#876 - Michael Gelb - How 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 dream 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? 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?

Yeah.

I mean, you had to be.

To get by at that time, you needed 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 you.

It's like, yeah, I need that backpack.

They're my patrons.

Yeah, exactly.

You need my 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, politically very interesting in Italy. How much did the 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 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 times of war because the felt need of despots like Sforza was, build me some cannon, help me get 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 can 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. the it's that line also i can paint uh 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 did he see his artistic endeavors as kind of of 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.
And that's the fifth principle for thinking like Leonardo, is arte scienza, the integration of art and science. The drive that he has to do the things that he does, it seems to come from sort of quite a balanced place.
You know, as you go around the Vatican or wherever else, there's sort of two, it's Michelangelo and da Vinci. Michelangelo and da Vinci.
Like that's what the tour guides are telling you about. But it seems, at least unless I'm remembering it accurately, michelangelo was very much like a conflicted soul you know sort of very pessimistic he had a dark dog that followed him around it seems like he maybe basically kind of had permanent depression throughout his entire life um difficult to work with like rambunctious uh disagreeable um and you know you can see where i think the drive for that kind of a person seems to be easier to understand in some ways that he's got this sort of fervent need to prove himself for validation uh to put his work forward because the external accolades will fill the internal void hopefully um da vinci's much more difficult for me to work out how he's motivated to work so hard.
Does that make sense? 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 passionate, deepest level, curiosita.

So you were in the Vatican,

and no doubt you saw the amazing,

obviously 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? Because 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 Pieta.

Which are shows of love, right? Their hope. It's upward aiming, it's the greatest that we can be.
Amazing. So that's just the thing is we can't just reduce them to simple psychological explanations.
Show me the other side then. If that's the light side of Michelangelo, what's the dark side of 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. 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.
I also think that 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.
I'd say the other dark side is that he went through a period towards the end of his life of profound doubt. 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.
So I think the sense of self-doubt of maybe losing faith or...

I don't even 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. There's no dark without

the light. And that's part of what makes Leonardo's artwork so interesting, is the way light emerges from the dark.
And 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 real genius that Leonardo 550 years ago was sharing for all of humanity. What do you wish more people realized that da vinci had done you know people

understand lots of the work the well-known stuff what are the uh early records or like the the underground hits that should have had more plays on spotify well yeah he did he did write uh il sole no se move, 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's an Italian painter, and she told me about him. 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? It was the Salvador Mundi. Okay.
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 dollars and it's disappeared and people trying to figure out where it is.
But 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.
And the 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.
Yeah, so you've spent this time deconstructing, reading an awful lot of his work. How much of his work and notebooks and stuff were retained? Is there more lost than was kept? 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. Wow.
Oh, so I mean, 6, six or 7,000 survived? Exactly. Yeah.
So even though a lot lost, still quite a lot to get through. 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. 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 emerged. What was a typical day like for him? Do you know what a normal daily routine was? 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.
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. 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? 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,, 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.
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. Be open, be receptive, go for a walk, come back, write it in your notebook.
So in a typical day, I know he worked with 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

