Michael Gelb
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
When he was working on the Last Supper, he would be up there on the wall of the refractory of the Church of Santa Maria della Grazia, working for hours and hours at a time with total intensity. But then he would just disappear, sometimes for a few days. Well, the prior of the church of Santa Maria della Grazia would get very upset. He'd say, where's this Leonardo guy?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Because he didn't know this was an all-time genius. As far as he's concerned, this is just another contractor. I got Vito the plumber and Luigi the carpenter, Leo the painter. So Leonardo comes back and the prior gives him a hard time. Leonardo says he dismisses him. So the prior complains to the duke. and the Duke summons Leonardo and asks him to explain himself.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And Leonardo says one of the great lines of all time, he says, men of genius sometimes work best when they work least. Because he knows, he understands intuitively, and so many of the great, great geniuses understand intuitively something that we can all practice ourselves, which is work with your greatest intensity, And then quit while you're ahead. Go for a walk in nature and let it all go.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Come back. Write it in your notebook. So in a typical day, I know he worked with great intensity, then went for a walk in nature, wrote in his notebook what he observed or the ideas that came to him. And his notes were very messy and had lots of creative doodles.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Amen. Well, my whole career, somehow I've pulled off this ability to just get paid for being playful and creative and having fun and helping corporate people. I figured that out. Help the people who have money be more creative and then you get money.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, I try to help people who have money, make lots of money, to be more creative so that they can help people who don't have money and don't have opportunity have more opportunity and more money. That's my lifelong passion, conscious capitalism. I co-authored a book called The Healing Organization with Raj Sasodia. You must know all this down in Austin.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
That's the headquarters, John Mackey and so on. So I've always, I realized early on that just like Leonardo did is, That's where the power and the money is. So if we can get business to think more creatively, more compassionately, raise the consciousness of business leaders, then that's a way to contribute to making a better world.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I was telling you before we started that I lived in England for seven years. I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1982 with this wildly idealistic notion that I would teach government how to think creatively and that would help save the world. Well, I was quickly disabused of that notion. But fortunately, business people were interested.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And I was engaged early on by some visionary humanistic business leaders. And it was from them I learned about the ins and outs of business. And that's what I still do.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, the first one is one that you embody so beautifully today. in your show, in your podcast, and I think it's why people like it. It's curiosita. It's genuine curiosity. It's a childlike, focused, passionate desire to know. And you ask one question, and... You know, Leonardo would never take yes for an answer. What about the next question?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And anybody who has kids, they'll just keep asking you questions. And you could get to the essence of what anybody knows in four or five questions. Einstein would be like, okay, we don't know that after five questions.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Little children. Who's got the most energy? Little kids. But then, you know, you go to school, focus on getting the right answer instead of asking questions. powerful questions. You go to college or university, it's way worse. You have to regurgitate back what the professor said. Then you go into the workplace and they're not necessarily rewarding creative thinking or challenging questions.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's figure out what the boss wants, just like you figured out what the professor wants, feed it back to them. And The media and advertising doesn't help with any of that. So having a renaissance, a rebirth of your own curiosita. And this is what I try to guide people to do with all the practices.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
One of the exercises in the book that has had the most legs over the decades, I still get mail from people around the world, There's an exercise in the book where I have you, in one sitting, write out 100 questions. Don't lift your pen off the paper. Write 100 questions. You can choose a theme if you want to. It doesn't really matter.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Because what's going to happen is the first 20 or 30 questions will just be your regular quotidian mind. So... what's the meaning of life, blah, blah, blah, but you're not really into it yet. The middle level of questions, 30, 40, 50, it'll be, why the hell am I doing this exercise? My wrists hurt. Why does my wrist hurt so much? Why did I pick up that stupid book anyway?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
70, 80, 90, 100, a lot of people do 120, 150. You get into new territory and you shift into, it's a way to break out of the habitual mind. Then I have you go back through them and highlight the 10 questions that have the most power, that really draw you in the most. Then think of those questions before you go to sleep.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Keep your notebook by your bed because you're going to wake up with insights and ahas that in many cases will change your life. So there are practices. It's not just, yeah, be curious. Okay, cool. There's practices and methodologies and disciplines. And that's one of the most powerful, which is why I'm excited to share it with you.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And the coolest thing is, it fires your imagination, doesn't it? And it probably, when people can put up with you, like if they can put up with me, I've been doing this even longer than you have. And not on a podcast, but asking people questions. It fires the imagination. and it raises your energy.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So remember we said little kids, wild imagination, the most energy because they have the strongest curiosita. So if you want more energy, You want to fire your imagination at any time in your life. You can have a personal renaissance by empowering the questioning process.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Journalist questions. Who, what, why, where, when, and how. There's a handy toolkit. Very simple. Well, who's involved? Who's involved in this particular project and issue? How did it happen? Where did it take place? When did it start? When will it be brought to completion? And why is it happening? That'll keep you busy on almost any issue for as long as you can stay up.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
