Welcome to my first column contribution for the Yes You Can Do It Club. I called this column Lessons From The Worlds Greatest because I will be highlighting crucial and interesting historical people that in my opinion teach via their existence, genius and perseverance. I see fit to begin this series highlighting the first man that inspired me when I learned about him, while I was still a child, he has consistently impacted my life to the present day. That man is, Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci (literally meaning ‘Leonardo of Vinci’) was born in the region of Vinci, in Florence Italy, on April 15, 1452.
Leonardo was a polymath, perhaps the most famous polymath in the world. A scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Exhausting just listing all he did, imagine the mind and concentration it took to be Leonardo himself, in his time or any time in history for that matter. Leonardo is considered, by all accounts, the archetype of what a Renaissance man is.
Leonardo’s varied talents were only matched by his insatiable curiosity and keen attention to everything happening around him, at all times. Easily considered one of the best painters of all time, having The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper being perhaps the most famous of his paintings, the fame of these two paintings only paired up by his drawing of the memorable Vitruvian Man. I had the opportunity of seeing the Mona Lisa at the Museum of Louvre in France, and being an artist myself, I stood there in wonder for a very long time, admiring Leonardo’s mastery of the Sfumato painting technique.
His talent as an Engineer and inventor was visionary to say the least, self evident in his recovered notebooks. Ideas such as the helicopter 400 years before airplanes were invented, solar power, the calculator and devises to take man to the bottom of the sea, amongst other things. He was so ahead of his time that most of his inventions could not be constructed until hundreds of years later.
He anticipated the principle of Inertia, which would be demonstrated by Galileo nearly a century later. But one of the things that impressed me the most, was how Leonardo invented an irrigation system through pipes and channels, by combining his studies of the human body, namely veins and the circulatory system, with Hydraulics … simply genius.
It is interesting, as we analyze Leonardo’s accomplishments, that the beginning of his life was not the most ideal start, or fortunate birth. An illegitimate son of a prominent notary and a peasant woman whose unfortunate birth status was impossible to hide. Poverty did not afford him the luxury of formal education in the first stage if his life. Should Leonardo permit it, it could have limited the rest of his life with lack of opportunity due to the stigma attached to his birth and modest education.
Leonardo, however, understood the fact that it is whom we are that counts and what propels us forward; so at the age of fourteen, Leonardo secured and apprenticeship in the middle of Florence, with one of the most successful artists of his time, Andrea di Cione (knowns as Verrocchio.) Florence was a capital of intellectual minds back then, and conveniently far from Vinci, were most people weren’t so benign to Leonardo. This apprenticeship would be the beginning of his salvation, as Leonardo began polishing his mind then, influenced by the very best that art, science, and medicine had to offer.
There is another fact, which I find extremely important and pertinent in this article. Since Leonardo was poorly educated, he was not all too familiar with the Greek and Roman philosophies (the dominant teachings of his time.) Because he was not schooled in the Greek or Latin languages, Leonardo did not have the benefit of learning of their writings, but he also did not have the boundaries of their dominating beliefs in those times. In this issue, Leonardo was recorded as saying: “It is only by observation that we can find the truth, the Greeks and Romans may just be wrong in some of their formulations; so let’s take a fresh look” I got chills when I first learned about this; this sentence may just be the reason why Leonardo has been called The first modern mind in history.
Found in one of the 6000 pages of his notebooks filled with notes and sketches, Leonardo wrote “I will do things no one in the past has dared to do, I will think new thoughts, bring new things in to being.”
To me, this is the key to success, evolution and to innovation … to be willing to think new ways, new thoughts, and new creations. Leonardo was my first acme of excellence for many reasons, but the main one, was the fact the he was an alchemist of life. He transformed his lacks in to pluses, his weaknesses in to strengths. I have loved his mind since I learned about him as a child.
Fear of being different, lamenting what we don’t have or walking away from the norm is a self-imposed cage that we create, an invisible prison for our dreams. We all have the choice to be the guard, or the liberator. There are no guarantees in life, life itself is not. But if we do not risk in order of have a chance to attain our dreams, the final cost, no doubt, will be much higher than the very things we fear. Dare to be an original, dare to challenge the established way … you may just revolutionize the genius in you.