yeah i am i have so many thoughts about this first one, I wonder how rare it is for people to be repaid financially, existentially, for the quality of their thoughts. You know, most people have what are commonly referred to as bullshit jobs.
They have bullshit jobs. And it's, you know, something that maybe they're even like kind of fired up by it but it's not necessarily the most creatively demanding job in the world or maybe it is but it's creatively demanding some of the time not most of the time and uh that would have been you know you're hoeing the fields you're a surf in you know a 1250 or something uh in europe like it's the same it's all the same so most people i think don't generate their primary source of value from the quality of their thoughts uh but the goal i think that most people are trying to get to is to be repaid for the quality of their thoughts so what you have in Da Vinci is somebody who is, I think, optimizing for a position that many people want to get into, not necessarily everybody is into.
But certainly if you get to the stage where you're trying to be creative, you're trying to come up with new ideas, you are paid for the quality of your thoughts, that on and off thing is really interesting. And then contemporarily, when you think about, well, the modern world has kind of robbed us of the ability to be off a lot of the time, because even when you're walking, the phone's in your pocket, you're listening to a podcast, the podcast is at two and a half times speed, you've got people coming past you, there's so much stimulus, et cetera, et cetera.
The opportunity to have a full switch off is super interesting and lacking, I think. And I think I'm right in saying the ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure.
So work was an aberration and leisure was the set point. Whereas now people kind of have this, I don't know, work purgatory thing where it just infuses, France just released this uh bylaw that said that employers can't contact employees after 5 p.m at night uh or on weekends in an attempt to kind of create a hard stop uh around this but yeah just that um quality of your thoughts it's kind of a specific use case but one that a lot of people i think aspire to and would like to get more of and then then on the other side, the sort of mismatch that we have with the modern world compared with maybe what would be better for flourishing.
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, that help the people who have money be more creative and then you get money. Teaching people who have money to make money is playing on easy mode.
Teaching people who don't have money to not make money is playing on hard mode. 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 Sisodia.
You must know all this down in Austin. 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.

So that's, I moved, 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. 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.

Okay.

Seven principles to think like da Vinci.

What's the first one?

Well, the first one is one that you embody so beautifully 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 Leonardo would never take yes for an answer. What about the next question? 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 so that's our birthright

our birthright is curiosity who are the most imaginative people little children

Thank you. Our birthright is curiosity.
Who are the most imaginative people? 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 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. 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.
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 a hundred questions.
Don't lift your pen off the paper, write a hundred questions. You can choose a theme if you want to, it doesn't really matter because what's going to happen is the first 20 or 30 questions will just be your regular quotidian mind.
So, you know, what's the meaning of life, blah, blah, blah, but you don't, you're not really into it yet. The middle level of questions, 30, 40, 50, it'd be like, why the hell am I doing this exercise? My wrist hurt.

Why does my wrist hurt so much? Why did I pick up that stupid book anyway? 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. 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.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm so fortunate that I have the opportunity to do that 100 questions a day three or four times a week for now you know six and nearly seven years um my friends may disagree when we sit down for dinner and they just want to chill out but uh whatever uh i had a drive we went to the mike tyson fight we drove back and forth from the mike tyson fight in dallas dallas to austin so three and a half hours ish 200 miles and uh the fight was frankly shit but the uh trip back and forth between me and my old housemate zach was just it's like my favorite thing to do i'm locked i'm going somewhere so it's not purposeless right uh i'm locked in a box and we went everywhere every single question that we could ask we're listening to music he's an amazing musician i'm like oh so why what's syncopation explain syncopation to me and why is this thing and blah blah blah and then he gets to ask dude i i i don't know i i understand that not everyone necessarily is has that drive, but it kind of blows my mind that that's not what everybody's trying to do all the time. Because it's the most fun thing.
To me, it's the most fun thing. And the coolest thing is, it fires your imagination, doesn't it? And 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. So remember we said, little kids, wild imagination, the most energy because they have the strongest curiosità.

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.

It feels like, what curiosity feels like to me, it feels like being pulled, not pushing.

