Founders - #15 Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography

Episode Date: November 17, 2017

What I learned from reading Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson.  ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Let's go ahead and jump into today's book and we're going to start in his introduction. This is Isaacson talking directly to the reader. I embarked on this book because Leonardo da Vinci is the ultimate example of the main theme of my previous biographies. How the ability to make connections across disciplines, arts and science, humanities and technology, is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius. Benjamin Franklin, a previous subject of mine, was a Leonardo of his era. With no formal education, he taught himself to become an imaginative polymath who was Enlightenment America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist.

He proved by flying a kite that lightning is electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses, enchanting musical instruments, clean burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream, and America's unique style of homespun humor. Albert Einstein, when he was stymied in his pursuit of his theory of relativity, would pull out his violin and play Mozart, which helped him reconnect with the harmonies of the cosmos. Ada Lovelace, whom I profiled in a book on innovators, combined the poetic sensibility of her father, Lord Byron, with her mother's love of the beauty of math to envision a general purpose computer. And Steve Jobs climaxed his product launches with an image of street signs showing the intersection of liberal arts and technology.

Leonardo was his hero. And this is a direct quote from Jobs now. He saw beauty in both art and engineering, Jobs said, and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius. His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created, a wondrous guide to the person whom the art historian Kenneth Clark called the most relentlessly curious man in history. So Leonardo's notebooks is the foundation for Isaacson's book on

Da Vinci. A few sentences from the introduction before we move on. Above all, Leonardo's relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge, but a willingness to question it, to be imaginative and like talented misfits and rebels in any era to think different. And skipping ahead, I'm not going to cover too much of his childhood. I do want to talk about the fact that he was an autodidact and he lacked formal education. And in this section, it's called The Disciple of Experience. So let's go to Isaacson here to learn more. Another upside for Leonardo of being born out of wedlock was that he was not sent to one of the Latin schools

that taught the classics and humanities to well-groomed aspiring professionals and merchants of the early renaissance. Leonardo was mainly self-taught. He often seemed defensive about being an unlettered man, unlettered man means no formal education, as he dubbed himself with some irony. But he also took pride that his lack of formal schooling led him to be a disciple of experience and experiments. This free-thinking attitude saved him from being an acolyte of traditional thinking. In his notebooks, he unleashed a blast at what he called the pompous fools who would disparage him for this. Now, this is a direct quote from Leonardo. I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters

may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me alleging that i am a man without learning foolish folk they strut about puffed up and pompous decked out and adorned not with their own labors but but by those of others. They will say that because I have no book learning, I cannot properly express what I desire to describe, but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others. His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more And before I move on, I just want a couple paragraphs down. There's this part that makes me think of the internet.

So it says, It was a good time for a child with such ambitions and talents to be born. In 1452, Johannes Gutenberg had just opened his publishing house, and soon others were using his movable type printing press to print books that would empower unschooled but brilliant people like Leonardo. So in the 1400s, they had the printing press. Today, we have the Internet, which I think is doing the exact same thing. Okay, this part just made me chuckle. So later, I'm still early in the book, but later on, Leonardo develops sort of a feud with Michelangelo. And Michelangelo was about 20 years younger.

And even though they were both gay artists, Michelangelo was very pious and kind of ashamed of his sexuality. There was even rumors that he enforced like a strict celibacy on himself. Leonardo was the exact opposite. And you're going to, he's just funny. You'll see here. On the contrary, in his life and in his notebooks, there is much evidence that he was not ashamed of his sexual desires. Instead, he seemed amused by them. In a section of his notebooks called On the Penis, he described quite humorously how the penis had a mind of its own and acted at times without the will of a man. Direct quote from Leonardo here. The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own

without the permission of its owner. When he is awake or sleeping, it does what it desires. Often when the man wishes to use it, it desires otherwise, and often it wishes to be used and the man forbids it. Therefore, it appears that this creature possesses a life and an intelligence separate from the man. He found it curious that the penis was often a source of shame and that men were shy about discussing it. This is the part that made me chuckle. This is another direct quote from Leonardo. Man is wrong to be ashamed of giving it a name or showing it, he added,

