Leadership: In Turbulent Times

✒️ Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin | 📖 Published: 2018 | 🗓 Read: February 21, 2021 | 📄 Pages: 497

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Through the study of four prominent U.S. presidents, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, we discover that these leaders have situated resilience, and the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration.

2. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership.

3. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership.

🎨 Impressions

• Each president likes to learn a different way, utilizing the best way to retain information.

• Mastery of language is important. It's not about the expansiveness of one's vocabulary, but how successfully they use language and concepts to help people understand an idea.

• Curiosity can be measured by the number of questions you ask. All these presidents asked questions and surrounded themselves with people who knew the answers.

How I Discovered It

Through Ryan Holiday's Reading Newsletter. This book was his favorite of 2020.

Who Should Read It?

Anyone who wants to understand and develop leadership skills. The last part of the book a case study on leadership and how each president managed their way through the situation. These are invaluable.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

• My biggest takeaway is that everyone experiences hardships and setbacks. It's how you rise above them that's important.

• Leadership is a learned behavior. Continually put yourself in situations to learn, grow the necessary skills, and feed your ambition.

• Reflection is an important part of life. It allows you to see the whole picture and illuminates blind spots or opportunities Make time for it in your life and you will grow as a person.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

• "Vision without execution is hallucination."

• "While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die."

• "True creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy. A great painter depicts both."

Notable Highlights

Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth. More important than what happened to them was how they responded to these reversals, how they managed in various ways to put themselves back together, how these watershed experiences at first impeded, then deepened, and finally and decisively molded their leadership.

“It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed,” Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams in the midst of the American Revolution, suggesting that “the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” Abraham Lincoln said, “without it nothing can succeed.” Such a leader is inseparably linked to the people. Such leadership is a mirror in which the people see their collective reflection.

While Lincoln’s ambition was as central to his makeup as his backbone, it was, almost from the start, two-fold. It was not simply for himself; it was for the people he hoped to lead. He wanted to distinguish himself in their eyes. The sense of community was central to the master dream of his life—the desire to accomplish deeds that would gain the lasting respect of his fellow men.

“When he appeared in Company,” another friend recalled, “the boys would gather & cluster around him to hear him talk.” With kindness, playfulness, wit, and wisdom, he would explain “things hard for us to understand by stories—maxims—tales and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force & bearing of what he said.” He understood early on that concrete examples and stories provided the best vehicles for teaching.

His stories often had a point—a moral along the lines of one of his favorite books, Aesop’s Fables—but sometimes they were simply funny tales that he had heard and would retell with animation. When he began to speak, his face, the natural contours of which gave off a sorrowful aspect, would light up with a transforming “winning smile.” And when he reached the end of his story, he would laugh with such heartiness that soon everyone was laughing with him.

Some leaders learn by writing, others by reading, still others by listening. Lincoln preferred reading aloud in the presence of others. “When I read aloud,” Lincoln later explained, “two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better.”

Yet, if melancholy was part of his nature, so, too, was the life-affirming humor that allowed him to perceive what was funny or ludicrous in life, lightening his despair and fortifying his will.

From this unprepossessing start, how was Lincoln able to establish himself so quickly in the minds of the residents that within eight months they encouraged him to run for a seat in the state legislature? The answer, one local man explained, lay in Lincoln’s sociability, his “open—candid—obliging & honest” good nature. “Everybody loved him.” He would help travelers whose carriages were mired in mud; he volunteered to chop wood for widows; he was ever ready to lend a “spontaneous, unobtrusive” hand. Almost anyone who had contact with him in the little community spoke of his kindness, generosity, intelligence, humor, humility, and his striking, original character.

In this first foray into politics, Lincoln also pledged that if his opinions on any subject turned out to be erroneous, he stood “ready to renounce them.” With this commitment, Lincoln revealed early on a quality that would characterize his leadership for the rest of his life—a willingness to acknowledge errors and learn from his mistakes.

While uncertain about his prospects in this first election, Lincoln made it clear that failure did not intimidate him. Should he lose, he had said when declaring his intention to run, he had been “too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.” And yet, he forewarned, only after being defeated “some 5 or 6 times” would he deem it “a disgrace” and be certain “never to try it again.” So, along with the uncertainty of whether his ambition would be realized was the promise of resilience.

