Latest / Life and How to Live It with Dr Rocco / How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci

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How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci · Life and How to Live It with Dr Rocco

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Do you sometimes feel like life is passing you by?
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: How would you like to get more out of life?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: We explore all things life on this podcast.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Life and How to Live It podcast with Dr.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Rachel.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Live and How to Live It.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Dream, create, connect, just live it.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to another episode of the Life and How to Live It podcast with me, Dr.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: Rocco.
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  SPEAKER_02: In today's episode, we will be discussing the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci with the author Michael J.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Gelb.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: I discovered this book about 25 years ago and it made a deep and lasting impact on me.
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  SPEAKER_02: The Life and How to Live It podcast is all about living a rich and fulfilling life.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Who did that better than Leonardo da Vinci?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I thought it would make sense to discuss this book and its ideas on the show.
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  SPEAKER_02: I'm delighted that the author of the book has agreed to join me today.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: Michael J.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Gelb is the world's leading authority on the application of genius thinking to personal and organizational development.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: He has led seminars, consulted, and provided executive and leadership counseling for clients, including ATT, DuPont, Microsoft, GenNtech, Nike, and many others.
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  SPEAKER_02: He is the author of 18 books that have been translated into 25 languages and have sold more than 1 million copies.
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  SPEAKER_02: In 1999, he was honored as Brain of the Year by the Brain Trust charity.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Other recipients of that award have included Stephen Hawking and Gary Kasparov.
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  SPEAKER_02: Michael J.
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  SPEAKER_02: Gelb, welcome to the show.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Great to be with you.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you again for agreeing to be on the show.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: And thank you for writing this book and getting these ideas out in the world.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: How is it that you got interested in Leonardo da Vinci and his ways of thinking?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: It started with my grandmother, Rosa, who was Italian and happened to be a painter.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And she told me about Leonardo when I was a child, maybe seven years old.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he seemed to be like Superman, who was my other hero at the time.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, when I got older, I realized Superman was only a comic book character, but Leonardo was real.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Somehow I was blessed to avoid a normal life path.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: I've never had a job.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I would tell them stories about Leonardo da Vinci as just because he was one of my heroes, and he's a great example of creative thinking.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they seemed to really resonate.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And after a while, uh I got more and more curious, read more about him, read his notebooks, went to Florence, went to the place where he was born, went to the place where he died, literally walked in his footsteps, and the book just emerged from this lifelong long passion.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, I when I read the book, I was really struck by, you know, how much detail there is about his life.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems like you did.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: You walked in his footsteps, you really studied this great master.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and I you know I had a feeling of uh deep rapport, uh real real connection to his his art, to his presence, to his writings.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about when you actually are in front of the things that he really did.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh especially I find his notebooks, I've had the opportunity to be to witness to see his real notebooks close up on many occasions.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the art critic Bernard Berenson said of Leonardo da Vinci that everything he touched turned to eternal beauty.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: And there's this there's this amazing quality, this energy in not just his paintings, but his notebooks, his inventions, his whole being.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's part of why, you know, why is he so fascinating?
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that Michelangelo was perhaps an equally great genius, but he's not in the news all the time.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: People aren't having podcasts about Michelangelo, because Michelangelo was kind of a depressing character, he was miserable.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he was he's not a really good role model.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to really live like Michelangelo, it'd be a tortured, miserable artist.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas Leonardo has this ethos, this quality of human aspiration.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: He embodies the notion of the renaissance, of the rebirth of our quest for goodness, for truth, for beauty.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: What makes life really worth living?
