How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci

Cultivating Curiosity

Question received wisdom and authority. Genuine innovation requires that you, like Leonardo Da Vinci, question the accepted answers to complicated questions and actively form your own opinions and observations about the world you inhabit. Leonardo trusted his senses and intuition over the "wisdom" of others, both contemporary and historical, relying upon himself and his own experience of the world to inform his worldview. For Leonardo, curiosity meant both looking forward and looking back, looking beyond the accepted wisdom of the Christian Bible to interact with the ancients, studying Greek and Roman texts and philosophical modes of thought, the scientific method, and art. Exercise: Examine an angle of a particular issue, concept, or topic you feel strongly about, from the opposite point of view of your own. Even if you're confident you "understand" what makes a painting great, or how a string quartet is put together, or you know everything there is to know about the state of the polar ice caps, make it your business to seek out dissenting opinions and alternative ideas. Make an argument for the opposite of what you believe. Play devil's advocate.

Risk making mistakes. A creative thinker won't hide in the comfortable blanket of safe opinions, but will mercilessly seek truth, even at the risk of being completely and totally wrong. Let your curiosity and enthusiasm for topics rule your mind, not the fear of being wrong. Embrace mistakes as opportunities and think and act in such a way as to risk making them. Greatness risks failure. Leonardo Da Vinci enthusiastically studied physiognomy, a bogus science that purported to link facial features and character. Now thoroughly debunked, it was a trendy concept in Leonardo's day, and might've contributed significantly to his innovative interest in our understanding of detailed anatomy. Though we might think of this as "wrong" it's perhaps better to think of it as a kind of swampy stepping stone to a greater truth. Exercise: Find a dated, debunked, or controversial idea and learn everything you can about it. Consider what it would mean to see the world in this alternative way. Look into the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Hell's Angels, or the Harmony Society, and learn about their worldview and the historical context of their organization. Were they, or are they, "wrong"?

Pursue knowledge fearlessly. The curious thinker embraces the unknown, the mysterious, and the frightening. To learn about anatomy, Leonardo spent countless hours studying corpses in less-than-sterile conditions, compared to the modern cadaver lab. His thirst for knowledge far outweighed his squeamishness, and led to his pioneering study of the human body and his life drawings. Exercise: Research a topic that frightens you. Filled with dread about the end of the world? Research eschatology and apocalypse. Scared of vampires? Dig up the dirt on Vlad the Impaler. Nuclear war always giving you nightmares? Learn about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project.

Look for the interconnectedness in things. To think curiously means to look for patterns in ideas and images, finding similarities that link disparate concepts rather than differences. Leonardo Da Vinci could never have invented the "mechanical horse" that became his bicycle without having linked seemingly unrelated concepts, horse-riding and simple gears. Try to find common ground in your interpersonal interactions, and look for the things you can relate to about an idea or issue, the things you can take from it, rather than looking at it as "wrong". Exercise: Close your eyes and randomly draw squiggles or lines on a page, then open your eyes and finish the drawing you started. Look into the nonsense and make sense from it. Generate a list of "off the top of your head" words and put them all into the same poem or story, looking for a narrative in the chaos.

Draw your own conclusions. The curious thinker is unsatisfied with received wisdom and accepted answers, and chooses instead to either validate those accepted answers with real-life observations and perceptions, or form new opinions based on an experience of the world. Of course, this doesn't mean that you can't validate the existence of Australia because you haven't seen it yourself, but rather that you choose to abstain from an opinion about it until you've learned everything you can about it, and experienced that knowledge for yourself. Exercise: Think of a time your opinion was swayed by someone or something. It could be as simple as changing your opinion about a movie you kind of liked, because all your friends felt the opposite way and you preferred to fit in. Go back and re-examine that movie with a fresh set of eyes.

Thinking Scientifically

Ask probing questions. Sometimes the simplest questions are the most complex. How does a bird fly? Why is the sky blue? These are the kinds of questions that drove Leonardo Da Vinci to his innovative genius and scientific study. It was insufficient for Da Vinci to hear "Because God wills it," when the answer was much more complicated and much less abstract. Learn to form probing questions about the things that interest you and test them to obtain results. Exercise: Write down at least five questions about a subject that fascinates you, and that you'd like to know more about. Instead of doing a cursory wikipedia search of the topic and then forgetting the matter completely, select a single question from that list and sit with it for at least a week. How do mushrooms grow? What is coral? What is a soul? Research it at the library. Write about it. Draw about it. Think about it.