So much of life, I think you're forcing yourself into it into it you're finding a wedge you're pushing yourself into this space curiosity is the opposite it's it's you sort of posit a vacuum and the vacuum sucks you forward and uh i really like that i really uh i very much do you've got the hundred questions i like that is there anything else tactically to consistently sort of keep this ticker over across time people can't do the 100 questions every day journalist questions who what why where when and how just there's a handy toolkit very simple ask a couple well who 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 all right cool that's the first one second the second one dimostrazione dimostrazione it means demonstration it's a word that leonardo actually used 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 curiosità.
Then, okay, think it through really critically. So 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.
So that usually have people who are naive and open and play, or people who are just very critical, even cynical. Cynic is a brokenhearted i try to take i've got 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 and then the super enthusiasts, I get them to be more skeptical.
Yes, yeah. As with most things, man, it's the golden mean.
Yeah. You know, I really think there's something to sort of playing with the extremes as opposed to finding a balance in the middle.
And this is just where I'm at at the moment. I think for a long time I tried to, you you know, like, I'm going to stay in shape mostly, but like a little bit of the time, I'm going to let it off.
I'm going to, you know, be skeptical quite a bit and try to be more disagreeable. But I'm also going to have the open warm hearted thing going on.
And that's, I guess, kind of optimal for relational stuff. You don't want to be bipolar in all of the things that you do.
But when it comes to like more strategic or structural stuff, how you build your life together, I think it's much easier to just go all in in one direction and then periodize what you do. So to move from the open-hearted curiosity thing to I'm going to scrutinize incredibly heavily the stuff that I've learned.
And then I go back because trying to do both at the same time is like trying to creatively write whilst you proofread. 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. We're coming up to December 21st.
And I love that. I just love that exquisite moment.
It's the greatest potentiality of the hottest day of summer is right there. It's the top of the roller coaster.
It's the top of the roller coaster. And then when you're at the bottom, and that's called life.
So recognizing that, 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 in the light bit i was reading seven eves this great book by neil stevenson and um in it they have to try and repurpose the international space station to become a colony for uh all of human civilization in like two years and then they get up there but you end up learning neil stevenson's a beast you end up learning a turnabout orbital dynamics when you're up there now and uh it's really cool and um when you think uh just trying to intersect uh two things flat like a car hitting another car quite a lot of stuff has to happen in order for that collision to occur but that's only on two dimensions when you then not only put it into three dimensions but put those three dimensions moving around a spherical object it is so interesting so they're talking about again the orbital dynamics and they use the the terms zenith and apogee uh there you go and uh it makes me think about the exact same but now in a another dimension i'm with you man that's cool um What would you say to the recovering cynics who want to kind of let go of some of their worldly scrutiny and sort of dark day thinking? How do you want to feel? How do you want to feel? It's a really important question when people are in their heads and have adopted positions and preset lenses through which, how's it working for you? What's it protecting you from? What's what's what's the benefit of it if it's working for you knock yourself out uh but if it's leading you to feel less than buoyant less than joyous less than grateful and you might possibly even consider that it's that's a way you could be, that life could be more buoyant and graceful and joyous.

then let's experiment with other ways of looking at things and just see first of all how they work

in 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. I love the idea of how's that working for you.
It's such a ruthless question. Naval has one that's similar where he says, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy it's crazy when you think you know i i have a bugbear with cynicism not only because i find it in myself but because it's everywhere on the internet and a lot of all of my work goes out on the internet and it makes me feel disheartened because i i love what i do and i think that most other people that are sort of normal are into learning and developing and doing stuff so then when i see the outliers which tends to be a lot of sort of more shit posty comment sections uh thankfully not not usually on this channel but it's it's still really it's just not cool and uh it's crazy how tightly people will cling to a life that they ardently don't like.

It's like, I'm the flag bearer for a life that I'm saying is shit,

but for some reason I'm also defending it.

I'm defending it at the same time.

It blows my mind.

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, how this is a temporal deal. so

but

you said the word disheartened

and one of the wonderful things about these kind of

conversations Uh, so, uh, but you said the word disheartened and one of the wonderful things about these kinds of conversations, and I think why people tune in, why do people want this? Cause it's reheartening. People want something that boys their, their, their heart and their hope.
Uh, 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,

you can navigate,

fix your course to a star and you can navigate through any storm. What's that mean? 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.
This is the Viktor Frankl thing. 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. Yeah, super interesting and it's's like, you know, the time that I've spent with neuroscientist people like Huberman or whatever, Sam Harris, talking about how almost everything is positive destination, move toward the destination, track the distance between you and the destination, get positive reinforcement, move the destination again, positive, you know, it's this sort of like how a, you know, a cartoon snail moves where it goes like this, and then it goes flat, and then it goes like this, and then it goes flat.
It feels like that. And I think we can get disheartened by the adaptation.
Oh, how awful the thing that I previously only wished that I could have had the opportunity to say yes to

is now something that I take for granted.

And we sort of give ourselves,

we like whip ourselves because we say,

well, you should be more grateful.

You wanted this and you got it.