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, Leonardo's the archetype of human potential.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, well, very well said.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: And and what a privilege it would be to be in front of his actual notebooks.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I've seen pictures and and it they're fascinating, you know, with all the different kinds of doodles and drawings and and anatomical models and being a physician, there, those are really interesting to me.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, I I am jealous of that.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you got to see those.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: Did you get to handle them or or how were they?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you can handle them.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: But uh you can you could so if you go to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, they're on display there.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: They have a rotating display, and right up close as far as I am from my screen to see them.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you can see them in the wind in Windsor Castle.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the British Royal Family has an extraordinary collection.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: And then Bill Gates, many years ago, bought one of the codexes and he had it sent around the world uh in an exhibition with uh Microsoft software translating it into whatever language you wanted.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is before AI.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: One of the best perks of having written this book is I've been invited.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I've actually gotten paid to go around the world with these exhibitions and speak to people uh about what they really mean.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I even I had one client take over the whole Uffizi gallery, and I was able to stand in front of the actual Leonardo da Vinci paintings and talk to the the clients about what Leonardo is up to.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, now I'm really jealous.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: All right, let's leave, let's just let's just move on.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: So you you distill Leonardo's thinking into seven characteristics, right?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: So can you can you tell us something about that?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: These these set the set I call them the seven Da Vincian principles.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what I was looking for were what were the keys to his genius that we could all learn from?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: How can we the big question was what's he trying to teach us?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: What is he trying to teach us?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, many people have written books about Leonardo da Vinci, and they obviously write a biography, you write about his art, you write about his science.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I had this driving question, which was what's his message for us today?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when you read his notebooks from that perspective, the good news is he gives lots of advice to his students.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did was translate that advice into contemporary language.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I was looking for what are his real operating principles?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: What are the principles that guide the journey to think like Leonardo da Vinci?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they became very clear.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the first is to be curious.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: Leonardo is probably the most curious person who ever lived.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: As uh Kenneth Clark, the great art historian, said uh Leonardo wouldn't take yes for an answer.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I like that I like that.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And and the second principle is to think for yourself.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that was not easy to do after a thousand years of the Middle Ages when it was generally accepted in Europe that anything worth knowing was already known.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And Leonardo came along and and questioned everything.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: So wildly curious, independent thinking.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: He very clear throughout that the senses are the means to uh cultivate knowing.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: So sharpen your senses, improve your ability to listen, to see.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: One of Leonardo's mottos was saper vedere means knowing how to see.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: He trained his senses like an Olympic athlete trains their body for competition.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So this sounds pretty simple.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Be curious, think for yourself, sharpen your senses.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the fourth principle is the real the greatest challenge, and probably the most important one, which is to embrace the unknown.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're really curious and you're really thinking independently, and you wake up your senses, you're gonna have more questions than answers.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's that's what tends to separate uh really exceptional thinking, great thinking from uh standard operating thinking, because people tend to want certainty, they tend to want to feel that they know what's happening, and we tend to be uncomfortable with not knowing.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: But the ability I call it confusion endurance.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: But this this is this is a real distinguishing characteristic of geniuses.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you're trying to understand like Einstein did, the whole universe, for example, you you're gonna not know more than you know.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna not know.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was friends with Murray Gilman, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he's the guy who came up with quarks.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And Murray had these ideas in his working, it's theoretical physics, so he's doing it in his mind, coming up with these equations.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody told him he was crazy and he was wrong, and he had he had to live for years with this curious, independent, super, super sharp ability to visualize mathematics and the universe in his mind, with no validation of any kind, and with mockery, until they built a reactor big enough to smash the atoms together hard enough to find out oh my god, Murray was right.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now he gets a Nobel Prize, now he's a genius.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but most of the time before that, it's just like you're wrong, you're crazy, you're nuts.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that's pretty much everybody who's ever made a great breakthrough.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: They were in the unknown longer than most people have tolerance for.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's a that's a really great example.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's a it's also an example of the thinking for yourself part, the independent thinking and the comfort with uh the unknown.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I in the book you you use Italian words for for all of these ideas, and the idea that you're talking about there, I love it in Italian.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: I do speak Italian.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um the word is sfumato, which means like like smoky, or it's like it's hazy.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's a haziness, a smokiness, like you can see it, but it's unclear.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: So sfumato is the word that art critics coin to refer to the hazy, smoky, mysterious quality in Leonardo's paintings.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sfumato, like it means literally means going up in smoke, fumes, sfumato.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: I use that term to represent this idea of being able to smile like the Mona Lisa in the midst of uncertainty and and change, and it's become an ever more important ability.