always covering and concealing something that deserves to be adorned and displayed with ceremony. I think I have an idea that he was taking a shot at Michelangelo. You're probably familiar with Michelangelo's famous statue of David. And at some point later on, Michelangelo made David nude, which was quite common then. And then later on, people would cover David's genitals with like a bronze leaf. And we see this throughout sculptures and paintings of all sorts where some people were ashamed of nudity. Leonardo definitely wasn't. He was extremely flamboyant.

He dressed in almost costume. Instead of wearing clothes clothes he wore almost costumes he was well known for traveling with a bunch of young uh male lovers and uh like i said he thinks that the issue the penis should be adored and displayed with ceremony and as you can probably guess um from just that he was not particularly religious um even though most of the people around him were um he's never really there was a rumor on his deathbed that he might have taken communion but throughout his whole life he never attended church okay so i want to skip ahead uh to the chapter that introduces us to leonardo's notebooks the reason i bought the hardcover of this book is

because it's there's just there's a lot of beautiful renditions of not only the art he created, but a lot of pictures of his notebooks and his writing. You got to see some of these drawings. The book is absolutely beautiful. There's a section where later in life, he starts to want to learn how the body is. And he starts basically dissecting cadavers. And the drawings in that chapter are just amazing how much detail he has as he goes layer by layer through the human body. So this is, we're going to get into his notebooks here. These little books on his belt along with the larger sheets in his studio became repositories for all of his manifold passions and obsessions,

many of them sharing a page. As an engineer, he honed his technical skills by drawing mechanisms he encountered or imagined. As an artist, he sketched ideas and made preparatory drawings. As a court impresario, he jotted down designs for costumes, contrivances for moving scenery and stages, fables to be enacted, and witty lines to be performed. Scribbled in the margins were to-do lists, records of expenses, and sketches of people who caught his imagination. Over the years, as his scientific study got more serious, he filled pages with outlines and passages for treaties on topics such as flight, water, anatomy, art, horses, mechanics, and geology. About the only thing missing are intimate personal revelations or intimacies. These are not St. Augustine's confessions,

but rather the outward-looking enthrallments of a relentlessly curious explorer. This is why I recommend a lot of Isaac's books. I think he's a really good writer. Listen to that last sentence. These are not St. Augustine's confessions, but rather the outward-looking enthrallments of a relentlessly curious explorer. So one of the reasons I think Da Vinci fits in perfect to the Founders podcast is because I think as founders, you don't have one specialty. In this paragraph, he's an artist,

he's an engineer, he's creating, he put on shows, like he was really into live like plays and pageants, designing not only what the actors and participants would do, but all their dress. He was a scientist. He didn't limit himself by saying, oh, I can only paint, or I can only sculpt, or I can only do these things. He just was, if he was curious about something, he just figured out a way to learn it. I think that's obviously an integral skill, not only for founders, entrepreneurs, but I think regular employees would be better off if they adapted that mindset. So skipping ahead a little bit, but in their content, meaning Leonardo's books, Leonardo's were like nothing the world had ever or has ever seen. His notebooks have been rightly called the most astonishing testament

to the powers of human observation and imagination ever set down on paper. Now, here's the crazy part. The more than 7,200 pages probably represent about one quarter of what Leonardo actually wrote. So we have, still to the present day, we have about 7,200. So if they're saying it's one quarter, what is that? Almost 30,000 pages. Now keep in mind, the book I hold in my hand is 600 pages. This guy wrote down 30,000 pages of things that were interesting to him.