And now you've fucking forgotten that you've even had it.

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.
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.

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.

I don't know. You know, 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 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.

What's the most exquisite pleasure?

Could it be breathing?

Like right now?

And 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, it's all being, 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 am an achiever. I'm a maniac.
It just, I have, I've just woken up to, okay, I don't have to worry. That's my default setting is to work hard and achieve and be disciplined.
I just grew up that way. So it's hardwired into my system.
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. 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. You know that idea of us all being connected, and I guess if people are deep into meditation, they'll know about sort of permanent, non-abiding, non-dual awareness, etc., etc.
A more rational version of that, which I love, and I've just checked ChatGPT to make sure that it's still correct. So, I ask the question, do we all breathe in particles of Julius Caesar's last breath? Yes.
It's likely that we all breathe in particles from Julius Caesar's last breath because of molecular diffusion and the fact that every breath contains 10 to the 22 molecules. While the fraction of Caesar's breath in any given inhalation is minuscule, the sheer number of molecules and the passage of time make it statistically probable that every breath we take contains some of those ancient molecules.
How fucking cool is that? 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 your advice of 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, with physics.
And that that's, you know, 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.
Your conscious is going to hurt you and you make less money. I mean, of all of those, of all of the things, for me, it's, I think, the little ticker in the back of your brain that knows when you did the thing that you should have done that gives you that sort of, as the kids would say, ick or cringe, that sense of like, oh, fuck, like I shouldn't have done that.
And I know I shouldn't have done that. And, you know, adaptively, evolutionarily, what is it?

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, you know, in the worst situations. But like 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 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 in the current moment and um i i really think that much of the balance with this like the first step is just realizing this is a tension to be managed not a problem to be solved like there's no fucking equation that comes out the other end. It's, you know, 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

Thank you. 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 fine wine and let that be just enough.
Because then you get to have some more the next night or whatever it is, dark chocolate. I mean, I'm really focused on all the best things in life and how to enjoy them sustainably to make, to put more dolce in my vita and the vita of my friends and clients more joie in their vive so that every hour will be happier isn't it cool you know like so much of this a couple of the things that you've mentioned there um 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 have never has anybody ever gorged themselves on dark chocolate i don't think so it's like after a while it's sort of it's so good too that you're fulfilled correct so i think uh what you're 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.
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. Whereas the taste design of going to McDonald's is significantly more pal palatable so you're going to eat more anyway okay so yeah but what you said let's just uh 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're having too too much fun in England and they wanted to be more austere.
So they came here and they dressed in those funky black and white costumes that looked 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 overdo it and get addicted. 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.
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 to a lot of my clients a lot of my clients over the years okay curiosity critical thinking next sensazione sensazione sharpen your senses your senses.
So Leonardo wrote that the five senses are the ministers of the soul. He disciplined his senses.
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.
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, 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.

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 compare. Then you can do the same thing with Manet and Monet, or

different pieces by Bach, or early Mozart, later Mozart, or Mozart 40th Symphony conducted by von Carrion 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?

And here's the deal to get,

to make this most fun is no wrong answers.

This is not music criticism or food criticism.

This is sensazione enjoyment.

What do you,

because there's no wrong answer to the question, what do you experience? And what's so cool is people will, I do this with my corporate people. They don't think they know about wine.
They put their nose in the glass. People make jokes, oh, that smells like grapes, ah, 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. 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, 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 of the person saying, the body language, and the voice tonality.
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.
Yeah, it's this, again, another one of those balances. I like the idea of the the sharpness but there's also this sort of element of savoring uh which seems you patience kind of i'm gonna wait and see what's there or i'm gonna take another sip or i'm gonna take another moment before speaking or describing or whatever yeah i've been i've been uh that's uh something i've been aiming to cultivate as a wine as a wine drinker i imagine that the savoring thing is is particularly important okay sharpen the senses sharpen the senses what's next okay the next is sfumato 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. so one of everybody rushes to see the Mona Lisa