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a in a little bit, about how things have changed since you wrote the book.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, so so we have curiosity, we have um think thinking thinking independently, um uh sensory, like uh activating all your senses.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: So Leonardo was very interested in uh sight, uh, you know, sight vision being the top, but then hearing.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh a lot of people don't know what a wonderful musician he was, right?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, yeah, musician.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, basically if if you could do something, he did it.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he's he was a musician, he you know, and then you know, all the senses, and and then just now we're talking about this sfumato or the sort of like comfort with the haziness or things that are unknown.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: What else?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: What uh what other principles do you have?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, right?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: So to merge out of sfumato, you need the fifth principle, which is arte scienza, balance art and science, balance logic and imagination, balance the you know in in contemporary parlance, people talk about balancing the two sides of the cerebral cortex.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's more a metaphor than a practical uh neurogeography, but but the idea of balancing yin and yang is a universal uh concept, a way of thinking about it.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: So be rigorous, disciplined, focus on detail, and be wildly imaginative, playful uh uh and creative, and go back and forth between the two and find a harmony between them.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most exciting things when I was doing the research for for the book, I was reading Leonardo's notebook.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's giving advice to his students, and he says to his students, basically he says in contemporary language, he basically says, Let your mind go free, which nobody ever said in the Middle Ages.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: He said, uh, you will see uh he said, look at look at uh uh amorphous things like stains of damp on a floor or a wall, or clouds in the sky.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: He says, let your mind go free.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: He said, and you will see in these thousands of things.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: He says, divine landscapes.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Then he says, which you may later reduce to their complete and proper forms.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words, what he's saying is be imaginative, just come up with wacky, crazy things, lots of things.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: He says a thousand things, then step back and analyze okay, which ones are actually useful and what am I going to do with them?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: That ability is like breathing, inhale, exhale.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: But many people are one or the other.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're either always linear, always logical, always needing the evidence, always wanting proof, always wanting certainty, or they're out in la la land dreaming and they never actually get in touch with three-dimensional reality.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: So Leonardo is a great uh role model and advocate for that harmony, for that balance.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the one of the uh really practical things that's resonated with so many people around the world over the years is this is not just a concept, but I I teach in the book a practical method for developing the balance of art and science in your thinking called mind mapping, which I actually used to write the book and all my books.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And mind mapping was originated by my dear friend Tony Buzan, who was also a huge fan of Leonardo da Vinci.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and um the mind mapping.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I I have used that a little bit, you know.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: I I never heard of mind mapping before I got your book many years ago.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I've used it some, you know, over the years.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: And it's been it, you know, I am a person who appreciates this like right brain thinking, but being a physician, I'm very much living left-brained most of the time.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: And the mind mapping was uh kind of a hard thing to do.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I'm used to writing outlines and you know, very linear kind of thinking, you know, and this is a different way of thinking.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: Just say just a few words about how it works.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll tell you how how the mind doesn't work, it doesn't work by outlines.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that is true.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: That is true.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean, because I well, I was so I began my career as an author began when I was working on my master's thesis.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And fortunately, that's right around the time I met Tony because I sat down to write my thesis and I was I was at a progressive master's program where they let me design my own project and my own my my own degree and my own curriculum.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I had to you know defend it, but when they accepted it, but then they wanted a hundred-page minimum thesis of my own thinking about it.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now I had gotten through university with you know honors, but I you know I just was paraphrasing my professors' quotes and joining them with ands, therefore's and indeeds.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, because that's how you you know get A's in college.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: But in this progressive graduate school, they really wanted me, they wanted my thinking, my ideas.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I sat down with this blank sheet of paper and I put a Roman numeral one and nothing followed because I realized later that most people, including me at that time, suffer from what I call premature organization.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're trying to organize your ideas before you even generated them.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I met Tony and he said, get a big sheet of paper, get a whole bunch of colored pens.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: You can see I I have I have them all over my desk here.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have big sheets of paper.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, draw a picture in the center that represents your topic.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now I didn't think I could draw, but he said, just make it a creative doodle.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Then he said, just let your mind go free.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Don't edit.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can do that later.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Just print keywords and more images that come to your mind by association rather than by logic.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: So just let your mind go free and just go for quantity of keywords and imagery without editing at all.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I had nothing to lose.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I did that, and my mind exploded.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I did this, I actually put big flip chart sheets on the on the wall of my flat in London at the time.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I had big colored pants, and I just did this and I filled the whole wall with keywords.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, if you just came in and looked at it, you think, what a total mess.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Except when I stepped back, I remember I took a yellow phosphorescent highlighter.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: I stepped back and then I asked myself the question, what are the most important keywords here?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it was so obvious what they were.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: I put a circle around each of them with a yellow, and then I and then it was very clear.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: What order should I put them in?
