What do you call yourself when you’re not at work or taking care of family business? A singer? An illustrator? A cook? A comedian?
Maybe you’re a few things, or maybe there’s one thing you really want to do full-time, but the wider world hasn’t cottoned on yet. In which case, you probably need to do other creative work to draw people to the real work you want to be doing.
Back in episode 2 we kicked around the notion of the cupcake bakery making TikToks and designing flyers to get people’s attention. Being a creative person in this most digital of decades means needing to be good at more than one form of creative expression. That means thinking like a polymath, and luckily we have history’s greatest multi-hyphenate to learn from.
Meet Leo
Leonardo da Vinci was born in April 1452, in what is now modern-day Florence.
By the age of 30 he was taking commissions for his paintings, and in 1513 he was working for Pope Leo X in Rome where he studied human anatomy. Over his 67 years he painted some of the world’s most famous works, helped reroute rivers, consulted on urban planning and pedestrianisation, and sorta kinda invented the helicopter.
This much we more-or-less know from the public works he created. But he was a prolific journaller and notetaker, and yes I used the word journaller even though “journalist” would be the correct word… but I don’t see him shuffling around in a donkey jacket, smoking cigarettes and cultivating sources. Although I would one-hundred percent watch that Netflix series.
Da Vinci’s notebooks, combined with his multiple biographies have uncovered 7 core principles da Vinci is purported to have lived his life by. These are
- Curiosity
- Learning through doing
- Sensory awareness
- Embracing uncertainty
- Mind and body care
- Whole-brain thinking
- Interconnectedness
Each one of these principles can help us get a better handle on our work and our time, so let’s get into it.
Principle #1: Be curious
I think it’s fair to say little Leo would’ve been a nightmare at school. I know teachers say they love it when kids are curious, but I think this lad may have taken it too far. He was always peppering his teachers with questions, and as he got older he was so obsessed with anatomical accuracy in his paintings that he essentially dug up corpses to study, before getting famous enough that he could just rock up at a hospital and ask for a fresh one.
Tell you what, this modern da Vinci Netflix series is starting to take shape, isn’t it? Here he is, shrugging on his donkey jacket, sparking up a cigarette and getting thrown out of a morgue in darkest London. Da Vinci in Dagenham – it’s got Golden Globes written all over it.
There’s a side to his curiosity that’s a little more wholesome. Still weird but in a different direction.
Da Vinci could write 100 questions before breakfast. Which he probably ate not long before he went to bed because da Vinci doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who spent much time sleeping.
This comes from a review of the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, where the author Michael Gelb suggests asking yourself 100 questions from a stream of consciousness, and looking for the connections.
The next time you’re in big-picture mode, it’s worth sitting with this. Maybe don’t go for 100 questions ‘cos that sounds both insane and boring, but maybe see what you can come up with in half-an-hour. Just follow your curiosity, then review the list and see what stands out for you. Could be there’s a future course of study or a hitherto unrealised hobby in there.
Principle #2: Learn by doing
What would you do if you knew you couldn’t make a mistake? That’s another question brought up by Gelb’s book on da Vinci. It’s an invitation to learn something new, to challenge your assumptions, and to put your ideas to the test.
If you’d given a lot of rational people the job of coming up with a competitor, Coca-Cola, they would have said, “Well, we need a really nice tasting drink that costs less than Coke and comes in a really big container.”
But the biggest success in competing with Coke is Red Bull, which costs a fortune, comes in a tiny can and tastes disgusting.
When I grow up, I want to be a dinosaur. Then I want my DNA preserved in amber so scientists can clone my body and sell me as a protein source. I want my dino-DNA infused into a sausage and eaten on an autumn afternoon by Rory Sutherland.
Rory quite literally wrote the book on irrationality, and there’s a big old link between these two men.
We’ll talk about interconnectedness later, but da Vinci was a big fan of challenging assumptions, and not just doing things by the book, but by getting hands-on experience.
It’s all feeding into the Da Vinci in Dagenham narrative… this guy doesn’t do things by the book; he rips the book in half and throws it in the chief of police’s face. And now his ass is on a permanent warning and he’d better buck his ideas up or he’ll be bust down to traffic cop.
