Lessons - How To Unlock Your Inner Polymath (And Think Like Leonardo da Vinci)

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. Today I'm going to teach you how to be like Leonardo da Vinci. Now, I'm calling him Leonardo da Vinci because that's the name that everybody knows him by, but just so you know going forward I'll call him Leonardo because da Vinci in Florentine time was actually an indicator of birthplace, not the actual family name, which is actually a very common misconception. So Leonardo, known as Leonardo da Vinci, what is his real secret to being so successful and how can we learn some things from him? And why do we have to learn things from him? Well, if you think about it, he was incredible at biology, science, astronomy, art. There was so many different things that he took on successfully. But let's imagine for a second that Leonardo had only chosen to be a painter. He did not have any curiosity for science or anatomy or engineering. See, these are the things that we wouldn't have had. So we wouldn't have had his, what's called a helical air screw, which is a sketch that laid the groundwork for the modern helicopter, basically his exploration of the human body that led to these pioneering insights into the circulatory system and the detailed structure of muscles and bones it would have never been done at least not by him. The Vitruvian man would have never been created. This is that iconic picture of a man that is the fusion of art and science and the study of human proportions. His early tank designs and his visionary concept of concentrated solar power wouldn't have been discovered. See, when I was doing research into Leonardo da Vinci, him as a polymath, this really hit me. He was like really the ultimate renaissance man. And 500 years later, he still inspires people. Because curiosity still really inspires me. And he shows why expanding our perspective unlocks this incredible level of creativity. Because most peers way back when Da Vinci, excuse me, Leonardo was an artist was focused on painting and a very comparable society to the type of society we have now where everybody is focused on one thing. Most other artists, painters way back then were focused on painting every single day. This was not how Leonardo operated. See, his interests, the best way to describe it, the analogy is a messy spider web. They span art, anatomy, flight, botany, geology, engineering, everything. See, he had this obsession de jour. He just followed his curiosity every single day. And at his core was this insatiable hunger to understand the world and to push boundaries. See, he didn't just paint the Mona Lisa and call it a day. He crossed disciplines like a mad scientist. He mixed optics, biology and art to pioneer new techniques with light and perspective. He studied bird flight to inspire his own flying machines. And like you and me, he lived in a world of intense specialization. Everybody specializes, everybody niches down, everybody focuses on that one thing, which it works to a degree. But he knew creativity compounds went all these different worlds collide. And we're so focused by traditional education, by our parents, by whatever we think is right, to really narrow down on a niche. You think about specializations, even in school, we're supposed to specialize. As a doctor, as a lawyer, we're told to specialize in our career, we're specializing because how else do you get ahead, right? But that works again to an extent. But Leonardo's cross pollinating method really shows another way that I don't think many people explore because innovation, it thrives in this serendipitous collision of ideas. And when we silo our knowledge, and when we silo other people's knowledge into these sub fields, we really choke out innovation. So I want to talk about Leonardo's this boundary blurring approach that he took to life. Some of my personal research on how he combined all these different things, all these different studies, all these different parts of the world into what he created. And I also want to go down some historical pathways as we can always learn from past teachers because again, history doesn't, history is not new and all the things that we're trying to discover right now and learn from and apply to our own lives, it's already been figured out. So you'll see Leonardo will really teach us by the end of this video, and end of this podcast if you're listening to it, how to expand our perspectives, synthesize ideas and make the most of our time on this earth and we're going to dive into this polymath world. So let's talk about mastering multiple domains. See, again, most Renaissance artists at the time, they hold up in their studios all day long, they were honing a single craft. And while all of Leonardo's peers focus on a single speciality, he bridged art, science, engineering. For example, the flying machines that he created, he visualized these, he designed musical instruments, he studied the optics, drew connections to painting with light and shadow, he sketched biological systems like the human embryo and the cardiovascular anatomy. He analyzed systems like turbulent water flows and principles of friction. He designed functional machines and prototypes from armoured vehicles to calculators. He overcame the specialist generalist paradox and what this is, it's a paradox that was noted by the management scholar, Ikujiru Nonaka, and it goes something like this. The specialist without some kind of general contextual knowledge falls prey to the narrowness and the sterility of the ivory tower and the generalist without specialized