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was so obvious.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: They it organized itself.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: So then I made another mind map in clockwise rotation of the ideas and refined the keywords.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And from that, I was able to write my thesis.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote it out longhand, just to give you an idea how long ago this was.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't there wasn't even word processing yet.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote it out longhand, had a friend type it up.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I sent it in to my thesis advisor, he said he'd never seen a student's writing improve so much in the course of his academic career.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: He said, It's as though you found your true voice, which I actually did.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's part of how I became dedicated to helping other people find their true voice.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that's part of why I wrote How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: No, it's great.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: I love the term.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, what is it?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: Pre say it again.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Premature organization.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: Premature organization.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: I like that a lot.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: You'll love this.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've over the years I've had lots of uh medical uh clients, lots of big pharma clients.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Genentech was my client, Merck, Pfizer, and so on and so forth.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd have uh rooms full of physicians or biochemists, and I would say to them, uh, look, uh, I'm gonna diagnose you, but I have a policy, I never give a patient a diagnosis without immediately prescribing the cure.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Say, are you ready?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: They look at me and say, Whatever.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, Okay, you suffer from premature organization.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a pause, they're not sure whether to laugh, and then I say, and premature organization prevents conception.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now they laugh.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, one of them starts laughing, and then the rest of them start laughing when they realize what I'm and then I say, Would you like the cure?
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: I promised you the cure.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to give you a diagnosis that I can't cure.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: They say, Yes, give me the cure.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the cure.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Generate first, then organize.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Generate first, then organize.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the writer's motto.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: The writer's motto is write drunk, revise sober.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you write sober and revise sober, your work is boring and no one wants to read it.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you write drunk and revise drunk, nobody can read it.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you write drunk, revise sober, generate first, then organize, arte, then scienza.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we've gone through uh five of these uh principles.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: So how about number six?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: What is that one?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Number six number six is corporalità, balance the body and the mind.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we know that Leonardo, of course, was an artistic genius.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: People know that he was a scientific genius.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Some people know he was a great musician, that he was a wonderful storyteller, even an accomplished chef.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: But he was also renowned as the strongest man in Florence.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And a great athlete, amazing physique.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: He writes about and gives advice to his students on how to, he says, learn to preserve your own health.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Today that that's uh holistic health, that's uh functional medicine.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: He says, learn to preserve your own health.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: He says, avoid grievous moods and keep your mind cheerful.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we call that psychoneuroimmunology today.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: We know our attitude affects our immune system moment to moment.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's telling his students this 550 years ago.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Eat a healthy, wholesome diet of the freshest foods you can find.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Have a little red red wine with dinner, enjoy dining with your friends, go for a pleasant walk after dinner, drink plenty of water.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: What else do you need to know?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I I had a recent episode where I talked about all those things, you know, and and not not in reference to Leonardo da Vinci, but in reference to things we can learn from the Italians, you know, and um and he was an Italian, so uh, but but yeah, he he had all those ideas 550 years ago.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: And he was also yeah, he was a vegetarian, right?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's there's some con controversy about that.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's not really there's there's one quote uh where he is he's quoted as speaking about uh uh the importance of vegetarianism.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and if there are in his notebooks various shopping lists.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh because you know, in the midst of some of the great works of genius in human history, he's like, pick up some beans and some uh uh potatoes at the market, you know.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and sometimes meat appears on some of those, but we don't know if that was for his students.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So uh oh yeah, it it was it was some noble at the time talks, he says he he writes this note and he says something about our great Leonardo, who is also a vegetarian.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: So so we don't really know for sure, but it wouldn't be surprising because he had a a great love for animals.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, he dissected lots of them.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so but so this corporalità is is about, you know, like so many people are so in their head all the time, you know.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's like that's how they live, they're constantly in their head to the detriment of their body.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: And there's this way of seeing like the intellectual is a like this puny, scrawny person, right?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's a kind of a stereotype.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_02: But Leonardo didn't see it that way, and he didn't live it that way.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: He was uh he was uh an equestrian, is that right?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah, yes, uh uh a fencer, an equestrian.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and the favorite thing I discovered was that he was also a juggler because I I worked my way through graduate school as a professional juggler.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I juggled uh uh live on stage with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones at the Nedworth Rock Festival and Dylan.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so yeah, I was very pleased to discover Leonardo is also a juggler.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: I I also am a little bit of a juggler myself, but uh not not to the point where I could put myself through grad school.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: But uh yeah, I like juggling too.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's an incredible um exercise for you know left left and right part of your body, for you know, I find it to be kind of put you in a little bit of a trance, you know, a little flow state, you know, when you're when you're juggling.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's a it's a wonderful thing.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: So he was a juggler, he was a dancer, he was an equestrian, a fencer, you know.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: So so this is a guy who did not ignore his body as an important part of his, you know, just living life.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: He was so graceful, his physique was so exquisite that Vasari, the first real art historian, writes in the chapter about Leonardo that the people would just turn out to watch him walk down the street because he cuts such a powerful and graceful figure.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: All right, so we're up to number seven.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: What is number seven?
