the theater so that was a way for him to

00:23:45.480 jumpstart his imagination and i think one of the misunderstood things about leonardo that i was

00:23:51.280 able to find by going page after page through his notebooks is how important it was to hit the

00:23:58.240 formation of both his engineering and his art that he spent most of his time as a young man producing

00:24:05.360 pageants and plays yeah i love that insight because oftentimes we think of these great geniuses

00:24:11.180 as sort of venerated like godlike but they they were doing sort of crass commercialism thing but

00:24:17.120 there's value in that too like it's it's i think it's important not to discredit that that's how he

00:24:21.240 made his living and by the way i'm sure there are lots of people listening to this podcast or people

00:24:25.940 like myself who at times say okay i'm going to try to do a screenplay or i'm going to try to uh you know

00:24:32.760 invent uh you know some new app or i'm gonna i'm gonna do something ingenious and i'm gonna do it

00:24:39.440 because maybe i'll make a buck by you know writing the screenplay or or or putting on this uh uh event

00:24:47.600 well that brings us to an interesting point and i i love this in the book because you do such a great

00:24:52.000 job talking about sort of the renaissance culture and these competing uh you know fiefdoms and like

00:24:59.420 patrons and what i thought was interesting is you know leonardo had to be very political

00:25:05.200 in a way because that's how he earned his capital he had to you know go to a patron and find out what

00:25:11.480 was what they wanted and try to do that but at the same time it seemed like da vinci didn't really

00:25:15.760 care so how did what can we learn about da vinci you know juggling the interest of you know economics

00:25:22.880 and creativity that often is economically inefficient right well first of all leonardo never produced

00:25:31.400 things purely for the money every now and then he made a living as a pageant producer as we said

00:25:36.400 but even when the richest person in italy the richest woman isabella desti is saying paint my

00:25:42.500 portrait i'll pay you anything he decides instead to paint the wife of a middle class cloth merchant in

00:25:49.360 florence named lisa and he never even delivers the mona lisa to the cloth merchant because he's doing it

00:25:55.700 pretty much for his own satisfaction and to have a universal understanding of nature uh and that meant

00:26:05.260 he didn't die incredibly wealthy even though he was the greatest artist of his time i also think that

00:26:12.880 um if you're driven simply by commercial uh considerations you're never going to try to make

00:26:21.020 something perfect you might be willing to cut corners and leonardo as i said took 16 years on

00:26:27.000 the mona lisa he put aside the adoration of the magi when he couldn't make it perfect and he spent a lot

00:26:33.100 of time doing dissections or math experiments on squaring the circle that certainly weren't driven by money

00:26:41.500 but it ends up making him the most well-rounded deeply enriched uh intellect and talent of his time

00:26:50.620 and that should be an inspiration to us as well which is always have your passion be for the product

00:26:58.860 not for the profit well you raise another interesting points you mentioned that he'd take forever on some

00:27:03.780 of this work some of his work sometimes he wouldn't even deliver it i mean he seemed kind of like a

00:27:09.000 deletone right like he just jumped from thing to thing and sounds like his dad got on to him a bit for

00:27:14.540 that but was that a key component ever know anybody like that but was that a key component to his

00:27:21.360 innovation and creative just his flightiness his create creative flightiness well he could be both

00:27:26.300 obsessed and do page after page of dissections of muscles and page after page of trying to square

00:27:33.520 the circle and transforming geometric shapes and he could be distracted at times which is he'd go in

00:27:40.260 paint two brush strokes on the last supper and then climb down and disappear for the rest of the day

00:27:47.160 so i think if it were alive today people keep coming up to me and they've read the book and they say

00:27:52.480 well wasn't he somewhere on the autism spectrum or wasn't he dyslectic or wasn't he you know obsessive

00:27:58.580 or compulsive or wasn't he you know adhd you know and distracted and attention deficit and i think you could

00:28:06.460 apply all sorts of modern acronyms to him in letters and pull down a manual and maybe even

00:28:12.580 prescribe a pharmaceutical regiment but all of those traits made him very quirky but it also allowed him

00:28:20.420 to wrestle with his demons and his dragons and his angels and produce you know some of the most amazing

00:28:27.380 engineering and art uh in history could someone like leonardo exist in our modern world as soon as

00:28:34.060 they see things like that they would want to you know put give it a letter an acronym and then

00:28:38.120 give them a prescription of some sort well i don't i think we can all kind of avoid that which is

00:28:43.720 yes we should applaud the wonders of modern medicine and psychology and it helps uh when people are

00:28:50.520 troubled on the other hand we should nurture creativity and quirkiness and leonardo was a misfit

00:28:57.140 he was a misfit and he was gay he was left-handed he was a legitimate he at times was obsessive he was 0.93

00:29:04.840 at times both depressed and then elated and you know at times he didn't finish his work and he would 0.77

00:29:10.160 procrastinate and yet in florence in the 1470s he was not only tolerated he was loved as a young man

00:29:18.980 so we all have to be tolerant of people who to use steve jobs's words think different yeah i love the

00:29:26.200 humanist too that you you you highlight in the book and we've talked about uh in his diary or his

00:29:30.880 notebooks you'd often write have i done anything have i done anything over and over and i've i've

00:29:35.540 felt like that i mean sometimes i'm yeah it's like i haven't done anything today you know this is the

