Leonardo Da Vinci (Part 1)

It's the 1470s, and Leonardo da Vinci is hiking alone in the hills of Central Italy, when he chances upon an enormous cave. It's unmarked, and there are no signs of human habitation anywhere. It's apparently undiscovered. He later wrote in his journal, "What he felt at the time. Suddenly, there are a rose in me, two contrary emotions, fear and desire. Fear of the threatening dark cave and desire to see whether there were any marvelous things within." He stands in front of the cave for a long time, bending back and forth to see if he can maybe make out even a faint outline of something inside. But it's too dark. He can't see anything. He's got a decision to make. Does he risk going into the cave and seeing what's inside? Or does he continue on with his day? But he already knows what he'll decide, because Leonardo da Vinci always chooses satisfying his curiosity over everything else. He enters the cave, and the reward for following that curiosity is that he discovers in the walls a fossilized skeleton of a whale. The historian Kenneth Clark calls Da Vinci the most relentlessly curious man in history. And I have to agree, when you read enough of these biographies, you start to see certain archetypes, certain types of people. But I think Da Vinci is a one-of-one. I've never seen or read about a mind like his ever anywhere. You're probably not wired like Da Vinci. And that's okay, I'm not. I don't know anyone that is. But I think anyone can learn how to be more curious by learning from his example. And curiosity, as it turns out, is a superpower. Da Vinci is widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time, if not the greatest artist. He painted what are probably the two most famous paintings of all time in the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, and his sketch of the Vitruvian Man could also probably go down on the list of most famous artworks. He was a shockingly insightful amateur scientist. When reading through the excellent biography of Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, I was struck by how often you read the phrase, which wouldn't be replicated for another hundred years, or two hundred years, or even sometimes three hundred years. He made observations about physics, biology, engineering, and material sciences that would literally take centuries to replicate. He was also a tinkerer, an amateur inventor who came up with a number of useful inventions and laid the groundwork for even more. Steve Jobs said of Da Vinci, he saw beauty in both art and engineering, and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius. We hear a lot about the power of standing at the intersection of art and science, and how that's where innovation comes from, but few people actually do it. And Da Vinci did, and he did it like no one before, and no one since. And this is an episode on how to actually do it, how to combine art and science to become a great innovator. So let's get into it. This is part one on the life of Leonardo da Vinci. Welcome to How To Take Over the World. I'm going to show you how great I am. Yeah, that's a tiny talent. I just want to say that from the bottom of my heart, I'd like to take this chance to apologize. To absolutely nobody. Leonardo da Vinci was a bastard. I mean that literally. His father was a minor nobleman from Vinci, a small town outside of Florence, and his mother was a 15 year old orphan. Da Vinci wasn't even a last name. Da Vinci just means from Vinci. Luckily for him, Renaissance Italy has been described as a golden age for bastards. In Florence especially, the culture was quite accepting of weirdness generally and bastards in particular. In fact I would say that it was even weirdly accepting of the practice. At the time of Leonardo's birth, his father, Pierro, was engaged to be married to a woman from a very prominent Florentine family. And yet, when Leonardo was baptized at one day old, the whole Da Vinci family showed up to the baptism and made a proper party out of it, apparently feeling no guilt, no embarrassment, no shame. If nothing else, you'd probably think they would sweep it under the rug for the sake of the poor Florentine girl who Pierro was scheduled to marry in a matter of weeks. But no, they were quite proud of this illegitimate child. In fact, not only was illegitimcy not a problem for Leonardo, I think you can make the case, I would make the case, that it helped him. As I said Leonardo was very curious, even as a boy, he was extremely bright and his talent as an artist was apparent from a very, very young age. But today we might call him ADD. He had a lot of trouble focusing in completing tasks and focusing on anything that did not capture his interest completely. If he had been a legitimate child of Pierro, he would have been expected to take up his father's trade as a notary. And Renaissance notaries were different than what we might think of today. They were essentially lawyers, it was a very prestigious occupation that could make you quite wealthy. But Leonardo would not have been a good notary because of his distractibility. And so the fact that he was illegitimate allowed him to explore the possibility of other careers. Additionally, if he had been a legitimate child of Pierro, he would have received a classical education study in Greek and Latin from a young age. Instead he was allowed to have a carefree childhood exploring the Tuscan countryside, letting