The second one, dimostrazione. Dimostrazione. It means demonstration. It's a word that Leonardo actually used in his notebooks. And he was saying, demonstrate things through your own experience. Don't just accept something because a person in authority says it or because it's written in a book. So it fits with, you can see how it naturally is organically from curiosita.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Then, okay, think it through really critically. So this is, this is, This is a yin-yang harmony we're already being asked to do. Be wildly open, really playful, childlike, innocent in your questioning. Then be really skeptical and really tough and really critical as you drive forward with the responses to those questions.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Usually you have people who are naive and open and play, or people who are just... Very critical, even cynical. Cynic is a broken-hearted idealist. I've had lots of cynics in my class over the years, as you can imagine, working with construction managers and engineers and finance people and even lawyers. So I try to get the cynics to become skeptics and the skeptics to become enthusiasts.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And then the super enthusiasts, I get them to be more skeptical.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
You can't do them at the same time. It's a rhythmic pulsation. It's like breathing. You inhale. You exhale. It's day and night. But it's understanding the harmony of those modes. So you inhale, and you get the fullness of that in-breath. And then there's that exquisite moment. It's the solstice of your breath. It just becomes the exhale. Just we're coming up to December 21st. And I love that.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I just love that exquisite moment. It's the greatest potentiality of the hottest day of summer is right there.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's the top of the roller coaster. And then when you're at the bottom, and that's called life. So recognizing that's why in the yin and yang symbol, there's that little bit of the light in the dark bit and a little bit of the dark in the light bit.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
how do you want to feel? How do you want to feel? It's a really important, uh, question when people are in their heads and their, uh, have adopted positions and preset lenses through which, how's it working for you? Uh, what's it protecting you from? Uh, what, what's, what's the benefit of it? If it's working for you, knock yourself out. Uh, uh, uh, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But if it's leading you to feel less than buoyant, less than joyous, less than grateful, and you might possibly even consider that that's a way you could be, that life could be more buoyant and graceful and joyous, then let's experiment with that.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
other ways of looking at things and just see, first of all, how they work in terms of practical, real problem solving, but also in terms of what they do to your sense of yourself and your basic feeling of what it is to be here.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, just to, I mean, I really meant it when I said they're often brokenhearted idealists, is it's armoring. It's armoring against feeling your feelings, feeling how utterly vulnerable we all are. This is a temporal deal. But you said the word disheartened. And one of the wonderful things about these kind of conversations, and I think why people tune in, why do people want this?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Because it's reheartening. People want... something that buoys their heart and their hope. And that's most needed if you're in the darkest time in your life, if you're actually struggling or suffering. It's easy to talk about how wonderful things are and how creative you can be when everything's going your way, but all of this counts. Leonardo himself said,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
you can navigate, fix your course to a star, and you can navigate through any storm.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It means that if you have a higher purpose, if you have a raison d'etre, then those principles, that love of truth, beauty, and goodness, that commitment will be your north star, will help you navigate in times of difficulty.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, I have to have read him when I was 14 years ago, which is a really long time. And that's part of what set the stage for my whole life and everything I've done since then.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Right. But this comes back to something you said before too about how everybody's work, work, work and totally focused. And even when they go outside, they're doing something and we feel we have to justify ourselves and the guilt and the shame, the Michelangelo flayed body that's pushing you forward to achieve so that we'll say you're worthwhile and you'll have some reason for being here.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Versus part of what I love about Italian culture is la dolce vita, the intrinsic notion that life is beautiful, that life is sweet, that we're here to enjoy the beauty and the pleasure of just being. The French have something similar, which is why they just passed that law that your boss can't call you, because they have joie de vivre, the joy of living. So the Italians have dolce vita,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
The French have joie de vivre. Unfortunately, in the U.S., all we have is happy hour. One lousy hour where you pound down some drinks before you go back to your miserable life and try to achieve more. But this notion, which is also a Taoist Buddhist notion about, and it's not just a notion, I think it's closer to real life.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
to what I consider to be the source of truth, beauty, and goodness is being able to be fully present and savoring presence for its own sake. Savoring the joy. Like what's the most exquisite pleasure? Could it be breathing? Like right now?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