Back to the book. But that is a higher percentage after 500 years than the percentage of Steve Jobs' emails and digital documents from the 1990s that he and I were able to retrieve. Isaacson's referencing the fact that he worked intimately with Jobs and Jobs the final days to finish that book called Steve Jobs. If you haven't read it, it's amazing. If you want to know more about it, I did a podcast. Just go back through the podcast feed and you'll see it. Leonardo's notebooks are nothing less than an astonishing windfall that provides a documentary record of applied creativity. As usual with Leonardo, however, oh, I skipped over something I need to talk to you about.

He talks about that it's a higher percentage after 500 years than the percentage of Steve Jobs' emails. I've heard Isis talk about this book on podcasts, and I've also heard he writes read he says it in the he writes it in the book but he feels that paper is a wonderful storage device and that we're doing ourselves an injustice that most of our storage if you think about all the content you create whether it's podcast writing most of it's stored on a hard drive which means like it may not exist 500 years from now so I obviously love technology and everything that it provides for us. But there is something to be said about the fact that paper can last hundreds, if not thousands of years. It's yet to be seen if we're

going to be able to do the same thing in the future with all of our digital content. So enough of that tangent, let me jump back in. As usual with Leonardo, however, there's an element of mystery involved. He rarely put dates on his pages, and much of their order has been lost. After his death, many of the volumes were disassembled, and the interesting pages were sold or reorganized into new codices. Because good paper was costly, Leonardo tried to use every edge and corner of most pages, cramming as much as possible on each sheet and jumbling together seemingly random items from diverse fields. This is definitely true and there's a bunch of examples in the book of actual pages from

Leonardo's notebooks. Often he would go back to a page months or even years later to add another thought, just as he would go back to his painting of Saint Jerome and later his other paintings to refine his work as he evolved and matured. So I don't think we're going to spend much time talking about the Mona Lisa. I know that's probably his most famous work, but what they just said, how he would go back months or even years later, something I learned about the Mona Lisa here is he worked on it for about 20 years he carried with it carried it with him he'd had like a brush stroke and this was very um common for the way leonardo worked he never rushed anything um he was actually still working on it when he died and let me just wrap with this sentence we'll move on his appetite for soaking

up information from books was voracious and wide-ranging. Okay, so I want to, again, really hard for me when I went back over my notes and my highlights to figure out how to make this into some kind of cohesive story, which I don't think I'm capable of doing, frankly. But there is some themes that I want to hit on over and over again because they talk about them in the book over and over again. And again, the reason I'm doing this is because I want to learn from his perspective. Maybe there's something he thinks or a way he approached his life that I can adapt to my own. And obviously share that with you to, to, to take the parts that, uh, that you find valuable. But he has this, um, I have just a note, um, here and it's experience

greater than sign theory. So he was very, very big. He did not like theory at all. He wanted to experience things. He said that was what life was all about. So this was very, very big. He did not like theory at all. He wanted to experience things. He said that was what life was all about. So this is just a few paragraphs on connecting experiment to theory. Leonardo's devotion to firsthand experience went deeper than just being prickly about his lack of received wisdom. It also caused him, at least early on, to minimize the role of theory. A natural observer and experimenter, he was neither wired nor trained to wrestle with abstract concepts. He preferred to induce from experiments

rather than deduce from theoretical principles. Direct quote from him. My intention is to consult experiences first and then, with reasoning, show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way in other words he would try to look at facts and from them figure out the patterns and natural forces that cause these things to happen and he goes into what's the practical application of experience over theory in

his notebook he described his method almost like a trick for closely observing a scene or an object. Look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps. Direct quote from Leonardo here. If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in your memory. Okay, so what would that look like in his work?

So I want to skip ahead a little bit to hopefully describe that to you. So this is about the commission on the Last Supper. what would that look like in his work? So I want to skip ahead a little bit to hopefully describe that to you. So this is about the commission on The Last Supper. And this talks about the commission and then about his way of work. And he has this really interesting idea of creativity. And I want to share that with you. When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper,

spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the count of a priest, Leonardo would 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. On other days, now we're going to see that didn't happen all the time, on other days, however, nothing would be painted. He would remain in front of it for one or two

hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created. Then there were dramatic days that combined his obsessiveness and his penchant for procrastination. As if caught by a whim or passion, he would arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two to one of the figures, and then suddenly depart. When Leonardo was summoned by the Duke, this is the person that gave him the commission for it, they ended up having, and this is the most important part

why I included this for the podcast. They ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing.

