Discovering how to think like history's greatest minds

Michael Gelb is an author and management consultant who conducts seminars on creative thinking and leadership. He has written several best-selling books, including "How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci" and "Discover Your Genius: How to Think Like History’s Ten Most Revolutionary Minds". Ljubljana Life editor William G. Wagner interviewed Mr. Gelb in August at the New Moment Ideas Campus in Piran, Slovenia.

Yes, and also the time. And having said that, we can't explain him even with the amazing ferment of the renaissance, even with the unleashing of pent-up curiosities that had been held in check for the previous thousand years. I'm always hesitant to give simplistic answers about complex systems, and who knows? God knows and maybe God himself is also miffed! But of all the various factors, you have the invention of the printing press: when Leonardo was born, there were only a handful of printed books in Europe, but when he died, there were over 15 million. You had the invention of mass-manufacturing techniques for paper and pencil in 1500, so people could learn to read and write. You had Brunelleschi's effectively changing the concept of space, in the previous generation. Alberti, writing on perspective. The birth, or rebirth, of the notion of the individual. If you take the contrast of any of the great gothic cathedrals, where the individual is incidental, and Brunelleschi's dome, where you are the center of the universe, it's an amazing symbol of the shift in consciousness of the renaissance. And you see the same in Leonardo's famous canon of proportion figure, and Michaelangelo's David. The message is that the power is in you. The divine power, which used to be something that you, as an individual, could only get to indirectly through intercession after intercession, now all of a sudden, it is in you.

But why did all that happen when it did? Leonardo is not just a person of the renaissance, he is a person of all time, representing an archetype of human potential. But what caused the Renaissance?. Well, one of the key points of leverage has got to be the plague, which broke down the belief that all problems could be solved by praying harder, and by greater fealty to the church. That had been the answer to crises, famine, and war for a thousand years. And what were the great inventions and discoveries in Europe for those thousand years? Pretty slim… aside from the windmill and lots of really effective torture equipment. And then all of a sudden there is this amazing explosion of originality and creativity in art, architecture, and science.

Well, my notion is that the plague was an equal opportunity killer. It killed bishops and clerics and nobles along with carpenters and laborers and street walkers. No matter how hard you prayed, you died in a visible, gross, and hideous fashion. A third to half of the population was wiped out. Think about that as something to set the stage for people to maybe question the way things had been, and to be possibly open to the notion of, for example, doing an anatomical dissection, because you might actually learn something about how the body works that might allow you to prevent such a thing. Or being more open to the idea of exploration. It's not a coincidence that Columbus, Magellan, all happened right around that same time. The telescope, the microscope, even the Queen (in chess) got her modern powers at the time of the renaissance. She could only move one square at a time prior to the renaissance. So there's this explosion of greater possibility, and then there are these extreme, almost inexplicable confluences of genius in Western history. The Greeks: Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, and many more, and the renaissance: Brunelleschi, Donatello, Alberti, Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Rafael, Machiavelli, and then, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Ben Franklin. These great confluences of genius have changed history forever, and are the dominant ideas in the world today. With all the ferment and change and everything we've been going through, with the speed of communication and the internet and the blending of East and West, the dominant institutions of the world are largely constructed of the mental models born of those three confluences of genius.

And - just to balance what Edward, whom I respect a lot, had to say about that, the (ancient Greek) model, nevertheless holds within it the orientation to question itself, and expand itself, and be open to and study and learn about and integrate other options, which is part of what I love about the virtues of those great geniuses. Now, has some of what's been taken from them been put into a box from which we need to escape, laterally and with six thinking hats and otherwise, you bet it has. But Edward challenges Socrates and Plato in terms that we got from Socrates and Plato!

I'm a big student of so-called Eastern disciplines. I'm a Daoist. I'm an Aikidoist. My deepest studies were in Sufism, Buddhism, and Hinduism - the wisdom traditions of the East. But nevertheless, we are not going in mass numbers to universities in India or China or Japan. They are coming to us (laughter)! And I think what's evolving, and again, here is Leonardo from 500 years ago who is a symbol of it, since he liked things that were really non-linear. Even though he has "obstinate rigor", amazing attention to detail, and discipline and logic, those 18 pages (of Leonardo's notes) that Bill Gates bought for $30.8 million, were Leonardo's proof that the fossilized seashells in the mountains outside of Milan were not placed there by the biblical flood. And he makes the case for what effectively is the beginning of modern geology and modern scientific thinking. So Leonardo was disciplined, scientific, rigorous, and logical - and he also effectively gave birth to what we now call creative thinking. He said to look at stains of dampness and clouds in the sky and patterns of smoke that come from a dying fire, and let your mind go free. He said that you will see in these an infinity of things - divine landscapes, which you may then reduce to their complete and proper forms. Now, for a thousand years during the middle ages, nobody said "let your mind go free". But here's Leonardo who writes it in his notebook.

