How to be Innovative | Life Lessons from da Vinci

We can learn how to be innovative from the master himself, Leonardo da Vinci. He is a renowned Renaissance artist, humanist, scientist, philosopher, inventor, and naturalist who created the Mona Lisa, Vitruvian Man, and the Last Supper. Some of the most famous works in the world. He lived 500 years ago, so how can we learn from him? Fortunately, he left behind over 5,000 pages of notebook writings that still last through this day, which we can gather unique life-insight from.

In his book, Leonardo Da Vinci, Walter Isaacson explores many of these journal pages to see what can be gleamed from Da Vinci. My main take-aways from the book and my own research: Da Vinci was a master at learning how to be more innovative.

Side note: Leonardo was left-handed and wrote right to left. So, to read his writings, read right to left with the aid of a mirror.

Head over to British Library online to see some of the journal pages!

How to Be More Innovative

1. Make a List of What you Want to Learn

In his notes, Leonardo asks himself to learn and understand a vast myriad of different topics to better understand how the world works. Sometimes these were astute observations on commonplace occurrences most people rarely pause to think of them “Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?” Some questions seem random, Da Vinci one day instructed himself to “describe the tongue of the woodpecker.”

He had no practical reason for this knowledge. He never drew a woodpecker in any of his works, and it wasn’t seemingly helpful to his inventions, but he wanted the minute details of the woodpecker tongue.

What da Vinci found was, “In addition to digging out grubs from a tree, the long tongue protects the woodpecker’s brain. When the bird smashes its head repeatedly into tree bark, the force exerted on its head is ten times what would kill a human. But its bizarre tongue and supporting structure act as a cushion, shielding the brain from shock.” By asking himself this obscure question, he learned Woodpeckers have a shock-absorbing tongue. Proving this information could prove useful in later inventions after all. Random questions lead to insightful takeaways.

2. Try to Solve the Impossible

Leonardo Da Vinci had an obsession with solving impossible puzzles. Mainly the perpetual motion machine and squaring the circle. He spent at least four decades trying to solve these problems, both of which have continued to be proven impossible. However, many of his pages over his lifetime are dedicated to trying to solve these puzzles. The mental agility, constant experimenting, and determined attitude shaped his mind to tackle solvable problems. He was learning how to be innovative by trying his mental ability to unsolvable problems.

Trying to solve the impossible is a good exercise in thinking of solutions, being creative, and always trying to learn. One of his last pages in his notebooks, when he was in the final years of his life, has some pages of him working out the squared circle. Proving he kept his mental agility up right up until the end of his life. Showing that learning how to be innovative is a life-long practice as well. We need to remember to view life in permanent beta.

3. Work in teams

It is a misconception that great thought leaders work alone. Every great creative thinker has a cohort they work with, from Steve Jobs to Abraham Lincoln to Leonardo Da Vinci. A great example of this is in Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The Vitruvian Man is a work of both mathematic and artistic ability, depicting the ideal human body proportions. Da Vinci went with a cohort of other Renaissance artists and mathematicians, and they all worked on their Vitruvian Man equivalents in Milan together.

They would collaborate daily on the work and would use the same models to try to keep their work consistent. The reason we don’t know the others might simply be because they weren’t Da Vinci, so there weren’t students or donors to save the work.

Another interesting note on this work, we see the square and the circle in the background. Da Vinci used all his work in trying to square the circle that he was able to make the perfectly proportioned man because he was so familiar with the space that the circle and square provided. The circle in the background is just one instance where Da Vinci trying to solve the impossible made other pieces of his work outclass all his peers.

Plus, the Harvard Study of Adult Development proved that what makes a good life is having connections to people in your life. See more insights from that study here!

4. Be Grateful 

Even though his circumstance wasn’t ideal, Da Vinci was grateful for it. He was grateful he was born out of Wedlock, that he didn’t go to university to get a lot of received wisdom, and that he had the good fortune to be bestowed with unrelenting curiosity.

His un-traditional upbringing provided him freedom, and a means to make his own life. Da Vinci is often portrayed as depressed and tortured, which he was at times, but he also saw the great things in his life and stopped to appreciate them.

We can note and learn how to be more grateful with insights from this post here!

5. Make Time for Others

In his last writing, Da Vinci is still working in his journal, and scribbled towards the bottom of the page, “but the soup is getting cold” and the entry ends. We can picture that he is working and then the chef and his students are calling him for dinner. Da Vinci could have stayed locked away, studying, but he made time to go see them and have the meal with them.

Much like with the Vitruvian Man, he spent his life with others, not in isolated brilliance, but working, collaborating, and enjoying those in his life. Being with others is a proven way to learn how to be more innovative.

Main Take-Aways

• Stay observant and learn how to be innovative. Da Vinci’s success is partially due to his unrelenting sense of wonder. We need to take that child-like sense of wonder with us as we go through our day and question our daily observations.
• Perform tasks that challenge us. Squaring the Circle is impossible, but it is a great creative mind exercise technique. We need to find the mental exercise that challenges us daily.
• Work in teams and make time for those in our lives. It is easy to stay locked away with work, but making time for others makes our lives fuller and much more enjoyable.

Action item

Write a list of three things you are curious about and make time to research them this week. Also, find your own squaring the circle exercise. Find something that challenges you, and requires creative problem-solving. Try to work out that puzzle a few times over the next week. It can be something solvable, like a Rubick’s cube or Suduko puzzle, just keep the mind agile.