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Connezione, connazione.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Everything connects to everything else.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: So Leonardo was a great systems thinker.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: He looked at things in context.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: He looked at how one thing relates to another thing, to another thing, to another thing, to another thing.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: This brings it all together because uh most unfortunately our society uh uh our institutions are frequently disjointed.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know uh in medicine, uh I'm a huge fan of of the genius and uh brilliance of medicine, and uh I have availed myself of it and do on a regular basis, uh, but it's also uh bizarre that you know I I had some shoulder problems a while ago.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Both shoulders were troubling me, and I went to the uh orthopedic specialist and I asked you know if they could please take a picture of both of them uh because I might need a shoulder replacement and I want to know which one to do first.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and the tech said to me, I'm sorry, we're only allowed to do one body part at a time.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so finding someone who will look at you as a whole system, uh I actually managed to talk them into doing both, uh filming both at once.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: I said, You please talk to the doctor because otherwise I have to come back here twice, use your time twice.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's some insurance thing, but the doctor can overrule it, uh, which fortunately he did.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: But the the paradigm is still one where we don't look at the whole system.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: We and that and so we have lots of atrogenic illness, uh, illnesses caused by the treatment, because we're not looking at the whole the whole person, the whole patient.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and it's the same thing in education.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: We educate different parts and we don't look at the whole person and how to bring forth the the brilliance uh of all the intelligences.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: We still overvalue verbal and mathematical intelligence, and we undervalue emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, spiritual intelligence, which may be the most, especially emotional intelligence, probably the most important human intelligence, certainly for happiness and fulfillment.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we have many people who have great mathematical or verbal intelligence and have not developed their emotional intelligence at all, uh, to our grave detriment.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: So once again, Leonardo intuitively understood that you have to look at things in terms of how one thing affects another in the big picture.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you have to be able to see the details and the gestalt back and forth simultaneously.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: Some people just are big picture thinkers, but they can't help you with details, and that that's a problem.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Other people are just in the details and they miss the big picture.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: But Connezione is is cultivating the ability to see how everything connects to everything else.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and and you know, you've you've talked about a couple of examples like medicine and education, but but the real Da Vincian way of seeing it is seeing like crazy connections, like things that are outside, say, like you find something about medicine by going to a a concert.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know, like yeah, so that I just want to make sure people who are listening get that.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like connecting things like within a field, it's across all of life.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's you got the essence of that's the essence of the of the book, really, in terms of big picture application to our world, is and that's that's probably why you were uh an excellent physician, because the the ability you know it was like average scientists uh are pretty linear, and they're just staying within their field and they're just focusing on the details.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's what apply to a physician, that would apply to a chemist, that would apply to a biologist, that would apply to a physicist.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: But what's fascinating, if you study Nobel, Nobel laureates, almost all of them have some kind of uh in the sciences, almost all of them have a passion for some sort of artistic endeavor.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Almost all of them love nature.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, Murray Gilman, uh the one Nobel laureate I I knew pretty well, uh uh, had an amazing, amazing pre-Columbian art collection, was a birder.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one of his life goals was to try to uh see every single species of bird on the planet.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't make it to all of them, but he did quite a few.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: He loved wine.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh part of how I became friends with him is I organized his wine cellar for him.