his imagination run wild, and learning by experimentation and observation. The only formal schooling he received was a couple of years in an abacus school, which was a school designed to teach young Florentines the rudimentary math required to engage in commerce, so counting, adding, subtracting, things like that. He also received some informal education, as you might imagine. He was of course taught how to read and write at home. At 12 years old, he moved from the small town of Incheek to Florence with his father. He later wrote in his journal, "How much he missed the countryside, the animals, the plants that he had come to love." But at the same time, he was thrilled by the intellectual scene of Florence. This is the peak of the Renaissance in Florence. It's an explosion of knowledge, culture and art. There are a lot of reasons for this. One of the biggest ones is the printing press, which was invented the year that Leonardo was born. With the advent of the printing press, information could be disseminated at a fraction of the cost that it previously had. Another reason for the Renaissance was the fall of Constanth Noble. Constanth Noble had been one of the great centers of Christian learning, who was a cosmopolitan city, where people from Europe, Asia and Africa came together to trade and learn. For more than a thousand years, it had been one of the great cities of the world, and it would continue to be so for hundreds of years more. But when Muslims conquered the city in 1453, many Christian scholars decided that they might be better off under Christian rule in Western Europe, so they abandoned Constanth Noble and came to places like Florence, bringing their knowledge with them, as well as a vast trove of books and manuscripts. So these two things happened at almost exactly the same time, the fall of Constanth Noble on the one hand and the invention of the printing press on the other. And so it's like, if you can imagine, two waves in the ocean and they crest at the same time on top of each other, creating this massive tidal wave. That's what you have at this time, a tidal wave of new information. And so it leads to an explosion of innovations in Western Europe in science, engineering, medicine, art, commerce, technology, you name it. And Florence is the epicenter of all this because it was the richest city in Europe. It was one of the great centers of industry and commerce, its merchants were very wealthy, and they loved to show off that wealth by patronizing the arts. So when Leonardo first came to Florence as a young man, he stepped right into the middle of all of this. He would have heard the worrying and clacking of weaver shops. The textile industry was the biggest industry in the world and it was centered in Florence. He would have heard the hammers and furnaces of goldsmith shops, the bustle of wagons and carts carrying goods to and from the markets. The music of street performers, the shouts and hurried conversations of merchants like the Medici's trading in the markets and the smells of street vendors selling food. It was the New York City of its time. It was a place where everything was happening, commercially and artistically. It couldn't have been more different from the tiny town of Vinci where Leonardo had grown up. And I imagine it must have been very overwhelming for him. In fact, some of his writings suggest that it was, but at the same time, it was very exciting. Now, firstly, Leonardo was just living with his father, presumably helping him with odd jobs and tasks related to the notary business, but his father writes of him at this time that he never ceases drawing and sculpting. So Leonardo has this obsession at a young age. So his father shows some of his drawings to a notable local artist named Andrea del Virocchio. Virocchio is very impressed by what he sees and takes the boy on as an apprentice at age 17. Now, this apprenticeship is interesting because it defies many of the stereotypes that we might have about great artists. First of all, the environment is not self-serious and ponderous. It's more like a commercial shop than a fine art studio. There's a work room on the ground floor open to the street where they are mass-producing products from easels, kilns, pottery wheels, and metal grinders. These aren't artists. It's a bunch of crazy young men, it's a bunch of lads, as they might say in England, who are joking around having a good time, making money, and also experimenting, exploring their craft, one up in each other competing, collaborating on how to create better and better art. It's an environment that reminds me a lot of the Silicon Valley of the 1970s, or of Thomas Edison and his traveling telegraph operators in the latter half of the 19th century. Leonardo found it to be an ideal environment. He later wrote, "Drawing in company is much better than drawing alone." And I think that's true of many pursuits. I think in the age of remote work too many of us are doing creative work alone. It's not just drawing. That's better done in company. Maybe other creative skills as well. Maybe writing, composing, graphic design are also much better in company than alone. Now again, this is kind of a factory. They're turning out mass-produced work for the most part. They also do a subarium-pressive commissions of a very fine art, but a lot of what Leonardo is doing is mass-produced art. Despite that, it's not long before Baroqueo notices how gifted Leonardo