Principle #3: Hone your senses
OK, so when’s the last time you sat in a quiet room and listened? You never know what you might pick up when you do. Is that next door’s dog snoring? I didn’t realise I had two clocks. Who’s playing the ukulele and how do I make them stop?
Noticing the world around you is a dirt simple and really effective hack for bringing yourself out of a funk, by the way. If you’re prone to anxiety or you’ve been lost in deep thought, look around the room and then
- count five things you can see
- point out four things you can feel (like your bum on the seat or the label on the back of your shirt)
- name three things you can hear around you
- notice two things you can smell
- focus on one thing you can taste
If you want to get better at studying the world around you, spend 10 minutes looking at a painting you really like. Notice where the brush strokes are going, or follow the line of perspective. Where has the painter made a seemingly odd choice? Why does the light fall in that particular way?
Noticing, rather than just looking, is useful in so many fields. You can do the same thing with pottery or poetry or pastry for that matter… get to the bottom of why something is the way it is, even if it’s not your primary art form, and you’ll find more you can bring into your own work.
Principle #4: Embrace the unknown
You ever watch a cat batting at an object on a desk? The damn eejits don’t have thumbs so they just sort of knock the thing away from them, almost as if they want as little contact with the thing as possible, and they just want it to be away from them.
That’s my relationship with ambiguity in a nutshell, and I daresay it’s not far from yours either.
We tend not to love the unknown. It’s sketchy and sometimes unsettling. Another one of Rory Sutherland’s insights is that we don’t actually mind waiting around for stuff if someone gives us a clear timeframe.
If you’ve ever asked the little hobbit from IT when emails will come back online, he’ll probably give you some variation of “when it’s ready”, combined with a withering look. Trouble is, these guys aren’t born like that; they get worn down by countless people asking them to put a timeframe on things there’s absolutely no earthly way of knowing.
And people – project managers, usually – assume that because they know computers, these big brained Bilbo boffins can estimate the downtime themselves, like they’re some sort of human progress bar.
I mention this not to exorcise any particular demons that might be lurking in my past as a code monkey, but to slightly overstate the point that I get it.
However, if we want to cultivate our inner da Vinci, we need to be more comfortable with paradoxes, ambiguities, and unknowables. Our Dagenham da Vinci eats enigmas for breakfast and dines out on dilemmas daily.
One of the paradoxes da Vinci embraced involved rest. When castigated for not working hard enough on The Last Supper, Leo apparently had this to say:
The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they do less.
Good to note that “being a dick” wasn’t one of his seven principles, but fair enough I guess – we do need periods of rest to marble the meat of our productivity.
We’ve talked a little before about sleep and rest. It’s something that came very easily to Churchill but not so much to Lincoln. Maggie Thatcher famously slept very little, but the more she stayed awake, the more government departments she could privatise, so that checks out.
But did you know da Vinci only slept for 20 minutes every 4 hours? This is called a polyphasic sleep pattern, and don’t let the scientific-sounding name fool you into thinking this is something worth doing. Lack of sleep can result in higher blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes – which I think are printed on Scotland’s coat of arms.
In case you hadn’t clocked it, 20 minutes every 4 hours equates to 2 hours of sleep a night. Now, da Vinci was an outlier in a number of ways – and we’ve still got more to explore – but we only have hearsay to go on here, as there’s no actual evidence he really followed this pattern. Maybe he tried it for a bit, as people often do, then realised his body needed the rest.
I mean, it’s exactly the kind of trope we need for Da Vinci in Dagenham, but it goes entirely against the real da Vinci’s fifth principle.
Principle #5: Stay healthy
Da Vinci was, as far as we know, an absolute unit. He was more toned than a laser printer, sporting pecs you could cut glass with. Seriously lads, this guy was the whole package. I bet he could cook, too.
Sigh
Anyway, all the self-help books I’ve read over my years that didn’t suck teach us that a healthy body gives us more energy which means we can do more of the things we want. If I think of the cumulative seconds I’ve spent slowly getting up out of a chair, I could weep.