This is now a direct quote from Leonardo. Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, he told the Duke, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions to which they afterwards give form. So this is something that I've just only in the last few years realized that You work all the time And you're you're always in engrossed in whatever task you have in front of you You're not giving yourself enough time to actually go back and let your brain do the the Like the work it needs to do to process and take that idea further

so elon musk talked about this I may have included in the podcast one of the podcasts I did on him where He feels that a lot of his best ideas, cliche, even if it's a cliche, come in the shower because he feels that he's in the shower in the morning after a night of basically his brain working on all these ideas and interacting with his subconscious. And then in the morning, he kind of gets like the result of last night's computation, I think is the word he used. I think that's very much in line. That's the modern version of what Leonardo is saying here, where their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions to which they afterwards give form. This is just one sentence, but I think it encapsulates Leonardo's life. From what I hear, Leonardo's

life is very irregular and uncertain, and he seems to live for the day only. Throughout his life, he's going to interact and meet and work with people that are now, in their own right, famous throughout history. So at this time, I think you guys already know this, but artists basically relied on wealthy people, patrons, to support their work and to make a living. So he goes to work for somebody that's completely ruthless. So there's some interesting stories in here that I just wanted to cover real quick. And I have no idea how to pronounce this guy's name, but his name is not too important. The name of the person that Leonardo starts interacting with you'll recognize and is important. Okay, so this

is, oh my goodness, what, I don't even know. Okay, Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo's patron in Milan had a reputation for ruthlessness that included, among other alleged acts, poisoning his nephew in order to seize the crown. But Ludovico was a choir boy compared to Leonardo's next patron, Caesar Borgia. Name any odious activity and Borgia was the master of it. Murder, treachery, incest, debauchery, cruelty, betrayal, and corruption. He had a brutal tyrant's hunger for power combined with a sociopath's thirst for blood. Once, when he felt he had been libeled, he had the offender's tongue cut out, his right hand chopped off, and the hand with the tongue attached to its little

finger hung from a church window. His only sliver of historical redemption, which is undeserved, came when Machiavelli, this is why I'm including this part, used him as a model of cunning in The Prince. So this is Machiavelli's famous book, The Prince, and taught that his ruthlessness was a tool for power. Now check how crazy this is. Caesar Borgia was the son of pope alexander vi so this guy that's that's engaged in murder treachery incest debauchery betrayal corruption is not only becomes a patron of da vinci but he's the son of a pope and he likely had his brother stabbed to death and thrown in the in the tiber river so that he could replace him as the commander of the Papal forces. Here's the crazy part. Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli.

So Leonardo, at the behest of Machiavelli, goes to work for this crazy madman. He was designing inventions for use by military, which is something that, and in war, which is something Leonardo was extremely interested in. So I want to give you an example of that here. Diverting the Arno River from its course and taking it away from Pisa. It was an audacious way, it was an audacious way, this is Leonardo's idea. It was an audacious way to reconquer the city without storming the wall or wielding any weapons. If the river could be channeled somewhere else, Pisa would be cut off from the sea and lose its source of supply.