knowledge readily falls into dilatantism. So you can see that and dilatantism just means like if you don't have specialized knowledge, it's really a better word, maybe amateurism, a lack of a level of significant skill associated because again, you're just generalized across all these different fields like Jack of all trades. Leonardo, he avoided both by pursuing expertise across tons of different fields while connecting the dots between them. So for example, he studied art representing the human form and then learned anatomy itself through dissection. He brought an engineer's mindset to painting by pioneering scientific methods for mixing pigments and using all these creative different perspectives. There is a renaissance historian, Morris Bishop, and he really understood that no man has ever united so many aspects of the human endeavor or worked so preservingly upon the deeper problems of science, art, and thought than Leonardo da Vinci. Art alone would never have birthed the groundbreaking innovations and ideas that he had. He had to trespass into these other domains. He knew that if you blend enough puzzle pieces, you can finally see the big picture. And it's not just ad hoc. There's an actual process to this and it's called combinatorial creativity. And this is really where breakthroughs come from. So if you have ever heard of these genius Eureka moments and we associate these genius Eureka moments to innate creative gifts, meaning that we assume that if we don't have this innate incredible creativity, we can't have this genius Eureka moment, but the truth is far more interesting. So these are all breakthroughs usually come from combining existing ideas from different fields. This is what Leonardo did. This is what polymaths do. This is what leads to these breakthroughs. This is what creativity scholars call combinatorial creativity. See intuitively Leonardo was brilliant at synthesizing insights across disciplines. He wove together anatomy and art to draw. He sketches, he blended optics with painting to pioneer artistic methods. He crossed his artistic training with engineering to again, these inventions, calculator, helicopter. Unlike artists with laser focus, he let his mind wander across fields and he collected all these different dots. He connected dots, others missed. And then this formed these new creative constellation. Innovation scholars say that these unlikely collisions between all these diverse concepts and skills are the key to these massive creative leaps in these Eureka moments. So just like Picasso, merged African sculpture styles with Western painting to pioneer Cubus, this is another example of these combinations that lead to these Eureka moments. As the astrophysicist Adam Frank wrote, insights often come from the combination of multiple ideas molded together in just the right way. The mixing of ideas from different disciplines in quarters is exactly what generates new insights. Interestingly enough though, these same scholars trace legendary Eureka moments back to these kinds of combinatorial creative leaps. And Leonardo just kept making these leaps intuitively, but we can actually cultivate this ability systematically. It's just how we program our brain to think. There's various schools of thought on how to process this, but one particular example, there's two Harvard innovation experts, Karim Lacanee and Afoso Ojomo, they advocate for developing cellular network thinking. So linking ideas across cells or buckets of knowledge that to the laymen to the outside eye, they appear disconnected programs like machine learning can also uncover all these surprising connections between ideas and data points across fields, obviously because they can process massive amounts of data at a time, but we can still train our brain to look across different disciplines for these moments. And when you apply either a computer to analyze data across fields or we just think that way all the time, we replicate and practice this Leonardo combinatorial creativity thought process. In a couple of minutes, I'm going to go through a few more things and examples of polymaths, but then I'll give you a few more tips on how to implement this thinking style basically starting tomorrow in your own life. Now just to sort of prove what I'm speaking about, Leonardo was not the only polymath. He wasn't the only one that was focused on dissolving all these boundaries between fields. There's a few other polymaths that fuse these insights across discipline. And now that we go through, as you can see, there's a pattern here, Johannes Kepler was an astronomer. He crossed physics and optics to revolutionize understanding planetary motion. He discovered that planets move in ellipses rather than perfect circles, Benjamin Franklin. He brought an inventor's curiosity and included politics, physics, and more into his mental bank. And he experimented with electricity and he invented the lightning rod and he helped draft the declaration of independence, like tons of different things that he's able to do when you combine all of these different fields into your brain. Buckminster Fuller, he combined engineering and architectural design to create the geodesic dome and a whole bunch of other different inventions. Maria, Gatana, Agnesi, mastered both higher math and classical language, which forged connections between those two fields, Mary Curie, but she drew insights from her side hobbies, like playing the piano to make tons of creative leaps in her pioneering physics and chemistry research. See, each of these great minds, and we know some of these, they've