We have about 5,500. It is estimated that he wrote double that, but the rest has been lost, which is amazing. But this notion of using these two modes is part of why Leonardo is revered, not just in the West but in the East. The Mona Lisa is the most recognized icon in China, Japan, and on the planet. It is the Western equivalent of the Chinese symbol of yin and yang, because what it says is "integrate contrasting modalities": logic and imagination, East and West, male and female, light and dark, day and night -- the tension of the opposites. The weakness in most people's thinking is that they're locked in one mode. Either they're all over the place with ideas and can't be ordered and logical and have trouble getting anything done, or they're overly ordered and logical and they rarely think of anything new. This comes back to what Edward does. He makes a very strong logical case for the value of non-linear thinking.

I sure do. In "How to Think Like Leonardo" I posit this notion of a modern renaissance man or woman. The old notion of a renaissance man was somebody who was balanced in terms of their intellectual pursuits. The idea of a Liberal Arts education was to train people to be renaissance individuals. I think that's still valid, but now I would add to it the notion that we must also integrate the best of East and West, and be computer literate and at home on the world wide web, and we must move beyond the various "isms" that separate and dehumanize: racism, sexism, nationalism, etc. That's my call for the notion of a modern renaissance person.

Yes. You have to be mentally literate. You have to know about your brain, your endowment, how it operates, different modes of thinking, how to apply them. That's another section in "How to Think Like Leonardo".

Well I think there are an amazing amount of creative people. We have these "super geniuses" who are gifted at a level beyond even those we normally call geniuses. That's what I was fascinated by. The book I wrote after "How to Think Like Leonardo" is called "Discover your Genius: How to Think like History's 10 Most Revolutionary Minds", and I was looking for who are those super geniuses who changed the way we all look at the world. You can't reduce them to a cultural explanation, or what their mother did or their father did. There's something inexplicable about the fact that Leonardo was the strongest man in Florence, renounced for his grace, beauty, and poise, gifted musically, charming, funny, and a great story-teller, a talented chef, and oh by the way, one of the handful of the very greatest artists of all time, and one of the leading scientists and mathematicians of his day.

Plato, Brunelleschi, Columbus, Copernicus, Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Gandhi, and Einstein.

[Laughter] He probably would be living in a space station on another planet that he had crafted for us and made viable.

[Laughter] (211)…Well, I've got to say something about rocket scientists because I've worked with biochemists at Merck who are incredibly brilliant people. When I was working with them they were developing a drug to effectively manage asthma. Any one of them could win the Nobel Prize, they are really super, super smart. But somebody made a comment once during an introduction in my seminar that "so and so is no rocket scientist". So all these super sharp biochemists looked at each other and they said "rocket science?! Please! What a lowly form of science!" [Laughter]. So they use the term "rocket scientist" as a pejorative.

But I think that Leonardo is alive. His spirit and his influence are alive more so now than ever. The Leonardo bridge was just built in Norway by my friend Vebjørn Sand, who saw the sketch that Leonardo did for the Sultan of Turkey in 1502.

He made the bridge! It crosses from Norway into Sweden. It looks very futuristic, it was featured in Time magazine. It's the first public works project built on a Da Vinci design. It was unveiled in 2001. He wants to do one on every continent. The Leonardo Horse - his clay, 24 foot high model that was destroyed by invading French troops on September 10^th, 1499, was resurrected in Milan on September 10^th, 1999, exactly 500 years from the day it was destroyed. There are now replicas of the horse in Vinci, in Allentown Pennsylvania, and in Grand Rapids Michigan. The number one best selling mystery novel in the US is based on Da Vinci: The Da Vinci Code. "How to Think Like Leonardo" is also in 18 languages, including Slovenian.