is. It's during this time that he begins pioneering two new approaches. The first is called Chia Escuro, which means light and dark. Essentially, this is the practice of adding black pigments to create shadows. And this allows Leonardo to much more realistically depict the effect of light and shading on a subject. The other innovation was something called "sphumato," which is based on the word "sphumo" smoke. Leonardo, with his keen power of observation, noticed that in real life, we hardly ever actually see hard lines on objects. Rather, we see soft lines and shaded contours. So he wrote about this technique, "Your shadows and lights should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air." And that's where we get the word "sphumato." The best way to understand this is to Google a painting called "The Baptism of Christ" by Da Vinci. This is a painting done actually by Baroqueo and Da Vinci together. On the right side, you can see John the Baptist, whose body was painted by Baroqueo. Look at the leg. It's painted accurately. With lots of details, it's well done. It's much better than I could do painting a leg, but you'll see how it's painted with hard lines to show the muscles. Now look at the body of Jesus on the left, which was painted by Da Vinci. Look at the leg, and how he uses "sphumato." He has rendered it much more realistically. The leg doesn't have hard lines, but subtle shading differentiates the various muscles in the leg, which gives a much more realistic effect. The technique in this painting was so ahead of its time that supposedly after the baptism of Christ, Baroqueo vows never to paint again. In its appears, he never did. He never did another painting commission on his own. So think about that. Baroqueo is a famous painter in his own right with many notable pupils, and he's only 40. He's not old. But the pupil had so thoroughly outpaced the master, De Baroqueo, who can only look at Leonardo and Marvel. He thought that once he's seen a master, like Leonardo at work, the right thing was to leave the painting to a genius like him. Now why was Leonardo so focused on these new techniques? He wrote that the first intention of the painter was to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane. So in other words, the first purpose of a painter is to render objects realistically, to make them appear three-dimensional on a two-dimensional plane. In that way, Da Vinci reminds me a lot of Pixar. He's kind of the Pixar of his time. Remember Pixar started out as a technology company focused on the computing, the technical problem of rendering 3D animations, and only later became a studio that produced movies. Both Da Vinci and Pixar were consumed with the same problem with how to render three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface. The only difference was that Pixar's objects moved. They were animated. So like Pixar, Da Vinci is focused on this technical problem, but also like Pixar, he wasn't just focused on the technical problem, and not for its own sake. He was focused on it because it allowed him to communicate more effectively through his art. He could better display movement and emotion and story by painting more realistically. It's an interesting paradox that those who are focused on the technical details of their craft are often those who create the most transcendent art, as maybe a little counterintuitive. There's a famous quote from Pablo Picasso, "When art critics get together, they talk about form, and structure, and meaning. When artists get together, they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." That's a substance used in paint. And for whatever reason, the artists are the people who actually create the form and structure in the meaning. The people who talk about where to buy cheap turpentine end up creating better form and transcendent art than people who talk about the transcendence of art. And so again, that's true of Da Vinci and his contemporaries as well. Like I said, there are a bunch of lads. They're thinking about the technical details. They're thinking about where to get cheap turpentine. They think about how to mix different paints, sfumato, kia skuro, all these different techniques. They're a bunch of nerds nerding out about how to create three-dimensional images, but at the same time, they are creating these transcendental, amazing, beautiful moving pieces of art. And in this pursuit, it's not just kia skuro and sfumato that Da Vinci is using. He's also pioneering new materials. So instead of using traditional egg-based paints, he's coming up with new oil-based paints that are more translucent so he can paint many, many layers that are somewhat transparent in order to create a feeling of depth and three-dimensionality. He's also carefully studying perspective and optics. He observed how objects looked different at different distances with different backgrounds in different environments from different heights and angles so that he could paint them more realistically. Now, we should also talk about Leonardo's personal life at this time as a young man in his late teens and early 20s in Florence. Everything about Leonardo was weird. He was illegitimate. He was left-handed. He was a vegetarian because he was a great lover of animals and didn't want them harmed. He dressed differently. He wore a rose-colored tunic that came to the knees where most people wore long tunics that went to the ground. Again, this is