accomplished incredible things. They stepped outside their core expertise to gather this mosaic of all these different pieces. And then together, the fragments formed these new creative holes. See, their interdisciplinary creativity still illuminates the path forward today, no matter how deep our expertise crossing into these new worlds expands our perspectives. Another way to frame this and to help you understand it, you need to learn how to develop T-shape thinking and to become a T-shape thinker. And I'll explain what that means, Leonardo learned by intuitively connecting insights across all these different fields, but how do we actually cultivate these cross disciplinary skills intentionally? Well, this is where T-shape thinking comes into play and this is actually a very popular expression for what we're talking about today. And it's becoming more and more popular to look for when you're hiring people for jobs and it becomes more and more popular to look for when you're hiring people for jobs. You'll hear, oh, is he actually a T-shape marketer is a very popular term and think about it like this. So the vertical line of the T represents the depth in one field, so you're going deep in one field. And then the horizontal line symbolizes synthesizing knowledge across all these different fields. And that's the way you have to think. You have to have this generalist plus specialist ability. And the generalist, you can tie those dots together to become specialists in multiple different verticals. Here's a few other habits that I think you should try out in incorporating to your own life to start to think like whether or not it be a polymath, a combinatorial creative individual, a T-shaped individual, these are just good thinking habits. So you want to make learning across all these diverse fields a lifelong endeavor. This is not something that's going to end or even sometimes begin with formal education. You have to let curiosity guide you. So I don't care what job you're in, I don't care what you're doing. You're constantly looking for ways to expand basically your comfort zone intellectually. Now, once you've come to terms with this is how I'm going to think going forward, you start to look for these underlying universal patterns and principles across disciplines. You start to look for commonalities in design thinking, systems, cycles, storytelling. And you start to learn by doing a long side studying. So you take up hobbies very different from your day job. For example, personally, piano has taught me very useful skills and there's useful skills that I would have never learned just reading books or doing my job, whatever it is. You start to observe how systems work across these different fields. You start to study diverse phenomena in nature, in business, society, technology. You start to see patterns if you really start to pay attention. And you start to have these open-ended conversations with people that are modern polymass. Again, upgrade your network. It's so important, but you're going to see people that do this effectively. You know, there's people in your life that have mastered their domain and they could be known for something. But they're the people that if you speak to about any topic, they have a smart, educated opinion. And you start to hear hints of them tying it back to other domain and they draw analogies and they draw context in ways that I don't know how else to describe it. It just feels like their knowledge bank is endless. Those people are modern polymass, even if they don't know that they are, but they're individuals that think across different disciplines and notice these different trends, these different similarities. And these are the people that you should surround yourself with. But also speak about how they avoid information silos and then turn your personal interests into useful data points that can help you improve and inform your perspective. So let passions like painting or music or studying nature. Let it inform your perspective on the world, on your interactions, on how you communicate, on how you make money, on how you view politics, on how you view religion, on how you view your personal meaning of life, on success, on fulfillment, on happiness. You let all these things just learn through osmosis is the best way I can put it. Put yourself into circumstances and in front of information that constantly challenge and widen your perspective. Also, you want to focus on mental flexibility to be able to switch between different modes of thinking. So you have to be able to dive into details and for a variety of reasons on whatever it is you're studying, but you also have to have the ability to zoom out for a big picture view of whatever it is you're trying to learn more about. Another good way to sort of sharpen your polymath mindset is to host or listen into debate ideas and debate sessions from all these different worlds. You start to get thoughts colliding, you'll start to expand your knowledge network. You're going to bring new perspectives and points of view in and people with new mental models into your life. Remember this polymath combinatorial thinking t-shaped mindset, it keeps you agile as the world changes. So you combine depth with interdisciplinary breath and together they unlock this very powerful mind and a ton of creativity. A couple more things, just to take home with you if you want to try these out. To maintain an anti-library of books on unfamiliar topics so you can browse, you will hear some of the smartest people in the world when they ask what their favorite book is. For example, as