Michael Gelb is an executive coach, speaker, and an author. Given that Leonardo da Vinci is one of history’s greatest minds, presumably we can learn a lot from the life, lessons and background of him. Michael is one of the world's leading writers on the man and today we get to discover his 7 most important rules for thinking like Leonardo. Expect to learn Leonardo da Vinci’s unique way of assessing problems, what Leonardo's demeanour was like as a person, if Leonardo was naturally gifted, what a typical day in the life of Leonardo was and his favourite type of working environment, the unreasonable standards that Leonardo held himself to, the 7 principles that Leonardo lived by and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why would anyone want to think like Leonardo da Vinci?
Why would anyone want to think like Leonardo da Vinci?
Why would anybody not want to think like Leonardo da Vinci if you even dreamed that it was possible? Most people are never really made aware of the phenomenal, unlimited potential with which we are all born. The incredible brains that we're gifted with. But they didn't come with a manual.
So, you know, just like baby ducks learn to walk by imitating their mothers, we learn how to think and how to be by the people we get to imitate. And usually that's a default setting, your mom and dad, the people around you when you grow up, your teachers. But what if you called on history's greatest genius to be your personal mentor in utilizing those amazing capabilities?
Chapter 2: What was Da Vinci like as a person?
What was Da Vinci like as a person? What was his demeanor?
He was charming. He was funny. He was elegant. He liked to dress really well. He wore the finest clothes that he could afford, the finest fabrics. He was a musician. He had a gift for... making people feel comfortable for connecting with others, which is part of how he was able to get high-level patrons throughout his career. He charmed them. And they thought, well, we kind of like this guy.
Let's keep him around and see what he can do. And then he winds up painting The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa and a few other things.
So he was a canny operator then?
Uh, yeah. I mean, you had to be to, to get by at, at, at that time you needed a patronage. You needed a sponsor. Just like I noticed you always have these great sponsors on your show. And I want to buy all those products. Every time I watch it, it's like, yeah, I need that backpack.
They're my patrons. Yeah, exactly. You need an automatic backpack. Shout out. How much, you know, I love Italy. I've spent a lot of time in Florence and Rome. I recently came back from Venice. You know, the period of time, Michelangelo, da Vinci, you know,
politically very interesting in italy how much did this sort of political landscape the cultural landscape of italy at the time do you think sort of shape who he was his opportunities the way he saw the world the places that he placed his efforts sure well he had to move because of political turmoil his tenure his original tenure in florence
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Chapter 3: How did Da Vinci's political landscape influence his work?
came to an end when he saw that he might be better off under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. So you probably read the most famous employment application letter of all time.
Can you tell people about that?
Well, you got to love it. It begins, most illustrious Lord. And then he basically says, having seen what other people can do, I got to tell you, I can do way better. And then he goes on to say, I can build you bridges. I can take care of everything in time and times of war because the felt need of despots like Sforza was build me some cannon, uh, help me get, uh,
underwater to blow up the enemy's fortress. So Leonardo goes on and on about how he can help with all this. And then he says, I think it's number 11, he says, oh yeah, by the way, I could do a little painting. And then he says, not only that, I'll come to your palace and I'll prove that I can do all of this. And then he says, all in most gracious humility. He got the job.
It's that line, also I can paint, that I just adore. You know, this sort of huge, illustrious list of things, war machines, battle plans, technology engineering, also I can paint. So did he see his artistic endeavors as kind of second string in some regard? Or was that him just playing to the fact that this guy probably needed war machines and curating to the audience?
You got to give the customer what they're asking for. And what he wanted and what he needed, to come back to your earlier question, he wound up, he was in the Vatican for a while. He was under the patronage of Cesare Borgia. He had a second time in Florence under the reconstituted Medici. He then was back in
Milan for a while under the patronage of the French, and then he spent the last three years of his life as the philosopher and basically high-level executive coach to Francois I, the King of France. So he had to do what he had to do in order to continue to do what he really wanted to do, which was to understand the mind of God. What Leonardo was passionately curious about What is truth?
What is beauty? What is goodness? How do they all fit together? So for him, art, what we call art and what we call science, were just ways of exploring truth. What is so? What is real? What is the nature of things? He draws the very first reasonably accurate drawing of an embryo in the womb because he really wanted to understand the secret of life.
So the science is he did dissections of more than 30 bodies, which was very, very hard to do at that time without running water and electric light and refrigeration and so on and so forth. And yet the way he drew the things that he was dissecting are so exquisitely beautiful. They are works of art and science.
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Chapter 4: What were the seven principles to think like Da Vinci?