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's another one of my passions.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I've got to organize some wine cellars and and meet some Nobel laureates.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's if that's how you do it.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: If that's how you do it.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: But we gotta talk more about that.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: So so yeah, you're you're you're saying that these folks, you know, they're they're great scientists, they're great writers, whatever they are, but they have these other passions and interests that somehow infuse their work or inspire their work or or give them ideas, or or yeah.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_02: Connezione.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: And almost, you know, and the other thing to bring it back to corporalità as well as connazione, almost every great genius throughout history got their best ideas while going for a walk.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: In nature.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's harder to find examples of great breakthrough ideas that didn't happen.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, nobody got their best idea in the laboratory just working on experiments and looking at the data.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: They got it in the shower, in the bath, drinking wine, going for a walk in nature.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then, of course, they have the technical ability to take that aha breakthrough moment and put it into the language of science and subject it to peer review and grave uh uh critique.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the breakthrough almost invariably comes in the arte mode, not in the scienza mode.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: And uh uh that you know we could we could think about the neuroscience of that, you know, a little bit, you know, but uh that might be outside the scope of the discussion.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_02: But I I do think that there's something that happens, you know, when you you you almost like turn you turn off that left brain a little bit and and it frees up this much larger part of your brain, much older, much you know, the you you free up the subcortical areas, the limbic system, etc.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: To maybe allow you to have that aha eureka moment.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_02: So so to summarize, you know, the seven uh things we have uh uh and I'm let's say I'm in Italian because that one which is about independent thinking, coming up with your own ideas or understanding where you got your way of thinking, demostrazione, demonstration, dimostrazione, sensazione is the senses, uh smokiness, that haziness, comfort with that, artescienza, so that's your are you know, kind of left brain, right brain, yin yang.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: What is next?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Is is it corporalità?
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Is that the next one?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the body.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like don't forget your body, bring it along, it'll bring you along.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and then connessione is the is the connections at the that's the seventh one.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, grazie, grazie mille.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: So you you put curiosità or curiosity at the top or the first one.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that uh it is the foundational uh one of these principles?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is, you know, if you think about little children, they are the most curious beings on the planet.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're born curious.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's how we come into this world, asking questions.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: And little children also have the most uh uh wild imagination and the most energy.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens to people as they get older, they lose their curiosity, they dampen their imagination, and they lose their energy.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to discover the fountain of youth, reawaken your Koriosita.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't, if you don't have Koriosita, you're not gonna read the book anyway.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: So so so that while passionate curiosity is is the foundational principle, but then it's important to uh to balance it with real critical thinking.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's demostrazione, and and sharpening sensory awareness and embracing the unknown, use your whole brain, cultivate the balance of body and mind, and then look for connections, especially those that other people don't see.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: So your book was published in 1998.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm like it's staggering to think how much the world has changed since 1998, you know, and one of the obviously the most, you know, kind of blatant thing is is the is technology, is the ubiquity of the internet, smartphones, devices, social media, now AI, all of this stuff, you know.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_02: So, so is are the ideas in this book still relevant in this crazy new world we're living in?