like the apogee, the zenith, the solstices of the breath, the fact that we're connected to everything, we all breathe the same breath, that as all sentient beings, we're made of the same cosmic dust. And what if we could just get out of our yakety yakety yak and be that even a little part of the time? And don't get me wrong. I'm, you know, I am an achiever. I'm a maniac.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It just, I have, I just woken up to, okay, I don't have to worry. Like that's my default setting is to work hard and achieve and be disciplined. I just grew up that way. So it, it's hardwired into my system and, So the edge for me has been to learn, oh, how about just being? How about just being present with myself? And then try it in relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Just being present with the people that you're with. And let something creative emerge rather than you having to think of it through your own cleverness and effort.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But that's such a wonderful element of the... amazing time we live in. Whereas we can take these concepts of ancient wisdom from the Vedas, from, you know, Advaita Vedanta, non-dual truth and things that yogis went off for 40, 50 years to get an aha. And we can actually back it up with physics. And that's, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
It's like when I tell my business clients that we now know we have the data that shows that if you treat all your stakeholders with care and respect and look after their welfare, over time you'll make more money. We have the data. So why would you think of ripping people off or exploiting the worker or your client? Because you're going to suffer. You're not going to feel good.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Your conscience is going to hurt you. And you make less money.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But let's just tie that up, too, because what I find is many people have internalized the Puritan ethic. You got to remember the Puritans left England because they were having too much fun in England and they wanted to be more austere. So they came here and they dressed in those funky dresses.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
black and white costumes that look very tight and uncomfortable, and pleasure and joy of living wasn't their thing. So a lot of people feel that they must deny themselves, that they don't deserve goodness and the bounty of life. Other people feel overdo it and get addicted.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And so whichever pole, if you're on this pole of overindulgence, you need to tighten up and get more discipline and learn the power of a positive no.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And if you're one of these folks over here who never really thought that this was possible or didn't know all the wonderful things the world has to offer you and wants to learn about the art of enjoyment, well, there's a whole beautiful world awaiting you. I like to be the guide for those people. A lot of my clients, a lot of my clients over the years.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Sensazione. Sensazione. Sharpen your senses. Sharpen your senses. So Leonardo wrote that the five senses are the ministers of the soul.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
He trained his senses like an Olympic athlete would train their body for competition. But you know what he wrote 500 years ago, 550 years ago in Tuscany, Leonardo wrote, the average person looks without seeing, eats without tasting, breathes in without awareness of aroma or fragrance, talks without thinking, basically doesn't pay attention to the beauty that's all around them.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So he advocates, and the principle of sensazione advocates, consciously sharpening your sensory awareness. And this becomes obviously more important as you get older. And what's the best, most beautiful way to do it is to appreciate nature and appreciate beauty. Go for a walk and have a theme of, what do I see? What are the colors I see today? Let's look at the different shades of green.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Make that the theme of my walk today. Or my walk today, my theme will be perspective or light and shadow. Or what sounds do I hear? Just listening to the sound of birdsong in a 20-minute walk significantly raises your immune system and your creative thinking. Taste the best the world has to offer and pay attention. And oh, here's a big secret too.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Instead of one dark chocolate, do a comparative tasting. Try an 80% cacao against 85%. or one from Madagascar against one from Venezuela, because your brain loves a theme. It loves to compare and contrast. And you'll notice sensory nuances in the chocolate that might have escaped you had you not compared. Then you can do the same thing with manet and monet, or a
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
different pieces by Bach or early Mozart, later Mozart, or Mozart 40th Symphony conducted by von Karajan versus Bernstein. It's amazing. Same music. It can even be the same orchestra, different conductor. You hear stuff that you never would have heard otherwise. So, And it's fun. And then you do this with other people and you say, well, what did you hear?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And here's the deal to make this most fun is no wrong answers. This is not music criticism or food criticism. This is sensazione enjoyment. Because there's no wrong answer to the question, what do you experience? And what's so cool is people, well, I do this with my corporate people. They don't think they know about wine. They put their nose in the glass.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