a business leader, they will name a book that is a biography of somebody or a religious text or a text on strategy or it could be a text completely outside the realm of business. But you can start to see how the person thinks. They look for things outside of what their core competency is. You can set time aside to connect with people and just talk through ideas. This is time back to the debate concept but maybe it's not a formalized debate. But your hobbies and your past times can include time when you sit down and just converse and chat with people and brainstorm and think tank and mastermind. If you are running a business, have different teams in different parts of your company exchange progress, insights, ideas so that your business also includes this combinatorial t-shaped mindset. Go to conferences and different industries, gather fresh perspectives. This is a great way to learn new things. Consume news from people that speak about mental models, that speak about diverse thinking. Consume news and social media content and wherever you get your content from people that have different points of view, from leaders in different fields. If you are trying to do some problem solving in your business, use lateral thinking techniques to generate ideas without too many constraints. You can sketch out concept maps showing how ideas relate across domains. Again, network is key. Bring people into your life that do think this way. When you regularly cross train these interdisciplinary muscles, you'll expand the creativity capabilities you have over time. You perceive more dots and you better connect with them easier when you are perpetually curious. Remember, combinatorial thinking, polymath thinking, t-shaped thinking is the art of mixing and matching different elements to create something new and useful. It helps us solve problems, it helps us generate insights on these creativity. But how can we improve and measure it? This is one tool that you can use. I call it the combination score and the idea is that we have a score that reflects how diverse and effective our combinations are in our thinking processes. So a lot of factors that are out of our control, but a lot of our thinking score depends on us. So our habits, our daily habits, can raise or lower our score. So you can raise your score by increasing variety. So you're exploring elements from all these different domains, you're always thinking about how do I basically raise my score, as well as improving effectiveness. So evaluating your combinations for originality, usefulness and value, and just assign an arbitrary number. It's not a hard and fast framework, but it will help you think in the right mindset. And then you'll lower your score by reducing variety, so you're sticking to elements and learning from things in your same domain or lowering effectiveness. So ignoring your combinations for originality, usefulness and value, and just write down your score in terms of activities, which pushed you one way or the other throughout a day, and then you will start to see in a day in the life of which way to use skew. How is your thinking going in the right direction or not? Because those who really master combinatorial thinking, they do this all the time. They seek variety in the elements of learning that they take in every single day. They select relevant and interesting learning elements and they produce effective and creative combinations. They have a high combination score, and it's something that you may have to learn how to do. But once you start thinking this way and incorporating these things into your life, you'll notice that you'll start to see dots across all these different disciplines, which is the goal, which makes you a stronger thinker. So remember the combination score rule when making a combination, when thinking about what to study, choose the option with the highest score. Ask yourself, where is my variety in effectiveness, the greatest, and go there? Why is this so important? Outside of just being smarter, why is this so important? Outside of just thinking differently? Because the winds of change are blowing. See, we are truly entering a new renaissance. We are fusing text exponential rise with humanity's ancient creative spirit, AI, gene editing, quantum science. These wild frontiers are actually happening as we speak, and we are as a society no longer constrained by what's merely possible, the impossible is possible. Even though you'll watch this video, you'll listen to this podcast, and many of us will try and start to adopt some of these principles, the people that really think differently. They're truly rare. This video is for the point 0.01%. Because breaking free of over specialization, it means swimming against the tide. It means going against how we were raised. But I would argue that it's worth it, because in the future, combinatorial thinking will be more of a need to have than a nice to have. This is also how we fight back against AI, and as more minds expand, mental walls will crumble. Societies, mental walls will crumble, and we will have another renaissance. Like Leonardo, they will connect arts and sciences, they'll blur cognitive boundaries, and they'll let new ideas flourish. But people that take this seriously, that think this way. Because great collaboration, ideas, they really do await. Across globally, if we break free of siloed thinking, Leonardo showed us how knowledge across disciplines amplifies creativity, connecting different domain-breed revelations. His genius drew from exploring broadly, let's do the same, and expand our perspectives.