So this is Borgia's trying to figure out how to overtake Pisa and this is what Leonardo comes up with. The primary advocates of the idea included the two clever friends who had been holed up together that past winter, Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli. The river that is to be diverted from one course to another must be coaxed and not treated roughly or with violence, Leonardo wrote in his notebook. His plan was to dig a huge ditch 32 feet deep upriver from Pisa and use dams to divert the

water from the river into the ditch. To do this, a sort of dam must be inserted into the river, then another one further downstream jutting out behind it, and similarly third, fourth, and fifth dams so that the river may discharge itself from the channel made for it. That's Leonardo writing his notebook. This is the interesting part. This would require moving a million tons of earth, and Leonardo calculated the man-hours necessary by doing a detailed time and motion study one of the first in history he figured out everything from the weight of one shovel load of dirt 25 pounds to how many shovel loads would fill a wheelbarrow 20 his answer it would take approximately 540 men working 100 days to dig the Arno diversion ditch

so this actually this project actually never comes to fruition, but skipping ahead a bit, we understand, we learn why it's important, why that's not as important. The Arno projects, the circular fortress, and the draining of the swamps had one thing in common with many of Leonardo's grandest projects, and even some of his less grand ones. They never came to fruition. They showed Leonardo at his most fantastical, dreaming up schemes that darted back and forth across the boundaries of practicality. Like the construction of his flying machines, they were too fanciful to execute. This inability to ground his fantasies in reality has generally been regarded as one of Leonardo's

major failings. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. That's Isaacson borrowing a phrase that he used heavily in the Steve Jobs book. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Suction pumps now drain swamps. Along the route of the canal that Leonardo drew, there is now a major highway. Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality. Okay, so I want

to skip ahead a little bit in the book, and I want to talk just very briefly about his relationship with Michelangelo, as I mentioned earlier. During the 17 years that Leonardo was away in Milan, Michelangelo became Florence's hot new artist. By 1500, the two artists were back in Florence. Michelangelo, then 25, was a celebrated but petulant sculptor, and Leonardo, 48, was a genial and generous painter who had a following of friends and young students. It is enticing to think of what might have occurred if Michelangelo had treated him as a mentor, but that did not happen. He displayed instead a very great disdain towards Leonardo. One day, Leonardo was walking with a friend through one of the central piazzas of Florence

wearing one of his distinctive rose pink tunics. There was a small group discussing a passage from Dante, and they asked Leonardo his opinion of its meaning. At that moment, Michelangelo came by, and Leonardo suggested that he might be able to explain it. Michelangelo took offense as if Leonardo were mocking him. No, explain it yourself, he shot back. You were the one who modeled a horse to be cast in bronze, was unable to do it, and was forced to give up the attempt in shame. He then turned and walked away.

On another occasion when Michelangelo encountered Leonardo, he again referred to the fiasco of the horse monument saying so those idiot Milanese actually believed in you unlike Leonardo Michelangelo was often contentious he had once insulted the young artist Pietro Torrigiano who was drawing alongside him in a Florence chapel. Torrigiano recalled, clenching my fist and giving him such a blow on the nose that I felt bone and cartilage go down like a biscuit beneath my knuckles. Michelangelo had a disfigured nose for the rest of his life. So Michelangelo and Leonardo couldn't have been more different. Leonardo was extremely popular. He was very colorful, happy, nice, not religious. Michelangelo

was pious, celibate, dressed in rags, just very, very different. I mean, it's really hard to summarize a person's entire life, but Michelangelo seemed to be rather unhappy, where Leonardo seemed to relish in life. So I want to skip ahead to when Leonardo starts in, I think, 1508. Yeah, in 1508, he starts to study the anatomy more, and he does this by dissecting a lot of dead bodies. So I found this part extremely fascinating. And the drawings, I would just Google, even if you don't have the book, just Google the centurion and his muscles, or Leonardo and drawings of the human body. They're absolutely amazing. Okay, so let's go to the book for this. Shortly before he left Florence in 1508, Leonardo was at the hospital

where he struck up a conversation with a man who said he was more than 100 years old and had never been ill. A few hours later, the old man quietly passed away without any movement or sign of distress. Leonardo proceeded to dissect his body, launching what would be, from 1508 to 1513, his second round of anatomical studies. We should pause to imagine the dandy-dressing Leonardo, now in his mid-50s, at the height of his fame as a painter, spending his night hours at an old hospital in his neighborhood, talking to patients and dissecting bodies. It is another example of his relentless curiosity

that would astonish us if we had not become so used to it. Now speaking about his drawings, the results are triumphs of both science and art. His rudimentary dissecting tools took him down layer by layer even as the body, untreated, decomposed. First he showed the surface muscles of the old man, then the inside muscles and veins as he pulled off the skin. He started with the right arm and neck, then the torso. He noted how the spine was curved. Then he got to the abdominal wall, the intestines, the stomach, and the membranes connecting them all.