It's you thinking if somebody in the tribe saw what you just did or what you just thought, you would potentially lose status or you would maybe even be kicked out or killed in the worst situations. But functionally, what is that? Well, it's you being pointed toward a direction that's probably good for you over the long term. It's the same reason that we have this tension between
Chapter 5: What does it mean to embrace genuine curiosity?
pleasure, enjoyment, and long-term contentment and meaning. It's a tension between the two. And a lot of the time, stuff that we do in the moment that gives us pleasure can be negative for us over the long term. And stuff that's positive for us over the long term is negative to our pleasure in the current moment. And I really think that much of the balance with this, the first step
is just realizing this is a tension to be managed, not a problem to be solved. There's no fucking equation that comes out the other end.
I'm passionate about wine. I do wine tasting team building exercises for my clients over the years. I wrote a book called Wine Drinking for Inspired Thinking. And I got to tell you, I've really mastered the art of pleasure every day without negative consequences.
And one of the great philosophers of wine that I read said, the art of enjoying wine is to have the greatest possible present gladness without any future misery. So I'm enjoying a beautiful wine, and it's so good, and I'd like to have another glass. but I just tune into my system and I know I'll have a headache. I won't feel so good. I won't be able to function at the level.
Just say, thanks, breathe in and savor the aromas and the afterglow of a, of a fine wine and let that be just enough. Cause then you get to have some more to the next, the next night or whatever it is, dark chocolate. I mean, I'm,
I'm really focused on all the best things in life and how to enjoy them sustainably to put more dulce in my vita and the vita of my friends and clients, more joie in their vive, so that every hour will be happier.
Yeah, yeah. Isn't it cool, you know, like so much of this, a couple of the things that you've mentioned there, wine, maybe you want a bit more, but there's also a bit of you that doesn't want a bit more. Like wine's more full, but not that much more more full. Dark chocolate's a better example of something where I've never, has anybody ever gorged themselves on dark chocolate? I don't think so.
It's like after a while, it's sort of been. It's so good too, that you're fulfilled. Correct. So I think there's two ways to sort of look at this temperance, maybe would say some sort of self-control. One is develop self-control, right? Is to actually have the ability to do the willpower thing. So that would be you being able to press the accelerator harder, right, of willpower. Yeah.
But the other one is taking a foot off the brake. And that would be choosing environments, friends, routines, lifestyles, food choices. Like the reason that everybody loses weight most of the time when they switch to something like meat and fruit, right, or carnivore, is that there's only so much ground beef you can eat before you're like, I'm fucking sick of this.
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Chapter 6: How did Da Vinci demonstrate his principles?
Both awesome, right?
no understanding of art or how it works and then you have someone who has to be some sort of art scholar or whatever anyway people should go and check out a great art explained and um they do maybe an extended one i think perhaps on the mona lisa and um yeah there's what you was talking before about uh the particular style to bring light out but wasn't that that was because of the number of layers that he used like this obscene number of like one layer one layer one layer
super so gossamer thin layers of paint hundreds of them so what that does is create this effect where the light seems to suffuse from behind the canvas creating this haunting engaging mysterious effect and you know the lesson for all of us is
When you're going through a period of big change, of grave uncertainty, which we will all go through, sometimes over and over again, can you maintain your emotional intelligence? Can you maintain your connection to your star, to your higher purpose or principle? Can you maintain your sense of humor? which I find to be perhaps... The ha-ha and the ah-ha are first cousins.
It's the same workings of the brain. It's shifting you out of... It's like improv. Improv, if we say... If we have you, you, you, you did that exercise, uh, where you, you name something and then name it the thing of the next thing and then name it something that it isn't. Love that idea. I was actually, I've been doing that.
I saw that on your episode and I've been doing that on my, I was doing it today. I looked at my neighbor's house and I'm saying tree and I'm saying mailbox. God damn it. My neighbors already think I'm nuts as it is. So I tried to do this a little quietly, but, uh,
Yeah, very good. Okay, okay. So, sfumato, embracing ambiguity and the unknown.
Principle number five, arte scienza. Integrate art and science, logic and imagination. what people used to refer to as left and right hemisphere thinking, now we know it's actually more complex and not so easily distributed, but the metaphor still is relevant.
There's convergent thinking, where we're focusing, analyzing, reducing, and there's divergent thinking, where we're going off and coming up with random associations. Way back in the 1990s, I coined the term synvergent thinking, the synergetic integration of convergent and divergent thinking. That's Artescienza. Why are we here talking about him? Because he wasn't just an amazing genius scientist.
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