People make jokes, oh, that smells like grapes, ha, ha, ha. But they get over their awkwardness and they get into it. And somebody says something like, I don't know, it kind of reminds me of biting into a really ripe plum while leaning back on a haystack on a really hot day. And somebody else goes, oh my God, that's just, let me taste that wine again, see if I can get that plum in that haystack.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And all of a sudden, you're not just learning about the wine, you're learning about the person. And you're connecting with the poetic soul and the poetic consciousness, the nonlinear way of being in the world, which is art, joy, beauty. So, If we want more of that in our lives, we sharpen our senses. Not to mention the fact that, look, my patrons are businesses.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So they need to be sharper than their competition. That means they're better at seeing what's going on. They're reading the body language of the person in the meeting. They are listening to the voice tone and noticing if there's a disconnect between the words the person's saying, the body language, and the voice tonality.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And then they'll use their curiosità to ask some more challenging questions so that they can fire up their dimostrazioni and get to the bottom of the situation. So the opposite of being sharp is being dull, and it's a sensory term.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Okay. The next is sfumato. So sfumato is a term coined by art critics to refer to the hazy, mysterious quality in Leonardo da Vinci's paintings. And what it refers to is maybe the most distinguishing characteristic of highly creative people. which is our ability to embrace the unknown.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So everybody rushes to see the Mona Lisa, and rightfully so, because she's the most renowned, famous work of art in human history, the most recognized symbol or icon or image on the planet. But on your way in to see her, a lot of people walk right by the St. John. And the St. John in the book is actually the symbol of sfumato,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
because he's got his hand on his heart, he's pointing up to heaven, he's got a funky head tilt and smile, and so he's saying, when things are really tricky and uncertain, use your emotional intelligence, consider what your higher principles are, and keep your sense of humor. So... Leonardo pioneered this technique, which they call svamato, where why is the Mona Lisa considered to be so amazing?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, one reason is she's so mysterious because he blurs the lines around her eyes, around the famous smile. He blurs from her figure to the atmosphere behind her. So things seem to kind of meld into other things. And she seems to follow you around the room if you've ever had the opportunity to actually move around that room when it's not that crowded, which fortunately I have actually had.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So try this. Everybody can try this altogether. We do this right now. So just imitate Mona's smile. Get in the position. Everybody knows it. And do your best Mona smile imitation. And then notice how it makes you feel. That's good, man. So I was doing this with a group of gifted children, ages 8 to 11 in Rappahannock County, Virginia. And kids are so great.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
You ask them to do something like this, they are so earnest. They're really into it. And one of the kids says, she's got a secret. And the other kid says, yeah, she knows everything has an opposite. And then the kids start saying opposites like day and night, good and bad, boys and girls, life and death.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I ask my average corporate group when we do this, I say, well, I read in the Wall Street Journal that the famous smile was caused by a dental problem. They kind of missed the point.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
ancient eastern symbol of yin and yang she is the embodiment of the notion of the harmony of dark and light of good and evil of masculine and feminine of yin and yang and that's just one of the reasons she's endlessly fascinating
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yeah, I'm on that channel. Great Books Explained, Great Art Explained. Unbelievable.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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,
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
He's also an amazing genius artist and inventor. So he integrated these modalities that we usually tend to think of as all in service of his quest for truth, beauty, and goodness. And my old buddy, English genius, a guy named Tony Buzan, originated mind mapping. I don't know if you've come across mind mapping. Tony made it up. Inspired by the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. And
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
He taught it to me when I was writing my master's thesis in London, and it transformed my experience of writing. My master's thesis became my first book, and that's how I became an author. So it's a methodology for integrating art and science, artesiense. It's a really simple, elegant, practical way to think like Leonardo.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But my guidance for everybody is learn at first the old-fashioned way with actual colored pens and big sheets of paper before you do it on your computer. It's great to do it on your computer. It's amazing the programs that have come out, a lot of free, great ones. But learn it the artisanal, old-fashioned way because when you draw – It activates circuitry in your brain.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
You want some serious neuroplasticity? Get the colored pens, make some mind maps, and you will be thinking like Leonardo da Vinci.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And that's the fifth principle for thinking like Leonardo is arte scienza, the integration of art and science.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, really learning and practicing mind mapping is the go-to most practical way to really do it because then you can learn to make mind maps of your plan for the day. You can plan a dinner party. The last exercise in the book is a mind map of all your life goals, dreams, visions, values, your different areas of life.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And then you get to look at them and see the gestalt of it all while you also get more detail because you put in key words. You print those keywords so they're easy to read, and you draw images or creative doodles that go with them so you're stimulating the imaginative part of your mind and the detailed, focused, analytical part of your mind simultaneously.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So you get a huge amount of information in a very small space. And it's fun. It's fun.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How 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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Okay. Next up. Next. Corporalità. corporalita, balance the body and the mind. So we all know that Leonardo was an artistic genius. Many people know he was also a scientific genius, great inventive genius, but he was also physically gifted. He was renowned as the strongest man in Florence. He was a master equestrian, a fencer, a
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