another commonality he has. If you remember Caesar wears his long togas with fringe, so he dresses slightly different than everyone else. Of course, Steve Jobs has his turtle necks. Great people tend to do this and Leonardo did as well. He had a slightly different way of dressing. And in addition to all of these things that were different about him, his sexuality was different. So in 1476 to age 24, he was accused of engaging insatomy with a male prostitute, along with three other young men. The charges were dismissed, probably because one of the accused was related to the Medici's who were the most powerful family in Florence at the time. But that certainly doesn't prove that the incident never happened. Florence at the time was much more tolerant of homosexuality than most other times in places in Europe's history. But even that had its limits. And accusations seemed to have left in impression on Leonardo who went into a little bit of a funk. Around that time, he wrote in one of his notebooks, if there is no love, what then? Of course, just because there was an accusation, that doesn't mean we can be sure of Leonardo's sexuality. And applying terms like gay to the past can be anachronistic, because people approached sexuality differently. They didn't divide it into binaries of gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, anything like that. These are all kind of modern inventions. But there are reasons to believe that he preferred male companionship, may have even been gay or homosexual, as we would define it today. He never pursued a physical or romantic relationship with woman. Throughout his career, he had a habit of painting androgynous looking figures. And while he was obviously interested in the male figure and drew many male nudes, he did not have a corresponding interest in the female figure. In the one nude of a woman that he sketched, the genitalia looked dark and scary. And this is funny, because he was extremely smart and extremely accurate about how he painted the human body. But the female reproductive organs in the one biological sketch he does of a woman are wildly incorrect. So I'm not trying to play Sigmund Freud here, but it does seem likely that he at least had some homosexual proclivities. These anonymous accusations may have contributed to Da Vinci's decision to eventually leave Florence in 1482. Although there was another even bigger reason, and that was that he left Verrocchio's workshop to try and start his own workshop, as would be expected from someone with his level of talent. But he was so unfocused and such a perfectionist that he could rarely ever actually finish any of his commissions, any of the things he was hired to do. Soon, he's got would-be clients hounding him to finish their paintings. Da Vinci, of course, wanted to finish the commissions and frankly needed the money, but he hated working on anything that didn't completely fascinate him. And what fascinated him was learning. Generally, he had really high energy when a commission was started, and he was figuring out the concept of the painting and hurdles that would need to be tackled in order to make it look realistic, how are we going to depict this, how am I going to show off some of the things I've been learning? But one solid progress was made, and he was sure he'd figured out the problem of how he was going to portray this stuff, and he was sure, okay, this is how I'm going to do it, and he had it all figured out, then he'd lose interest. Because he wasn't learning anymore, he was just completing. He also hated finishing works because he hated imperfection. So there's this example of this painting that he does around this time, and the neck muscles are correct. There's muscle inside his neck that divides into, and you wouldn't know that unless you had really carefully dissected and studied a human body that when you turn your neck at a certain angle, you can kind of see the muscle divide into. And so people think, wow, how did he know this? He hadn't really figured this out yet, and it turns out through careful analysis. They found out that he went back to this painting like 30 or 40 years later, in order to correct the neck muscles based on what he had learned in the dissection 30 years later. So that's what a level of perfectionist he was, that he will revisit a painting that was done decades ago in order to make sure that the neck looks exactly true to life. So it's impressive, but this inability to finish works and the subsequent pressure from his clients sent him into a pretty severe depression at this time in his life. He wrote in his notebook at the time, "Tell me if anything was ever done. Tell me, tell me." While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die. While I'm 1482, Da Vinci turns 30 and decides to leave Florence. He was already an innovator and recognized genius, but a remarkably unaccomplished one. All he had to show for his effort were some contributions to paintings he did jointly with Virokio, a couple of unfinished would-be masterpieces, and one undelivered portrait of a young woman. And this is not the Mona Lisa, by the way, this is another portrait of a young woman. Luckily, he would soon have the chance to start over, and that's because he's going to go to Milan. He was actually sent from Florence to Milan as a diplomatic gift to the Duke of Milan, the ruler there. Florence had commissioned a new type of liar, which is a string musical