Finally, he exposed the liver, which he said resembled frozen bran, both in color and substance. He never reached the legs, perhaps because by then the body had decomposed too badly to make it bearable to handle. But there would be other dissections, probably 20 more, and by the time he finished his anatomy studies, he would have beautifully illustrated every body part and limb. That is insane. So it's saying he beautifully illustrated every body part and limb. That is insane. So it's saying he beautifully illustrated every body part and limb. Keep in mind, he's doing this in the 1500s with no medical or scientific training

and on bodies that are untreated and decomposing rapidly. The book continues. In his quest to figure out how the centurion died, Leonardo made a significant scientific discovery. He documented the process that leads to arteriosclerosis, in which the walls of arteries are thickened and stiffened by the accumulation of plaque-like substances. I made an autopsy in order to ascertain the cause of so peaceful a death, and found that it proceeded from weakness throughout the failure of blood and of the artery that feeds the heart and the other lower members, which I found to be very dry, shrunken, and withered, he wrote. Next to a

drawing of the veins in the right arm, he compared the centurion's blood vessels to those of a two year old boy who had also died at the hospital. He found those of the boy to be supple and unconstricted, contrary to what I found in the old man. Using his skill of thinking and describing through analogies, he concluded, the network of vessels behave in a man as in oranges, in which the peel becomes tougher and the pulp diminishes the older they become. The constriction of blood flow had caused, among other things, the centurion's liver to become so dry that when it is subjected to even the slightest friction, its substance falls away in tiny flakes like sawdust and leaves behind the

veins and the arteries. It also led to his flesh becoming the color of wood or dried chestnut because the skin is almost completely deprived of sustenance. The noted medical historian and cardiologist Kenneth Keel called Leonardo's analysis the first description of arteriosclerosis as a function of time. Again, this is another example of Leonardo figuring something out through experience that is now, hundreds of years later, wildly accepted as truth. The dissections continue. When Leonardo began the second round of anatomy studies in 1508, he made a to-do list that surely must rank as one of the quirkiest

and most enchanting such lists in the history of intellectual inquiry. On one side of the page are a few sketches of dissecting instruments and, on the other side, some small drawings of veins and nerves found in the brain of the centurion, with writing crammed all around them. Have Afisenya's book on useful inventions translated, he wrote, referring to a book by the 11th century Persian polymath. Having drawn various surgical tools, he jotted down some of the equipment he needed. Spectacles with case, fire stick, fork, curved knife, charcoal, boards, sheets of paper, white chalk, wax, forceps,

pane of glass, fine-tooth bone saw, scapel, inkhorn, penknife, and get a hold of a skull. Then comes my favorite item on any Leonardo list. Describe the tongue of the woodpecker. This is not just a random entry. He mentioned the woodpecker's tongue again on a later page, where he described and drew the human tongue. Make the motions of the woodpecker, he wrote. When I first saw his entry about the woodpecker, I regarded it, as most scholars have, as an entertaining oddity, evidence of the eccentric nature of Leonardo's relentless curiosity. That it indeed is, but there is more, as I discovered after pushing myself to be more like Leonardo and drill down into random curiosities. Leonardo, I realized, had become fascinated by the muscles of the tongue. All of the other muscles he studied acted by pulling rather than pushing a body part. But the tongue seemed to be an