History records that he also was a juggler, which I was thrilled to discover since I worked my way through graduate school as a professional juggler. He loved to walk. He walked through the countryside for miles and miles and miles with his notebooks. And he gives advice in his notebooks to his students. Remember, I told you he actually tells you what to do.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I just figured out what he was saying, translated into contemporary terms. One of the things he says is, Learn to preserve your own health. Today, we might call that integrative medicine or functional medicine. Learn to preserve your own health. Take responsibility for your health and wellness. He says, avoid grievous moods and keep your mind cheerful.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, today we call that psychoneuroimmunology, right? Your attitude affects your immune system moment to moment. He says, Eat a healthy, wholesome diet of the freshest foods that you can find. He says, if possible, dine with friends. The Italians have a saying, a tavola non si invecchia. You dine with others, you don't grow old. He says, have a little red wine with dinner in moderation.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
He says, get moderate exercise every day. Have plenty of fresh water.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Yes. So Leonardo was renowned for his grace and poise in his own movement. He was so... The chroniclers of the time recorded that people would turn out just to watch him walk down the street because he moved with so much poise and grace.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And part of why, especially when you go see the drawings, I've seen them close up at the Ambrosiana in Milan and in Windsor Castle and in a few other places with special exhibitions. The grace... of the lines that he creates. The drapery that he enfolds St. Anne or the Madonna in. The curls of the hair in the Ginevra da Benci, which is in the National Gallery.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
You can go see it for free in Washington, D.C. So they're all indicative of this sense of just having the right amount of energy in the right place at the right time, which is one of the secrets of life. And it's an element that's often missed in a lot of physical training. You know, people go to the gym and they're trying to just push the most weight they can. They want to achieve the goal.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But you see these people, they're contorting themselves. They lose their form. I see runners, walkers everywhere. doing more hard to themselves than good because they've lost poise and grace in their movement. So I trained originally as an Alexander Technique teacher in London many years ago, which is a genius methodology for cultivating poise and grace in your everyday movement.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And Leonardo is one of the supreme examples of that quality.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Connezione. Connezione. Everything connects to everything else. Leonardo wrote that in his notebook. Everything connects to everything else. So today we would call that systems thinking. Looking at how things that you might not ordinarily think are related are actually related. Like how Julius Caesar is in your nose right now. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So that ability to really see the big picture, to see how, to think things through, what are the potential unintended consequences, the negative on it. People call them side effects when it's a drug, but they're really effects. They're just effects. So what's the gestalt of this thing?
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
project we're doing what's of this product that we're launching of this plan i am making how do i see he's he guides us he asks us to do that and what i i guide people to try to do that with their own lives is just you know what's your purpose what are your values what are your goals and how do they all fit together And what are you actually doing every day?
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And is what you're doing every day what's out of alignment with what you say your purpose, values, and goals are? And how can you make little shifts? I mean, I know you know this. Little shifts every day lead to really big shifts in a surprisingly short amount of time. But it helps to not just, all right, I'm going to get fit. And you just focus. No, why are you getting fit? How are you doing it?
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
When are you going to do it? Where are you going to do it? That fits in with the questions we laid out earlier. And asking those questions about every aspect of your life. And then you can take these and put them in one mind map and make symbols for each one and some keywords. Put that on your desk. I have mine right over there. I keep redoing it. I've been doing this for a really long time.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
But it helps us stay on track to that star that Leonardo talked about. And believe me, it comes in handy when you have to navigate through storms.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, that's a positive addiction. Yeah, because the default setting is not. Is programming, is conditioning, is reactivity, is unconsciousness, is somebody else's intention that was set to manipulate you and control your life.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And set it in a systems way and make images that go with it so you're not just doing it linearly, but you're also doing it with your imagination. And plus it's more fun.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Thank you. MichaelGelb.com. That's G-E-L-B, MichaelGelb.com. And when they go to MichaelGelb.com and they sign up for our free newsletter, we send them a 14-page handout on how to do mind mapping for free. So MichaelGelb.com is the place to go. Thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I love that. I love that the contrast between Leonardo and Michelangelo is a wonderful character study of genius, and they both reflect aspects of our own quest to express ourselves and achieve and live our life's purpose. Some of us do it from guilt and shame, like Michelangelo, and some of us do it from love and just passionately
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
deepest level curiosita so you were in the vatican and no doubt you saw the amazing obviously the the ceiling of the sistine chapel but the judgment of christ painting on the front wall of the chapel with the amazing, powerful figure of Christ sending some people up to heaven, sending everybody else down below. And do you know where Michelangelo is on that painting?