instrument, and they sent Leonardo, who was a very gifted musician, to deliver this liar as a gift and play it for the Duke of Milan. The trip from Florence to Milan was 180 miles long, which Da Vinci knew because he developed a wooden odometer that made a mark with every turn of the wheel in order to track the length of the journey. When he gets there, after he delivers the liar to the Duke, he writes a letter to the Duke of Milan to offer his services. He's a little burned out on being a painter, so he really pitches himself as an inventor and a military engineer. He says that he can design bridges, fortifications, siege weapons, canals, waterworks, public buildings, and more. In this letter to the Duke of Milan, he's listening out all these different things that he can do. Of course, he's the real Renaissance man. He can do all these things. Then he throws in at the end, oh yeah, I can also paint. He puts at the very end, this is what he literally says. He says, likewise in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other man, whosoever he may be. So literally saying, by the way, I'm also the best painter in the world, which is a great flex. Luckily he is hired by the Duke of Milan. He never does make much use of his supposed skills in military engineering, but he produces pageants and theatrical performances. He plays the liar, rights, and paints for the court of the Duke of Milan. Pageants were a much better medium for Leonardo than painting. And that's because they had deadlines, like actually had to happen, and therefore it kind of forced him to finish things. He was apparently exceptional as a producer. It's a shame that these productions are, you know, they're ephemeral. They're essentially lost a time, but we can tell through some of the materials that have survived that he put the same level of detail and interest into these things as he did into his paintings. In one play, there was a bird that flew through the scene. And in a normal play, you maybe get a little fake bird and you put it on a string and you fly it through the scene. But Da Vinci is not your normal person. He spends countless hours studying birds and their wings to find out exactly how they moved and at what speed. And he created an extremely realistic mechanical bird that flapped its wings in a very realistic way. And so this is a lot of what he's doing. It's very important to the Duke of Milan. Actually, these big pageants in plays are one of the big ways that he entertains the masses in his territory and keeps them satisfied with his rule. But even these pageants weren't enough for Leonardo. One of the reasons for being in Milan is that it was a larger city than Florence and had a more diverse set of intellectual pursuits. Whereas Florence was the center of commerce and art, yes, Milan was not as commercially important or as artistically impressive, but it had more experts in fields like science, literature, medicine, and military engineering. Leonardo had always been a doodler and a notetaker, but it's in Milan that he starts keeping his famous notebooks. The notebooks of Leonardo are incredible. He actually didn't publish any of his scientific discoveries and observations in his lifetime. So it's only through these notebooks that we get a glimpse of Leonardo's true genius. And we only get a glimpse. Today we have about a quarter of the notes that he actually took at the time. In his notebooks, we see him propose an armored human-powered, what can only be described as a tank. We see him propose a flying machine, a telescope, siege weapons, waterworks, a machine gun like rotating cannon, a helicopter, scuba-like diving equipment, and much more. We also see quirky observations from everyday life, such as the fact that a dragonflies, back wings go down when his front wings go up in vice versa. I think of the level of observation you'd have to do in order to notice that. We also see profound scientific discoveries. His realization that blood, swirls, and eddies in the heart wouldn't be confirmed until the 21st century. Leonardo dissected bodies and used the findings from these deceptions to make the most accurate diagrams of the human body ever created to that point. It would take hundreds of years before they were again matched. What comes through in these notebooks is his curiosity in the probing nature of his brain. On one page, you'll have, you know, in one corner, a groundbreaking diagram of the heart, and then in another corner, a doodle of a tree, and then in the middle, maybe a shopping list, and some note on what's happening in his life. You'll have the design for a new musical instrument, and next to it, a riddle, and a journal entry. Leonardo is truly letting his curiosity run wild. Now all this has to be cave-yotted with the fact that he really only had one or two inventions that ever actually made it out of his brain and into the real world. And that's still impressive. I mean, if you're obituary said that you were the greatest artist of your generation, and you invented the wheel lock, which is something he actually did invent, which was an important innovation in the science of warfare, I think you would consider that a very successful life, you know, great artist. And he had a couple of little inventions. But when you read through his journals, it becomes clear they had so much more to contribute than he actually did. The reason that he didn't contribute more inventions in