How to Think Like Da Vinci

The 4 steps to greatness

Leonardo da Vinci spoke little Latin, had no formal credentials, and was born out of wedlock. Yet despite the social stigma suffered because of these realities, few names in history carry the weight of his own.

Leonardo went on to become the Renaissance man par excellence, designing everything from bridges to war machines, dissecting human cadavers to mapping the nervous system, and painting some of the most enduring works of art ever produced. His thousands of pages of notes are filled with everything from mechanical sketches to fragmented questions on the movement of water and the structure of the cosmos.

Yet beneath all of Leonardo’s seemingly disjointed accomplishments lies a distinct and coherent approach to learning and thought — a set of habits that shaped the way he engaged with the world. His prolific creative output wasn’t simply the result of natural genius, but of a dynamic and unorthodox approach to the life of the mind.

So what was Leonardo’s secret? And more importantly, how can you cultivate his same habits to create something great of your own?

Here are four of the main factors behind the Renaissance master’s genius — and how you too can think like Leonardo…

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1. Let Curiosity Take the Lead

When it came to curiosity, Leonardo couldn’t restrain himself.

His notebooks are filled with questions about how birds fly, how the tongue of a woodpecker works, and how blood flows through the heart. One of his (many) to-do lists includes tasks like calculating the area of Milan, describing the jaw of a crocodile, and finding out how moonlight reflects off water.

All of these subjects are seemingly unrelated — but to Leonardo, that didn’t matter. He trusted in the power of his curiosity to lead him where he ought to go, and he chose to follow whatever fascinated him in the moment. Although this inevitably led to him building up a massive catalog of unfinished work, the constant probing nevertheless allowed him to open doors that others never even thought to knock on.

In an artist of a lesser caliber, the decision to let curiosity take the lead could easily spiral out of control and turn into aimless distraction. But with Leonardo, he gave his full attention to everything he engaged with, both absorbing the material and finding meaning where others saw none. His boundless curiosity was tempered only by the rigor with which he engaged all the objects of his fascination.

Curiosity by itself, however, can only take you so far. The next major defining feature of Leonardo’s mind came in what he did with the information he absorbed…

2. Synthesize Across Fields

While Leonardo’s curiosity eventually led him to possess polymathic knowledge of a wide range of subjects, his real genius lay in how he made these seemingly unrelated fields converge.

Everything Leonardo studied informed his approach to all that he worked on. The time he spent examining flowing water, for example, helped him depict hair and drapery with striking realism. His dissections and anatomical studies allowed him to “see under the surface” of the people and animals he depicted, enabling him to paint the human form with striking precision and realism.

Human bodies, Leonardo theorized, are a microcosm of the created world

Leonardo’s approach reflected his strongly held belief that nature operated by patterns, and that the study of one system could often clarify another. The movement of blood through a heart might resemble the way water moves around a rock. The shape of a leaf, on the other hand, might suggest something about the design of a propeller.

This is why his notebooks often show unrelated studies side by side, like a drawing of human musculature next to a pulley system, or a plant stem next to the axle of a cart. The seeming juxtaposition of these subjects, however, isn’t a juxtaposition at all — it’s rather a reflection of the extreme degree of synthesis that defined Leonardo’s work. In fact, his ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated fields is arguably the defining characteristic of his creative genius.

But while synthesizing different fields of knowledge — even the seemingly “useless” ones — was what made Leonardo a great artist, it’s an incredibly difficult thing to do.

That’s why Leonardo developed his next habit of the mind, a much more practical one, to transform the flow of his creativity from a stream into a torrent…