And as much as I’m giving it the big’n when it comes to da Vinci’s physical form – and brother, what a form – a healthy body doesn’t have to mean a sculpted one. This is not about being thin, having a six pack, and being able to bench press a toddler. You can be overweight and healthy – this is more about balance and moderation. It’s maybe one reason people think da Vinci might have been a stoic, as temperance is one of their core principles.
Da Vinci bucked the trend of the artist or the thinker whose head is in the creative clouds and doesn’t spare much thought for his corporal form. It’s all part of the same machine. So, put the right fuel in and you’ll get the right stuff out. If you figure out how to do that without climbing the walls, hit me up.
Principle #6: Blend art and science
The Last Supper is a study in perspective. The paneling along the walls and the ceiling beams all gather towards the vanishing point, which is Jesus’ right cheek. If you’re looking at a photo – and there’s a link in the show notes – ignore the massive door cut into the bottom of the painting… that wasn’t da Vinci’s doing; that was some monk in the 17th century.
The point is, you don’t paint something like that without a solid grasp of perspective.
Thank you, professor Monty Python. By the way, I never noticed it before, but the beginning of that sketch has Pope John Cleese introducing Eric Idle as Michelangelo. I guess one Italian renascence artist is as good as the next.
OK, so from the technicolour 3D splendour of the Last Supper we move to the pen-and-ink doodle that is the Vitruvian Man – you know, that guy in the middle of a square that’s in turn, in the middle of a circle.
The dude’s belly button is at the centre of the image, and he’s sort of doing jumping jacks. The legs-together stage of the jumping jack depicts mankind in a square, where the star jump stage puts the guy in a circle. It’s an exploration of a mathematical riddle called “squaring the circle”, as well as a study in proportion, since the arms and legs are roughly the same length
For da Vinci, I guess there wasn’t so much of a gap between art and science. My man was also a musician, and even made his own instruments. If you check out this renaissance jam, you might notice there’s a level of mathematical precision in the music – everything resolves neatly and it kind of runs like clockwork.
This was the sort of stuff he’d have on shuffle. And now I sound like an over-eager secondary school supply teacher, so let’s move on.
Principle #7: Only connect
Da Vinci saw connections in everything, including people. You know every episode of Da Vinci in Dagenham is going to end with him stopping midway through a perfectly normal conversation, running out of the room, and then walking calmly into the bit where all the suspects are gathered in a circle. I might be mixing my media now but you get the idea.
A wholistic or systems thinking approach to life is fascinating. My friend Anya performs a “many hands” meditation where she invites you to think about the people behind the clothes we wear, the seats we sit on, the food we eat, the devices we carry in our pockets.
No one person can exist in the modern world alone. It takes thousands of people all doing a tiny proportional bit, to sustain a life. And that’s before we start getting into the whole golden ratio of it all, which is a number that appears in nature, architecture, cryptography, and graphic design (although not as much in nature as Dan Brown novels would have us believe).
Da Vinci, like many before and after him, saw this interconnectedness, and followed it. He was his own internal system, and he made sure to look after every part of it, nourishing not just the mind and the body, but the spirit too. And he existed – as we do – in a much larger system, so the actions we have – the things we make and the people we influence – have ripple effects that we might never see, but nevertheless have bigger consequences down the line.
The world of productivity gets tested the most when we think about interconnected systems. Sure, I can block out time on my calendar and only open up a couple of slots per week for “office hours” when people are allowed to book a Zoom call with me. But if a client of mine is implementing the same system, it might be months before we actually get a call in the books, if ever.
Part of the work of being productive is not just about being your own individual machine, but more like a highly advanced coprocessor sitting inside a bigger mainframe. Sure there’s a lot going on inside our own internal system and there’s beauty in its complexity, but it exchanges data with and draws power from a great big universe.
What our Dagenham da Vinci would make of this, I’m not entirely sure. He’d probably just shrug, flick his lighter, and walk off into the distance.
In conclusion
So, if you want to do like da Vinci, keep these three mantras in mind:
- Learn new things and put them into practise
- Feed your body, mind, and spirit on a healthy diet
- Remember you’re part of something bigger