exception. This was true in humans and in other animals. The most notable example is the tongue of the woodpecker. Nobody has drawn or fully written about it before, but Leonardo, with his acute ability to observe objects in motion, knew that there was something to be learned from it. On the same list, Leonardo instructed himself to describe the jaw of the crocodile. Once again, if we follow his curiosity rather than merely being amused by it, we can see that he was on to another important topic a crocodile unlike any mammal has a second jaw joint which spreads out the force when it snaps its mouth shut that gives the crocodile the most forceful bite of any animal

it can exert 3 700 pounds per square inch of force which which is more than 30 times that of a human bite. So the chapter on his anatomical studies continues for quite a while. I want to skip ahead to some other ideas that I learned from Leonardo by reading this book. This one's really an interesting thought. It's his idea on the microcosm and the macrocosm, and this is a short part. During the period when he was probing the human body leonardo was also studying the body of the earth true to form he made analogies between the two he was skillful at discerning how patterns resonate in nature and the grandest and most encompassing of these analogies in both his art and his science was the

comparison between the body of man and the body of the earth man is the image of the world he wrote known as the microcosm macrocosm relationship it harkened back to the ancients leonardo first discussed this analogy in a notebook entry from the from the from the early 1490s and this is just the part I wanted to tell you about. The ancients called man a lesser world, and certainly the use of the name is well bestowed, because his body is an analog for the world. As man has his bones that support his flesh, the world has its rocks that support the earth. As man has a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide, which likewise rises and falls, as if the world breathed.

As the blood veins originate in that pool and spread all over the human body, so likewise the ocean sea fills the body of the earth with infinite springs of water. To me, those few paragraphs go back to the beginning uh where they were talking about that leonardo was infinitely curious about the world not only the world but how we fit into the world um skipping ahead i just want um some interesting quotes or little anecdotes from him um leonardo made a point of not expounding much on religion during his lifetime he said that he would not endeavor this is now direct quotes from him to write or give information of those things of which the

human mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by an instance of nature that goes back to his his uh his desire to to prioritize uh experiences over theory um just another quote I really liked of his, as a well-spent day brings a happy sleep, Leonardo had written, so a well-employed life brings a happy death. To me, that's just him reminding all of us, don't waste any time. Adding on to that, the best way to approach his life is the way he approached the world, filled with a sense of curiosity and appreciation for its infinite wonders. Okay, now I want to skip ahead towards the end of the book. Isaacson does a really good job of basically taking everything he learned from studying Leonardo's notebooks and breaking them down as if Leonardo had maybe a

dozen or half a dozen or whatever the number is, principles. And I want to get into some of those that I felt were extremely valuable. Relinquishing a work, declaring it finished, froze its evolution. Leonardo did not like to do that. There was always something more to be learned, another stroke to be gleaned from nature that would make a picture closer to perfect. What made Leonardo a genius, what set him apart from the people who are merely extraordinarily smart, was creativity. The ability to apply imagination to intellect. I think that's what Steve Jobs liked most about him. His facility for combining observation with fantasy allowed him, like other creative geniuses, to make unexpected leaps that related things seen to things unseen.

Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. Because they think different, creative masterminds are sometimes considered misfits. But in the words that Steve Jobs helped craft for an Apple advertisement, while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. What also distinguished Leonardo's genius was its universal nature. The world has produced other thinkers who were more profound or logical, and many who were more practical, but none who was as creative in so many different

fields. Some people are geniuses in a particular arena, such as Mozart in music and Euler in math, but Leonardo's brilliance spanned multiple disciplines, which gave him a profound feel for nature's patterns and cross-currents. His curiosity impelled him to become among the handful of people in history who tried to know all there was to know about everything that could be known. There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the refraction of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still beating

heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius but more. He was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it. So now this is the part about learning from Leonardo. The fact that Leonardo was not only a genius, but also very human, quirky and obsessive and playful and easily distracted, makes him more accessible. He was not graced with the type of brilliance that is completely unfathomable to the rest of us.