00:29:40.580 emotion i want everybody to feel every few pages of the book which is to be a little bit sort of

00:29:47.820 surprised and then also say what you just said which is oh i've done that or i felt that way or i've

00:29:55.300 been distracted and to realize the human connection we can make to leonardo da vinci and then the

00:30:01.560 inspiration we can get to say oh yeah i used to wonder how a bird wing worked i even wondered why

00:30:08.940 the sky was blue or how would you measure the sun uh and maybe if we're really wild we say i even

00:30:17.220 imagine once trying to figure out what the tongue of a woodpecker looked like but i outgrew that i quit

00:30:23.060 asking those questions so maybe i should be inspired to go back and uh appreciate the

00:30:30.180 quirkiness of leonardo and appreciate the quirkiness in ourselves and every now and then

00:30:36.040 be curious about things be curious just for curiosity's sake well your book did inspire me to do this so i

00:30:42.700 went out and i bought an anatomy book after reading about his experiments with anatomy and i remember in

00:30:48.240 the book you talked about how da vinci had planned on taking his anatomy drawings and turning into a

00:30:52.200 book or a treatise but he never did that because he got you know something else caught his fancy but

00:30:56.220 what i was struck by is these illustrations in this this anatomy book that's you know was published

00:31:00.940 a decade ago look pretty much exactly the same as the illustrations that da vinci did over 500 years ago

00:31:08.380 like exactly the same so i'm curious so da vinci had this power of did art to science and one of the

00:31:16.620 things that he invents probably not even intentionally is what you and i would call the visual display of

00:31:23.520 information whether you're an old magazine editor like myself or a web designer you realize okay how

00:31:29.960 would i do this in layers how would i make an aerial view like leonardo did of the town of omola

00:31:35.220 when he was working with machiavelli that shows the buildings in three dimensions how would i take a

00:31:42.400 dissection of the human body and do layers and layers so that you can flip the page and see what

00:31:48.420 happens when you go down deeper so that ability to do visual display of information is a key it's what

00:31:56.060 steve jobs saw when he went to xerox park and said oh i can do a graphical user interface on the new

00:32:03.600 apple computers that ability to connect humans to nature through great visual displays is a talent

00:32:13.620 that we don't often focus on that that's something that you know just like inventing the airplane or

00:32:20.580 something inventing those abilities to convey information visually and help us visualize it's just

00:32:28.500 an extraordinarily important thing so last question we've been talking about that da vinci

00:32:33.220 developed this power of observation this curiosity i mean da vinci lived 500 years ago twitter didn't

00:32:39.660 exist instagram didn't exist all these digital things that are distracting us that make it hard to

00:32:45.120 really observe didn't exist so based on your research and writing to da vinci what can we learn

00:32:52.020 from him about staying focused and observing intensely on things even in this crazy digital world that we

00:32:58.040 live in yeah he had distractions too i mean gutenberg's inventing of the printing press

00:33:02.520 is up there with the invention of twitter as a way to communicate and get information so but what

00:33:08.960 he was able to do is pause and put things aside and look at very ordinary things and marvel at them

00:33:17.440 to see how light hit a curved leaf and how the shadow was formed behind the curved leaf when the sun hit it

00:33:26.640 but also how there'd be a spot of luster you know one of those little shiny spots on the leaf and that

00:33:32.400 the spot of luster moves when you tilt your head whereas the shadow doesn't move in the same way

00:33:37.960 these are pretty you know interesting observations but there's something an eight-year-old could make

00:33:43.960 and he teaches me as even as i was walking today in manhattan getting ready to do this podcast and i'm walking

00:33:53.920 through central park and the sun is out and even though i've got my iphone with me and even though i could

00:34:00.660 go on twitter to look up what people are saying about this that and the other thing

00:34:04.740 instead i said no no no let me force myself let me look at the light hitting the ripples

00:34:12.940 on the central park lagoon and let me see how that the reflections sort of flutter onto the leaves

00:34:20.040 and let me just occasionally marvel at the simple things in nature that we don't observe

00:34:26.820 that's not that hard to do it just requires keeping your phone in your pocket for a minute

00:34:34.720 and not checking your facebook page or twitter feed or snapchat uh you know in conversations

00:34:43.120 and instead saying i'm actually going to observe something and i'm going to observe it carefully and

00:34:49.860 closely and i'm going to do it for no useful reason i'm going to just do it out of curiosity

00:34:56.300 pure curiosity walter this has been a great conversation thank you so much for your time

00:35:00.340 it's been an absolute pleasure well you're you're a pleasure to talk to thank you so very much

00:35:04.760 my guest today was walter isaacson he is the author of the new book biography on leonardo da vinci

00:35:09.120 it's called leonardo da vinci it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere also make

00:35:12.700 sure to check out his other books about benjamin franklin which is really good the steve job

00:35:15.840 biography fantastic as well also check out our show notes at aom.is slash da vinci

00:35:20.360 where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic

00:35:26.300 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice

00:35:38.180 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy the

00:35:42.060 show you've got something out of it since you've been listening to it i'd appreciate it if you take

00:35:44.980 one minute to give us a review on itunes or stitcher helps that a lot if you've already done

00:35:49.060 that please share the podcast with your friends the more the merrier around here as always thank you

00:35:53.960 for your continued support until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - November 17, 2017

#357： How to Be a Creative Genius Like da Vinci

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