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Because, you know, they always put themselves in these paintings. You go back and look at this again. He's hung out. His flayed skin is hung out on a branch, hovering in purgatory, roasting over the fires of hell. So that was Michelangelo's painting of his own self-image. Having said that, he did do the David. and the Pietà.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Amazing. So that's just the thing is we can't just reduce them to simple psychological explanations.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Great, great, great. The dark side of da Vinci is twofold. One is he's been criticized a lot for not following through and actually finishing things. Now, I've defended him because I feel like he was so interested in just pure perfection. He wasn't competing with Michelangelo or other artists. He was competing with God.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So part of why he couldn't finish things is he couldn't quite get everything as perfect as nature, which is what he wanted to do. He knew he was a genius, and he ultimately didn't really care whether the monks got their altarpiece or not. He thought he was onto something more profound.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
He writes in the margins of his notebook, did I really accomplish anything? Which is kind of amazing when you consider what he actually accomplished.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I don't think it's not really even a dark... I don't see it as light or dark, but it's because it creates what he called chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is the contrast of light and dark. There is no light without the dark, and there's no dark without the light. And that's part of what makes...
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
leonardo's artwork so interesting is the way light emerges from the dark and he he pioneered that and that's part of the deeper meaning to me of his work and why we're so drawn to it so fascinated and why most people haven't really plumbed the depths and understood the the real genius that leonardo
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, yeah, he did write, Il sole no si muove, the sun does not move, many years before Copernicus created the heliocentric. Yeah, way. It's pretty wild. And having said that, part of my mission, part of why I wrote How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was one of my childhood heroes. My grandmother is an Italian painter, and she told me about him.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And when I was a kid, Superman was my other hero. But I grew up, I found out, oh, he was only a comic book character, but Leonardo was real. And part of why he fascinates us now, part of why he's on a PBS special, part of why there was the Da Vinci Code, part of why his painting sold a few years ago for $450 million, the most any work of art has ever sold for. Which piece was it?
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
The Savior of the World. It's an amazing front-on portrait of Christ holding the globe of the world in the palm of his hand. It's exquisite. I actually saw it. It was found. It was authenticated by Professor Martin Kemp, who's probably the go-to academic world expert on Leonardo. And then it was sold at auction for $450 million, and it's disappeared, and people are trying to figure out
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
where it is but the the point is he's in the news we're talking about him and here's the real answer to your question here's what i really wish people knew because he'll endlessly fascinate us with his art with his science with his invention but what i want people to know is that he left instructions in his notebooks on how you can think more like him, on how you can use your potential.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
And that simple sort of naive childlike question I asked many, many years ago was, what's he trying to teach us? And he's really trying to teach us how we can think more creatively, how we can use all of our power and potentiality. So that's what I really want people to know.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
More lost than kept. More lost, 20,000. At best scholarly estimate, about 20,000 written. People seem to choose the numbers between 6,000 and 7,000 pages, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, I read it all way back when I was doing the research in this. I really focused in on this from 1994 to when the book came out in 1998. And I was absolutely immersed. I literally, I went to the place he was born. I went to the place he died. I walked in his footsteps. I went to every museum I could. I studied the live notebooks as well as reading the Richter translations of the notebooks.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
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.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
I interviewed the Leonardo scholars. I contemplated his paintings. I started dreaming about him. And it was from those dreams that the Da Vinci Principles began.
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#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Well, there's a lot of speculation about that. I would say it probably differed when he was in different places, but we know he advocates the importance of working with great intensity and then taking a break.
Modern Wisdom
#876 - Michael Gelb - How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
So wherever he was, whatever he was doing, whether he was in his studio or interacting with patrons, we know that one of the things he teaches us and advocates, which has been borne out by contemporary research into optimizing the psychology of memory and high performance and so on and so forth, is oscillation. Work with great intensity. Actually, there's a great story.