Instead, he was self-taught and willed his way to his genius. So even though we may never be able to match his talents, we can learn from him and try to be more like him. His life offers a wealth of lessons. I think that paragraph there perfectly summarizes why I'm recommending you read this book. Okay, so we're going to get into some of its principles. I'm not going to share all of them. I'm just going to share ones that spoke to me. Be curious, relentlessly curious. I have no special talents, Einstein once wrote to a friend. I am just passionately curious. Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn,

how they walk on ice, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the eye and what that means for the perspective in a painting he instructed himself to learn about the placenta of a calf the jaw of a crocodile the tongue of a woodpecker the muscles of a face the light of the moon the edges of shadows being relentlessly and randomly curious about everything around us is something that each of us can push ourselves to do every waking hour, just as he did. Let me go off on a tangent here. I have a five-year-old and she kind of reminds me of this all the time because she, if you

have children or little kids, even if you don't have them, you're around them, you see that they're very much living the moment. And she's very inquisitive about stuff that's going on. She asks just questions I would never think to ask. And every time this happens to me, I sit there and think like, wow, I'm jaded by adulthood. Like that is pretty amazing. Or that is something to wonder about. And I just look at it just because I'm used to it. I don't know. I don't know any effective techniques to jar myself out of this, but other than being aware of it and hopefully changing it over time. Another one here. Seek knowledge for its own sake.

Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how the heart valve works to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce the virgins of the rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era. And I think that's extremely important now when you're trying to think of like if you want to design a product or create a podcast or do anything, you just expose yourself to a lot of things and like elon musk says let's let the computation happen and then you'll be uh you'll be uh surprised by the results that happen when you're constantly exposed and not just focused on one thing to that extent here's another one of his principles go down rabbit holes he filled the opening pages of one of his notebooks with 169

attempts to square a circle. In eight pages of his codex, he recorded 730 findings about the flow of water. In another notebook, he listed 67 words that described different types of moving water. He measured every segment of the human body, calculated their proportional relationships, and then did the same for a horse. He drilled down for the pure joy of geeking out. Another principle here, this one is counterintuitive, and I think many of us beat ourselves up about it, but this is what he says about it. His next principle is procrastinate. While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally making one small stroke and then leave.

And again, I know I repeated this previously in the book, but it appears again in the conclusion. He told Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel. Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions to which they afterwards give form. Most of us don't need advice to procrastinate. We do it naturally. But procrastinating like Leonardo requires work. It involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas and only after that allowing the collection to simmer here's another another interesting one avoid silos at the end of many of his product presentations jobs displayed a

slide of a sign that showed the intersection of liberal arts and technology streets he knew that at such crossroads lay creativity leonardo had a free range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts sciences engineering and humanities his knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in the last summer and on a page of anonymical drawings depicting the dissection of lips he drew the smile that would reappear in the Mona Lisa. He knew that art was a science and that science was an art. Whether he was drawing a fetus in the womb or the swirls of a deluge, he blurred the distinction between the two. Here's another one. Indulge fantasy. His giant crossbow, the turtle-like tanks, his plan for an ideal city, the man-powered mechanisms to flap a flying machine.

Just as Leonardo blurred the lines between science and art, he did so between reality and fantasy. It may not have produced flying machines, but it allowed his imagination to soar. And just three quick ones. Make lists, and be sure to put odd things on them. And just three quick ones. to astonish and inspire us. 50 years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start writing them down, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts. And this is what I'm going to close on and probably my favorite one.

Be open to mystery. Not everything needs sharp lines. If you are interested in reading the book and you want to help out the podcast, you can go to founderspodcast.com. You will see a link for the book. That link is an Amazon affiliate link, which means that if you click through and buy the book through there, Amazon gives me a small portion of the sale at no additional cost to you. And I do appreciate it if you do that. Not only this book, but any book that I've covered, I think it looks like 20 something of them that I've read for the podcast. You'll see links for them all there. And I'll talk to you soon.