He would be doing what I guide people to do in my book, which is based on what he did. Seriously, the third principle for thinking like Leonardo is Sensazione, sharpening all your senses. Five hundred years ago, in Tuscany, Leonardo wrote that the average person "looks without seeing, hears without listening, touches without feeling, breathes in without awareness of aroma or fragrance, eats without tasting, and talks without thinking". That was 500 years ago in Tuscany! He wrote that the five senses are the "ministers of the soul". So, even by far now more than in Leonardo's day, we need to have a disciplined program of sensory enrichment. A big part of the popularity of the book are the practical exercises for doing that, and they work. And the other good news is that now, more than in Leonardo's time, you can have access to the great sensory treasures of the world. You can get the greatest music of the world, of every tradition, at your fingertips. You can have the cuisines of the world. You can have the art of the world. The literature of the world. It's all available -- an unbelievable treasure-trove of inspiration, richness, genius, is available to you at the touch of your finger. But you have to press the right button.

That's the first principle for thinking like Leonardo, curiosita. His principles are more relevant now, perhaps than they were even when he was applying them, because we need them even more. The point that Bob made was accurate, because if you don't have a renaissance program for yourself, you will be a citizen of ‘McWorld’ [laughter]. You will be driven down by the pressure of the lowest common denominator. By advertising! A lot of advertising is some of the best art in our global culture now, with some of the greatest creativity, and the high point is phenomenal. But the low point of it, which is much more dominant, drives gross materialism, greed, disrespect -- values that most people would not say they hold, yet unconsciously they take it in. If you're not consciously directing your path, you will be hypnotized.

Well, I think there are different creative styles. I think the underlying principles are the same. Creativity manifests in different modes, so what you might see in music, art, and sports are different manifestations of creativity. You might see this in a meeting in a big corporation where they are trying to figure out a new marketing program, and are trying to bring their people all together. The essence of it is this pulsation between generation and organization, between expansion and contraction. There is no creativity without the integration of generation and organization. That's the simplest way to understand the thing that is present in anything that is ultimately creative. New possibilities arise, and you have a range of different approaches for generating those possibilities. DeBono and others have different ways of inspiring people to generate and be more idea productive. And then for anything to happen with any of those ideas, you have to organize and implement. There's a time to generate, and there's a time to organize and implement. And part of being good at this is knowing which is the right time!

Some people are better implementers, some people are better generators. My vision is to use Leonardo as a model for balance. So if you're a better implementer -- learn to generate. If you're a better generator -- learn to implement. If you're a leader -- learn to create balanced teams between generators and implementers. And there are other models and different elements in this process. Some people are just good at framing the problem. They can't implement and they can't generate -- they just frame the problem. Other people are good at conducting the research you need so that you can make a more informed decision about the problem. Some people are good at looking at the benefits of an idea, and some people are good at looking at the weaknesses of it. All of those things are important in a creative process. But they still generally fall into a yin or yang category, and having that balance as an individual or as a group or society may be the simplest way we can talk about these complexities and be true to what's really happening.

He's been criticized a lot for his time management, getting too involved in too many different things and leaving things unfinished, but I think it's because he was interested in the pure creation -- once he could see it how it could go through to the end, he didn't necessarily feel he had to bother with it. He was questing for the highest truth of "how does it all work". My insight into Leonardo is that -- people say he was competing with Michaelangelo and other great minds of the time -- no, he was competing with God! That's why he left a lot of things unfinished [laughter]! It's just like Einstein. Someone asked him "what theory are you working on now". He said "I don't work on theories -- I want to know the mind of God -- everything else is just details".

That's the transcendent genius in Leonardo's work. Why does the Mona Lisa fascinate people around the world, hundreds of years later? There are tons of Last Suppers painted -- why is his so special? Every time you look at it you see something new. There's endless depth and richness and mystery. There's always a new question. That's one of the things that characterizes really great art -- there is something about the secret of existence. There is some transcendent wisdom in the music of Mozart. Can you reduce it to some particular formula? Probably not. But there is significant research that says you can solve problems better when you listen to Mozart's music. So just having the music around might help.

In chapter 3 of "How to Think Like Leonardo", there is a description of designing a more creative environment in a workplace. I get my clients to play Mozart in the workplace. I get them to have colored pens and big flip charts to do mindmapping. I have juggling balls around the place so that they are more likely to play and be more open to making mistakes, which is what I teach them.

The idea that anything individual takes away from professionalism, and that everybody has to be in a uniform space, without any opportunity for self-expression. Especially spaces where people are cut off, where they are just in their own separate box, where they are just looking at a computer screen all day, where they are basically in a dehumanized environment where they are viewed as machines, not beings with a soul. I don't think that's very conducive to creativity, but it's still very common. That's why Dilbert is so popular. He reflects the reality that a lot of people still face.