Curious Realizer - six more steps to genius that were inspired by the Maestro

Following some thoughts about curiosity, we continue our Curious Realizer examination of the remaining six steps from Gelb's How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day

Aug 10, 2022

We recently explored curiosity and how to develop it in a series of exercises based on Michael Gelb’s book How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day. Now we’re taking a Curious Realizer look at the other six steps in Gelb’s book.

Introduction

Leonardo da Vinci is thought to be the original Renaissance Man1, remembered for his incredible inventiveness and creativity. In addition to creating amazing art, he maintained many papers and notebooks during his life in which he recorded his drawings, his thoughts, his investigations and his ideas for inventions.

In 1998, Michael Gelb published How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, where he summarized his research into Leonardo’s life and creativity into 7 steps or principles that you can incorporate into your daily life, as summarized below:

As summarized by Leigh Boggs in an article from the Presidential Leadership Academy at Penn State University

Let’s examine the other six steps, starting with Dimonstrazione.

Dimonstrazione - Independent Thinking

A Commitment to Test Knowledge through Experience, Persistence, and a Willingness to Learn from Mistakes

Gelb suggests the following exercises to develop dimonstrazione:

Examine Experience

This exercise directs you to reflect on the major experiences in your life by summarizing them, reflecting on what you’ve learned and how those experiences have impacted your perceptions and attitudes. It also suggests a further step: reflecting on the impact of these experiences and seeing if any previous lessons are still valid or if they could be reworked based on what’s happened since then.

Check Your Beliefs and Sources

In summary, you might want to apply Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit.

Three Points of View

In summary, for a position you may hold, consider looking at it from three points of view:

Your own
A diametrically opposite point of view
A disinterested or detached point of view

You may learn some valuable things by comparing all 3 points of view.

Practice Internal Anticommercial Martial Arts

Gelb suggests examining advertising and other marketing tools to try to examine how they try to shape your thinking and motivate your behavior, including how some companies try to co-opt the image of the individual or the rebel in their quest to win attention.

Learn from Mistakes and Adversity

Gelb suggests additional freewriting exercises where you examine past mistakes to determine where you want wrong and what you learned. He also suggests considering how you might approach situations if your fears didn’t hold you back as they might have in the past.

Create Affirmations

Affirmation creation has been used as a tool by psychologists to help reshape a person’s thoughts and beliefs and Gelb also presents them as a means to develop resilience and focus.

A Curious Realizer perspective on dimonstrazione

I’ve tried most, if not all of these exercises in different forms and yes, they certainly are useful and effective. Like anything, doing the exercises once, recording the results and filing them away, never looking at them again, is probably not going to give you the full benefits of regular review, reflection and updates. Some effort recommended!

So I wouldn’t consider any of these exercises “once and done” - this type of reflection should be a regular part of your life, though they probably don’t need to be done everyday. A weekly or monthly check in is probably enough.

About affirmations: Gelb seems to derive his thoughts on affirmations on Martin Seligman’s positive psychology concepts, which have been echoed by other prominent psychologists and writers. Well, um, hm. Taking affirmations to extremes you get, well, The Secret, where people seemed to be encouraged to think and dream about their heart’s desires and they would come true as if by magic or divine intervention.

I’m still waiting for my $10 million, by the way.

I do believe that you can use affirmations in two positive ways:

To help build mental and emotional resilience in some situations (possibly in work or personal life) - I think this is a fairly well known technique used by sales people with some success, as an example.
To help direct your attention to opportunities that you might otherwise ignore.

However, I think there is a huge danger of putting too much emphasis on affirmations because they may cause you to ignore warning signs, current problems and potential threats. Affirmations can lead to narrow-mindedness, arrogance, and hubris, so please consider this carefully if you want to make affirmations a significant part of your life.

Use with care!

[Incidentally, if you have strong thoughts about affirmations I’d love to hear about them in the comments section!]

Sensazione - Refine Your Senses

I’m going to skip over this section because I haven’t really done the exercises, but in summary Gelb suggests a number of exercises to stimulate and develop the five major senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. It’s worth nothing that particularly in his paintings, da Vinci experimented a lot with color and perspective to provide some truly groundbreaking work.

If nothing else, there’s a suggestion for making good minestrone soup in the book and it sure seems like it would smell and taste delicious!

Sfumato - Embrace Uncertainty

(Literally, “Going Up In Smoke”)
A Willingness to Embrace Ambiguity, Paradox, and Uncertainty

The rate of change in modern business and culture does force a lot of action when you lack proper, in depth knowledge and you need to react quickly. Think on your feet, right? The global COVID-19 response has been a huge lesson is how the world handles conflicting information about threats and the impact it has on people, business and a highly interconnected world.

Gelb’s exercises focus on how you can handle uncertainty, the anxiety that can arise from that, and even some contemplation of mysteries and paradoxes which can lead to confusion (i.e. why do seemingly good people and organizations do terrible things?) There are also sections about the importance of rest and time to reflect on things, while even working on developing your intuition.

A Curious Realizer perspective on sfumato

The inherent nature of sfumato (ambiguity and mystery) makes it really difficult to say something concrete about it! And intuition… there’s a number of people who have tried to study intuition. People write best selling books about developing and harnessing the power of your intuition, blah blah blah. And it’s also hard to avoid the System 1/System 2 model of thinking from Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow when you discuss intuition.

But I will say this: all of us experience situations which are new, uncertain and confusion and we have to navigate though them to better clarity and certainty. The road to adulthood is the journey that we all must take, as an example. I don’t now about you but I remember adolescence as being a particularly confusing and occasionally scary time! The same is true for learning a new job or mastering a craft or skill - you move from ignorance and confusion to competence and clarity, perhaps even becoming an expert. The unknown is a feature, not a bug.