scientific discoveries was he didn't have to. He loved learning for learning sake. In the field of art, commissions forced him to sometimes, sometimes complete his work. But the fact that no one was paying him to do these military innovations meant that for the most part, they never made it into the real world. So in that way, we see that constraints actually helped Leonardo. He hated them, but they were good for his legacy. So we will hear about two of the masterpieces that he actually did finish after this brief break to hear a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix makes the best mattresses on planet earth. I sleep on a Helix mattress every night, and I used to wake up with back pain, and now I don't. That is a huge deal for me. It has changed my life. That is why I am a huge fan of Helix. Others have found the same thing. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand. A study they ran found that 82% of those involved saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle while sleeping on a Helix mattress. I have the Helix midnight elite. It's phenomenal. Upgrading your sleep is one of the easiest ways to upgrade your life, because you're sacrificing nothing. Right? You're going to be spending that time sleeping anyway. You might as well do it on a great mattress that helps you sleep better. So go to helixleep.com/takeoverpod for 20% off. That link is in the show notes. If you need help remembering it, that's helixsleep.com/takeoverpod for 20% off. Make sure you enter our show name after check out so they know we sent you. The two great masterpieces that DaVinci did finish during his first stint in Milan were the Vitruvian man and the last supper. Now the Vitruvian man was not supposed to be a work of art. It's actually just a sketch, and it was born from a conversation he was having with some of his friends. Leonardo had lots of friends. He was very popular. He was handsome, well built and proportioned, generous, funny. He was open with others. He shared his learning a lot. One friend he made was an architect and polymath from Siena, named Francesco Didgeorgio. Didgeorgio and DaVinci traveled together to meet a scholar named Poggio Bracio Lini, who had recently translated the works of a Roman statesman and architect who lived in the first century BC, named Vitruvian. So Vitruvian is this ancient Roman who mostly wrote on architecture, but he had a long passage about human proportions and their relation to one another. It demonstrated that ideal aesthetically pleasing bodies were defined by certain set proportions. So, after meeting with Bracio Lini, this translator, and reading his translation of Vitruvius, Giorgio and Leonardo, along with another one of their friends named Yakamo Andrea, set about trying to diagram their proportions laid out by Vitruvius. Okay, so that was a lot of names. I'll just go through that again. Vitruvius is the ancient Roman who originally tried to figure out the ideal proportions of a human body. Vitruvian is the one who rediscovered Vitruvius' work, 1500 years later, and translated him from Latin to Italian. So Vitruvius Bracio Lini translates him and then Giorgio and Andrea are Leonardo's friends who are researching this stuff with him and learning about Vitruvius' proportions with him. Torgio and Andrea made their own attempts at diagramming the proportions set out by Vitruvius, and while they are impressive, I mean if I had done it, I'd be impressed by it, more than anything, these illustrations serve to highlight the brilliance of Leonardo's Vitruvian man. Because for one thing, his is more scientifically correct than the others. The body looks more natural, the proportions are more correct, but not only that, it's rendered more beautifully, it's a better piece of art. The man is fully sketched out with proper shading, it's a very interesting body and interesting face, there's a feeling of gravity and transcendence to Leonardo's Vitruvian man. Walter Isaacson describes Leonardo's Vitruvian man as "the ultimate symbol of the intersection of art and science." And it is that, it's also a symbol of the renaissance, of the beauty of the human body, of the reasoning capacity of man, and so much more, I think it demonstrates the genius of Leonardo, maybe more than anything else he's done. And it wasn't even designed to be a work of art, it was a sketch in a personal notebook created for no other reason than to satisfy his personal curiosity. I mean, can you imagine that? How amazing of an artist you would have to be for a glorified sketchbook doodle to become one of the great artistic works of all time. It just shows you what a genius he was, what an unbelievable genius Leonardo was. His other masterpiece from this time was The Last Supper. Now The Last Supper is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. For years he had studied perspective and geometry in order to properly be able to paint scenes with depth and The Last Supper was a masterpiece in creating this depth perception. He was also able to use Sumato and Kiyaskuro to create the sensation of movement and emotion. The painting depicts the moment when Jesus had just told his apostles that one of them will betray him. His apostles appear to be in motion, talking, sulking, and gesturing with their hands to convey their feelings. When you look at it, it feels like it's just happened. After they're in the moment right after Jesus has said that one of them will