#357： How to Be a Creative Genius Like da Vinci
Episode Stats
Summary
On this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, host Brett McKenzie speaks with famed author Walter Isacson about his new biography of Leonardo da Vinci, The Innovators: A Biography of the Manly Genius about the Italian Renaissance painter and inventor.
Transcript
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
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
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
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
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