Book #22 “Leonardo Da Vinci” by Walter Isaacson
By: Gabriel Sadek
Tags: Self Improvement, Think Different, Biography, Art, Self Taught

A deep dive into the life and legacy of Leonardo Da Vinci has certainly left me with many insights about our existence and the collective human condition. This was the first biography that I ever read. I read this book in September of 2019. Biographies are interesting because they allow you to examine a character, while knowing his/her ultimate fate. It allows the reader to examine the mind and actions of a man at particular times throughout his life while ultimately knowing what his end-state will be. It is so interesting to read about what is running through the mind of this incredible genius years, weeks, and hours before his death. As the reader, I know exactly when he will die. Leonardo Da Vinci however, like all of us, does not know when his end will be.

His life was captured beautifully by the work and research of Walter Isaacson. I cannot continue this book review without first giving my thanks to Walter Isaacson for writing such a masterful biography. I truly appreciate this man’s work. I believe Isaacson is a genius himself, and I am thankful to be able to enjoy the culmination of his research into the lives of the world’s geniuses.

Leonardo Da Vinci was a world-class genius. His intellect was simply a product of curiosity. While he was most certainly a talented artist, all of his accomplishments were achieved by just asking interesting questions and eagerly searching for the answers to those questions. His talent as an artist was supplemented by a level of curiosity that led him to create perhaps the greatest series of private accomplishments in history. Unfortunately, his compulsiveness, procrastination, and lack of organization left virtually all of his research unfinished and unpublished. In fact, we contemporaries are lucky that his erratically unorganized journals were kept by the limited number of people who knew of his genius. Had they not been preserved, we would have never understood the complete picture (pun intended) of the greatest artist in the history of the world.

Because of his talent as an artist, he had an incredible ability to observe the world around him and depict it. Literally everything around him, he could depict on paper via a drawing or sketch of some kind. From there he could begin to extrapolate incredible feats of knowledge based on the various insights he gained as he physically depicted his observations. His attention to detail and curiosity, combined with his ability to draw, is the reason he was able to make major developments in anatomy, engineering, optics, geometry, fluid mechanics, and of course, the flight of birds…just to name a few.

My greatest takeaways are the following…

Follow your curiosity and always say yes…fuck the money, fuck the titles, pursue the knowledge just for the knowledge. Know your gift and stay true to yourself. There were certain aspects about the life of Leonardo that certainly disappointed me; the greatest of which were the fronts that he put on…pretending to be a military engineer, or mathematician, or scientist, or poet, or whatever. If he had just come to terms with the fact that he was born to paint, and pursued all of the other things as hobbies, perhaps we would have more masterpieces. I say this with some serendipity however; after all it was his private research/inquiries that were the true testament to his profound intellect. But I just wish he spent more time painting instead of studying fluid mechanics for absolutely no fucking reason other than his random curiosity. Formal education means absolutely jack-shit. True knowledge and insight come through self-education and experience. My closest friend (and the most successful dude that I know personally) received no formal education past high school. He, like Leonardo, had the balls to say, “fuck college, I’m going to go be a self-made success phenom.” Leonardo taught himself. The greatest geniuses, and the most influential people in all of humanity, all committed their lives to acquiring as much knowledge and experience as possible. If you are not committed to a life of learning, you will never amount to anything. The piece of paper that a school gives you means shit. What do you actually know? What are you actually learning on your own?