and rightfully so

because our ability to embrace the unknown. 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 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? 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.
So try this. Everybody can try this all together.
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. Right.
I could have beaten Mona Lisa. Whoa.
So I was doing this with a group of gifted children, ages eight to 11 in Rappahannock County, Virginia. And kids are so great.
You ask them to do something like this. They are so earnest.
They go, 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.
I asked my average corporate group when we do this, I say, they 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. Mona Lisa is the Western equivalent of the ancient Eastern symbol of Yen 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 it's so interesting i was uh i've watched a number, YouTube videos explaining it. I think it's a YouTube channel called Great Art Explained.
Yeah, I'm on that channel. Great Books Explained, Great Art Explained.
Unbelievable. Both awesome, right? Yeah.
So good. Especially for me, right? Total philistine, 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 were 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. And 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, you know, the ha-ha and the ah-ha are first cousins.
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 did that exercise where you name something and then name it the thing of the next thing and then name it something that it isn't. I fucking love that 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 i try to do this a little quietly, but...
Yeah, very good. Okay, okay.
So, sfumato, embracing ambiguity and the unknown. Principle number five, arte scienza.
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 Artesienza.

Why are we here talking about him?

Because he wasn't just an amazing genius scientist,

he's also an amazing genius artist and inventor. So he integrated these modalities that we usually tend to think of as opposites, 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.
It's Tony made it up, inspired by the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison. And 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, artesienze.
It's a really simple, elegant, practical way to think like Leonardo. But my guidance for everybody is learn it 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.

You want some serious neuroplasticity?

Get the colored pens,

make some mind maps,

and you will be thinking like Leonardo da Vinci.

There's a program for Mac, which is free called mind node um it's not quite it's more tiered so it's basically uh how would you

say like um nested bullet points but presented visually and it's super easy to use which is the

most important thing for me and i love mind node so i use my note i haven't used it that much

recently to be honest but i used it in the past when i was planning out talks and other bits and pieces i think one of the certainly if i was to lay an issue or a pathology at the feet of modern society would certainly not be that there's too much art or imagination you know it's very it's very sort of left brainy. It's very rational.
It's tied in with the cynicism thing. How can somebody that thinks, this sounds great, I'd love to inhabit my sort of creative, imaginative, artistic Da Vinci energy more.
What are some of the things that can help to sort of pull people out in that way 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 you can make a the last exercise in the book is a mind map of all your life goals, dreams, visions, values, your different areas of life. 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 keywords, 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.
So you get a huge amount of information in a very small space. And it's fun.
It's fun. Yeah.
Okay. Next up.
Next. Corporalita.
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.
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. I just figured out what he was saying, translated into contemporary terms.
One of the things he says, 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. 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. He says, get moderate exercise every day.
Have plenty of fresh water. Be in nature.
What else do you need to know? so that fitness, looking after the body, looking after the mind, but there's the elements of grace and poise. Yeah.
What are those specifically? Because that, I think, to me is a very different sort of word. 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. 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,

Thank you. creates, the drapery that he enfolds Saint Anne or the Madonna in, the curls of the hair in the Ginevra de Benchy, which is in the National Gallery.
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 but you you see these, 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. And Leonardo is one of the supreme examples of that quality.
Okay. And what's the final one? Connazione.
Connazione. 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.
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 project we're doing? What's of this product that we're launching? Of this plan I am making.
How do I see? He guides us. He asks us to do that.
And what 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?

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, I'm going to get fit.
And you just focus. No, why are you getting fit? How are you doing it? 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 key words.
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.
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.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Intentionality, uh, intentionalism as a word that, I mean, a lot of my friends are pretty

addicted to like doing the thing that you mean to do.

Right.

Well, that's a positive addiction. i'm 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.
So set your intention 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.

Michael Gelb, ladies and gentlemen.

Michael, awesome.

There's this new Leonardo da Vinci documentary

that's coming out.

I think it'll be out actually once this episode is done.

So I'm sure a lot of people will be wanting to learn more.

So I really appreciate your work

and the many trips and pages that you

had to go through in order to be able to glean these insights. Where should people go if they

want to keep up to date with the stuff you do? 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.

Heck yeah.

Appreciate you, Michael.

Thank you.