betray him. Now I love the story of how he actually painted it. A contemporary wrote that he would, and this is a quote, "Come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding and then remain there, brush in hand, from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink painting continually." Okay, so he's describing him just being there all day painting. But then he goes on to say that on other days Leonardo would show up, stare at the painting for a while, and then leave without touching the brush in a whole day. He reminds me of the chapter in the Almanac of Neval Rovacant. Neval is this entrepreneur. He's like the guru of Silicon Valley. In this chapter, Neval talks about working like a lion and not like a cow. Because cows are walking around. They're chewing grass all day. They're always kind of working. The lions mostly don't work. They mostly rest and recharge. And then they sprint and take down a gazelle and eat it. And he says that it's better to work like a lion, to take long periods of rest. And then when you're interested in something, work really, really intensely and work really, really hard for a short period of time. And that's what Leonardo does. He works like a lion. Sometimes he works furiously and then other times he doesn't work at all. He's this guy, Vassari, who was a biographer of great artists in the 1500s. So he was a near contemporary with Leonardo. And he wrote about Leonardo in this habit. He wrote, "Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least." I love that. Men of genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least. He goes on, seeking out inventions with the mind and forming those perfected ideas, which the hands afterwards express and reproduce from the images already conceived in the brain. And I think that's true in many different fields. You have to take time away to think. And for all of you that complain, the episodes don't come out fast enough, that's my response from now on. So sorry. Okay, well, all this happens in Milan in the 1480s and 1490s. In 1500, the French invade and take over Milan and Leonardo has to flee for his life. So we will take over from there in part two, but I wanted to highlight a few things that I learned or took away from studying the life of Leonardo da Vinci. The first is to strive to be more curious. That's the very obvious takeaway. Challenge your assumptions. Try to figure out how things work. I don't think anyone can make themselves be as curious as da Vinci, but we can make ourselves more curious by looking at his example. The next is, and this is something that Walter Isaacson highlights in a really beautiful way, is how Leonardo combined observation and fantasy. So Isaacson writes, and this is in his very good biography, simply titled Leonardo da Vinci. He writes, Leonardo was one of history's most disciplined observers of nature, but his observation skills colluded with rather than conflicted with his imaginative skills. Okay, I liked the way he phrases that. His disciplined observations colluded with his imaginative skills. So in other words, he wasn't just a keen observer of nature, of things as they existed, but he had a great imagination as well, and he's able to think up things that didn't exist, and he was able to combine them. And I think that both of those things made the other one stronger. I brought up the example of Pixar and talked about how people who are focused on the technical details are also able to create some of the most creative and soulful art. And I think that's getting at the same thing. Observation and imagination are not mutually exclusive, and actually they help to reinforce each other. And so I think the lesson is, if you're someone who works in the field of fantasy, if you are maybe a writer or an artist, then it helps to also get grounded in observation, to learn more about things as they actually are. And if you're someone who works in the field of things as they actually are, if maybe you're an engineer, then it can actually help to dip your toes in the world of fantasy, of imagination, of fiction, of things like that. And then the last thing I'll say is Isaacson has a great line in his biography. He says, "Obsession is a component of genius." I would take that even further. I would say that obsession is the largest component of genius, the most important part. And so it's easy to look at the life of Leonardo and say, "Man, he did some great things, but it's a real waste that he wasn't able to complete more of his work. Imagine what he could have done if he was more disciplined about finishing things." But I don't think it works that way. Leonardo was as great as he was in part because he ruthlessly followed his obsession. And if that meant that he lost interest halfway, then so be it. And I think that is my biggest takeaway so far. Follow your obsession, no matter the cost. Okay, that does it for this episode. Tune in next time to hear more about Leonardo da Vinci. Give me a follow on Twitter @BenWilsonTweets and please, if you like this episode, share it with a friend. More than anything, sharing the show is what helps me the most. So please do it and thank you very much to all of you who are already sharing the show. I really appreciate it. This episode was written and produced by me, Ben Wilson, with editing and sound design from Ezra Bakker Truviano. So that's it. Until next time, thank you for listening to How To Take Over the World.