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I think absolutely, but I feel like I need to ask that question.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know, but yeah, so why are why are they relevant or maybe even more relevant?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: More relevant, yeah.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're more relevant.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh well, you just so so here's the thing that I I do.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: I regularly actually go around and I read through all the books I've written to see is this holding up, or and I'm you know I'm more critical about anything that I wrote than anything that anybody else wrote.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: So am I how do I feel about this when I go back?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I I yeah, it's it's and I'll tell you why, because I was on uh another podcast and uh podcaster asked me if there if you had a quote, what's your favorite quote from yourself?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, My favorite quote from myself is it's either universal truth or it's BS.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the reason the reason this book is holding up is these are universal truths.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: These will always be these will always be relevant, they'll always be true.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there might be some more timely examples.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't have any stories about AI in there.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so if I was rewriting, I might use some more uh uh contemporary examples, but the underlying truths are really probably even more important now than than when the book was was written.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Leonardo's not going away.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is he will be a hundred years from now, five hundred years from now, people will still be studying, learning, and inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and hopefully reading my book.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: These ideas are universal and timeless.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um so, you know, the people who are out there who who are, you know, like a lot of people are not readers today, but trying to adopt these principles, these these characteristics, you know, curiosity, dimostrazione, etc., etc.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: We we don't need to list them all again.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: But that is timeless.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and that is the key to standing out in a world where everyone is just scrolling.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I so a a good friend of mine wrote this paper recently.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's called something like Empires of the Mind.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about how AI and contemporary media is hijacking people's mind and their ability to think.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: And guy just got it.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: This guy's a brilliant uh world-class uh investment manager.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote a book called The Master Strategist.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in midlife, he just got his master's in neuroscience.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's one of the smartest people I've ever met.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I met him uh in 1999 when he was the head of strategy uh for KPMG in Europe, and he had just read the Da Vinci book and he said, I want you to come and teach my people how to think like Leonardo da Vinci, which I did.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we we've been friends ever since.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if I would say, you know, what principle is most important today, it is demostratione.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is the ability to think for yourself and not just to be uh uh uh locked into completely pre-digested uh posts uh that are uh playing uh off your limbic uh reptilian brain.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it'd be nice if you were using your limbic brain, you're not even getting there.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: You're it's all reptilian, it's all territorial, it's all identity, it's all ego, it's all separateness.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and if you buy into that, if you believe that, you've just you've given up the independence of your thought.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh whether you're left wing or right wing, what if you're if you're a wing, uh you have a thinking problem.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm a radical moderate, which means I actually encourage people to think, let's think this through.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: And let's look at the connazione, the big picture, uh, in terms of what benefits humanity uh most.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's let's go to the core of our Western civilization, which is organized around three key principles truth, beauty, and goodness.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Is it true?
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: Is it beautiful, and is it good?
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: We've kind of lost sight of those core principles.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm uh that's the other, that's the other reason I I hope there'll be a rena even a renaissance of interest in this book and and Leonardo, because when when there's nobody who says, no, I'm against truth, I'm against beauty, I'm against goodness.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you stop and go to first principles, which those are Western, Western uh civilization, uh, gee, maybe we've we've lost our way and how do we get back to it?
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, very well said, and I do agree with you that dimostrazione is really important today.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: Also, curiosità, because you know, like if you're not, you know, if as you said, I and and I don't talk politics on this podcast, but if you're a wing, it means you're not curious.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, not only are you not like thinking clu uh independently, you're not even curious to know about what else is out there, right?
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I I think those those two are really important today, you know, given given the world that we're living in and how we're bombarded with algorithmic media.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just put it there, like that.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_02: So, well, I have really enjoyed this conversation.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate you, you know, taking the time to talk about these ideas, which are timeless.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_02: They really are timeless.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope our listeners have gotten some interesting things and go out and grab your book.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_02: Now, how else can they find you and your ideas?
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the best way is to go to my website, michaelgelb.com.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's G-E-L-B, Michaelgelb.com.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: People like they can sign up for our free newsletter, and there's lots of free stuff on the website.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: There are articles, uh, links to lots of other podcasts.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there's uh videos where uh YouTube's where I'm teaching all sorts of different elements of the seven principles, uh including wine tasting.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, michaelgelb.com.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: If people go to the books page, uh the first one that pops up is how to think like Leonardo, and then they can see the 17 others as well.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: Perfect.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: So before I let you go, uh I ask a question of all of my guests, and that is if you had the ability to put a message on a billboard and that you knew that billboard would be seen by thousands of people every day, what would your message be?
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's so many different things I'd like to put on that, but I think based on our conversation today and the importance of Dimo Strazione, I would put the following quote from Leonardo da Vinci, who said, The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_02: The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_02: All right, I like that.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh a lesson in humility, right there, right?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Michael, Jake, Galb, thank you for being a guest on the show.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's it for today's show.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you very much for joining us today.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_02: I hope you learned something and we piqued your curiosity or curiosità.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: Until next time, so long.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to the Life and How to Live It podcast with Dr.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Rocco.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: If you'd like to book a coaching session with me, simply visit the show notes and schedule a discovery call.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: And if today's episode encouraged you or added value to your life, please subscribe and leave a review.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_02: Remember, life is not a dress rehearsal.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: Until next time, so long.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Just live it live how to live it!