Test your hypotheses with your own observations. When you've started to form your own opinion about a particular topic or question, when you think you're getting close to a satisfactory answer, determine what criteria would be sufficient to either accept or reject that answer. What would prove you were right? What would prove you were wrong? How can you test your idea? Exercise: Come up with a testable theory for your probing question and set up an examination, using the scientific method. Gather some substrate and grow your own mushrooms to learn more about different methods, techniques, and varieties.

See your ideas all the way through to completion. The scientific thinker interrogates ideas until all avenues of thought have been prodded at, examined, verified, or rejected. Leave no avenue of inquiry untouched. Regular thinkers often get attached to one of the first pleasing options or answers, ignoring the more interesting or complicated questions that might be more accurate. If you want to think like Leonardo Da Vinci, leave no stone unturned in your search for truth. Exercise: Practice mind mapping. A powerful tool that can help you combine logic and imagination in your work and life, the end result of mapping should be a web-like structure of words and ideas that are somehow related in your mind, making it easier to remember all the nooks and crannies of your thoughts, failure and success alike. Mind mapping can improve memory, reading retention, and creativity.

Build new concepts from a foundation of failures. A scientist embraces failed experiments in the same way that a scientist embraces successful ones: an option has been eliminated from the list of possibilities, getting you one step closer to some truth. Learn from hypotheses that turn out to be wrong. If you were absolutely sure that your new way of structuring a work day, writing a story, or rebuilding your engine would be perfect, and it turned out not to be so, celebrate! You completed an experiment and learned what won't work next time. Exercise: Think back to a particular failure. List all the things you learned from it, what you'll be able to do more effectively as a direct result of that failure.

Practicing Creativity

Keep a detailed and illustrated journal. Much of what we now celebrate as priceless art was really just Leonardo Da Vinci's daily sketch book, which he recorded not because he was actively trying to make a masterpiece, but because the creative act was integrated to such a degree in his everyday life that it became the way he processed thoughts, writing them down with accompanying illustrations. Writing forces you to think in a different way, articulating your nebulous thoughts as specifically and concretely as possible. Exercise: Come up with a list of topics on which you'll thoroughly journal over the course of a day. Big topics you've got opinions about, like "television" or "Bob Dylan" would be perfectly appropriate. Start addressing the issue by writing at the top of the page, "On Dylan" and writing, drawing, and free-associating your way through the writing. If you come to a place you're unsure about, do some research. Learn more.

Write descriptively. Cultivate a rich vocabulary and use accurate words in your descriptions. Use similes, metaphors, and analogies to capture abstract concepts and seek connections between your ideas, continually investigating the roil of your thoughts. Describe things in terms of tactile senses--touch, smell, taste, feel--and also in terms of their import, their symbolism as you're experiencing it, and their significance. Exercise: Read Charles Simic's poem "Fork". In it, he describes the most pedestrian and everyday object both accurately and with the strangest of eyes.

See clearly. One of Leonardo's mottoes was saper vedere (knowing how to see), upon which he built his work in arts and science. While you're journaling, develop a sharp eye for seeing the world and turn it onto luminous particularities. Write down images you see throughout the day, striking things, bits of graffiti, gestures, strange shirts, strange bits of language, anything that strikes you. Record it. Become an encyclopedia of tiny moments and record those moments in words and images. Exercise: You don't have to journal like it was the 15th century. Use your camera phone to take lots of pictures on the way to work to liven up your commute. Make yourself actively seek out 10 striking images on your way and take pictures of them. On your way home, look back through the morning pictures and think about what it was that struck you. Look for the connections in the chaos.

Cast a wide net. Leonardo Da Vinci is the Platonic ideal of the Renaissance Man: equally notable as a scientist, artist, and inventor, Leonardo would be doubtless confused and frustrated by modern notions of a "career." It's hard to imagine him sullenly carting off to work at an office, putting in his hours and going home to watch "House of Cards." If you're interested in a subject or a project that's outside of your everyday experiences, call that an opportunity rather than a challenge. Embrace the luxury of modern life for the instantaneous access we have to information, the freedom we have to pursue experiences, and the limitlessness of it. Exercise: Write up a bucket list of subjects and projects you want to accomplish over the next several months or years. Always wanted to get a draft of a novel together? Or learn banjo? There's no sense in waiting for it to happen. It's never too late to learn.