As you get older you inevitably realize that there are few rulebooks out there on how to actually do things and most of them are garbage or outdated. The ability to wade into the unknown, get your bearings and find your way through is hugely valuable. I suggest going through Gelb’s exercises on this if you’re particularly uncomfortable with change and ambiguity. Bring a flashlight.

Plus there’s one exercise where you have to stare at the Mona Lisa painting for awhile and that’s always interesting.

Arte/Scienza - Art and Science, Whole-Brain Thinking

The Development of the Balance between Science and Arts, Logic and Imagination: “Whole Brain” Thinking

This step is an exploration of mind mapping, which is a way to encode knowledge in a combination of words and images that can help you understand and assimilate information. Word and pictures on steroids! Mind mapping was a practice defined and popularized by the late Tony Buzan, using diagrams that mix text, shapes and colors as a learning and communication tool for concepts.

The original mind maps were reportedly influenced by the types of diagrams that da Vinci and other thinkers used in their notebooks and writings as they catalogued their observations.

Mind maps were originally done by hand and Gelb offers a number of examples in his book. Mind mapping software became a bit of a thing during the past 20 years, providing a faster way to create diagrams and connections between information and ideas. Other variations including clustering and concept maps, which are used to group things together or else take a large concept and visually depict its components.

Combining pictures and words helps with both learning and communication, so the thinking goes, and there is certainly some strong support for it. Mind maps allow you to blend science (facts) with art (visualization) and are a potentially powerful marriage of disciplines.

Haven’t seen any smell or taste based mind maps yet, though.

A Curious Realizer perspective on arte/scienza

I spent a lot of time investigating mind maps a few years ago; I even wrote and published an eBook about them, along with interviews of people who were proponents. Interesting stuff. While I haven’t made a formal mind map in years I still think it’s a very useful concept, especially when you have a general idea and you need to break it into its component parts in order to figure out how to achieve it.

I do this type of work (decomposition and organization) regularly for my project management day job, when I’m trying to figure out how to start and carry out a new project. Outside of work, I will do this kind of thinking when I’m planning out articles and posts for How About This for upcoming weeks, either in outline form or simple diagrams.

Mind maps are a powerful tool for decomposition of ideas into their components. I think they’re a great tool and you don’t need to overemphasize the art side of the work to make them effective, but incorporating your creativity into work can be a lot of fun!

I’m kind of doing work that’s similar to mind mapping when I’m adding to my Zettlekasten (knowledge repository made of index cards) or putting new entries into my commonplace books:

I have to decompose ideas and information into their components to store them
But they are connected by indexes and links to form a greater whole
There is a visual and artistic component in the use of color and design.

Corporalita - Mind-Body Care

Again, I’m going to skip this step because I haven’t really done the exercises, but I do have a few remarks. It’s well established that fitness is important to everyone and it’s good for the brain. I expect that Da Vinci would have been a yogi if he lived in the 21st century, along with 2641 other jobs or passions.

Tai chi and sitting zazen are techniques that I’ve tried, only briefly. I used to do Kung Fu and run long distances: I took up both practices in my 40s but they haven’t followed me into my 50s, alas.

Ambidexterity is one item that I will comment on because I have tried this. I’m right-handed but sometimes, for kicks, I will try writing with my left hand. Talk about getting back to beginner’s mind!

I can write effortlessly with my right hand but using the left hand requires a lot of focus and attention. After a bit of practice I’ve been able to learn to print fairly neatly with my left hand but I have to print slowly and carefully. I can do some cursive writing with my left hand but it’s even slower and harder to do well. It’s not easy! It feels uncomfortable to work with my left hand but I have found that even if I don’t use my left hand very often I seem to maintain a minimum level of writing skill, which is cool.

Here’s a very recent example of printing and handwriting using both hands:

Note: I am still not ready to use a hammer with my left hand.

Connessionne - Interconnectedness

A Recognition of and Appreciation for the Interconnectedness of all Things and Phenomena. Systems Thinking.

There are some great exercises in this section of the book and the general theme is to see how things are connected to each other. You can examine things in reference to a common organized whole, like a family (human genealogy, including roles and relationships between family members) or the human body (the roles of the organs, skeleton, muscles, circulatory and nervous systems, etc.) You can reapply the mind mapping concept when looking for connections, etc. Connections abound.

A Curious Realizer perspective on connessionne

The ability to see and understand connections between people and/or things is an uber skill: it’s necessary for innovation and for problem solving (and, of course, for creative problem solving). You can fix symptoms without much work sometimes (thank you, duct tape and bandages) but you can’t solve problems without understanding root causes and how they contribute to problems. Learning how to spot and analyze connections is extremely important. Learning how to combine ideas, concepts, etc. can also be very valuable. This book gives you some great tips about this kind of work.

A Curious Realizer summary of this book

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci remains one of my favorite books. Gelb manages to infuse the book with a sense of history and wonder while making his own interpretations of the value of da Vinci’s work and habits and synthesizing them into the Seven Steps. To my mind, the book remains an appealing way to combine a number of good practices into a cohesive whole, giving a newcomer a path forward to infuse their life with curiosity, exploration and new skill development while helping them with self-awareness and personal growth.

Is the book perfect? Well, what is? But I’d say the book is very well crafted and although it doesn’t take into account the growth of the Internet and Web technologies, it’s still relevant and can be supplemented by information and ideas you can find using Web search and online tutorials. There’s also a workbook based on the Seven Steps: I haven’t tried it but you might find it interesting.

For a more modern, though less extensive approach, you might try Austin Kleon’s The Steal Like An Artist Journal, which he provides a number of creative and observational exercises that touch on some of these areas - I have one and the exercises can be quite fun.

In short: get out there, find a copy of this book and give some of the exercises a try!

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