A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln’s repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.

“Get the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice two decades later. “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

“They say I tell a great many stories,” Lincoln told a friend. “I reckon I do; but I have learned from long experience that plain people, take them as they run, are more easily influenced through the medium of a broad and humorous illustration than any other way.”

Their choice signified not only their deference to Lincoln’s language skills and his mastery of parliamentary procedure, but what became known as his “crowning gift of political diagnosis”—his ability to intuit the feelings and intentions of his fellow Whigs and the opposing Democrats as well. After silently considering his colleagues’ strategy and opinions, he would stand and simply say: “From your talk, I gather the Democrats will do so and so.” If we want “to checkmate them,” here are the maneuvers we should take in the days that follow. So clear was his recommended course of action that “his listeners wondered why they had not seen it that way themselves.” It was “his thorough knowledge of human nature,” one fellow legislator observed, that “made him an overmatch for his compeers and for any man that I have ever known.”

The great bulwark against a potential dictator is an informed people “attached to the government and laws.” This argument takes Lincoln back to his first statement to the people of Sangamon County when he spoke of education as the cornerstone of democracy. Why is education so central? Because, as he said then, every citizen must be able to read history to “appreciate the value of our free institutions.”

Still in his twenties, Abraham Lincoln had already developed a conception of leadership based upon the leader’s shared understanding of his followers’ needs for liberty, equality, and opportunity. In less than half a dozen years, seemingly from nothing and from nowhere, he had risen to become a respected leader in the state legislature, a central figure in the fight for internal improvements, an instrumental force behind the planting of the new capital, and a practicing lawyer.

The boss also understood that Roosevelt had the means to contribute to his own campaign. So while Lincoln, as he conceded in his opening statement, had “no wealthy or popular relations” to recommend him, it was precisely those relations and that wealth that brought young Roosevelt to the attention of the Republican boss.

“I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened.”

**Note:** Quote about opportunity.

The first success, he argues, belongs to the man “who has in him the natural power to do what no one else can do, and what no amount of training, no perseverance or will power, will enable an ordinary man to do.” ... The second and more common type of success, he maintains, is not dependent on such unique inborn attributes, but on a man’s ability to develop ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree through ambition and the application of hard, sustained work. Unlike genius, which can inspire, but not educate, self-made success is democratic, “open to the average man of sound body and fair mind, who has no remarkable mental or physical attributes,” but who enlarges each of those attributes to the maximum degree. He suggests that it is “more useful to study this second type,” for with determination, anyone “can, if he chooses, find out how to win a similar success himself.”.

Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, “need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.”

Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt “the greatest of companions.” Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.

While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body. ... “Theodore, you have the mind but not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.” Teedie responded enthusiastically, promising his father: “I’ll make my body.”

That young Roosevelt could open himself up to such men, relate to them, and learn from them suggested that in the aftermath of great sorrow he was beginning to chip away at the inherited elitism of his privileged background. He told Sewall he was thrilled to get “firsthand accounts of backwoods life from the men who had lived it and knew what they were talking about.” Even at this early age, Sewall marveled, “he was quick to find the real man in very simple men.” He listened intently to their stories: he told stories himself from the adventure books he had read; he connected with them. He was learning, Sewall said, what it meant to be an American, the idea that “no man is superior, unless it was by merit, and no man is inferior, unless by his demerit.”

The incident suggests Roosevelt’s developing sense of empathy. While Lincoln’s seems to have been his by right of birth, Roosevelt slowly expanded his understanding of other people’s points of view by going to places that a man of his background typically neither visited nor comprehended.

He made a good impression, Tom Leonard recalled, “because he wouldn’t immediately enter into the topic of politics”; instead, he encouraged people to talk about their work, their families, their lives. He had always loved to talk, but now he learned to listen, and to listen intently, his head nodding in a welcoming way, with an air of sympathetic identification, an attentive posture and manner that would become a lifelong characteristic.

“Temperament,” Richard Neustadt argues in his classic study of presidential leadership, “is the great separator.”

If the young boy’s independence was compromised by the protective care of both his parents, if there was little of the spontaneous explorations that enlivened Theodore’s childhood, the disposition and temperament of Franklin Roosevelt would bear the indelible stamp of his optimistic spirit—a general expectation that things would turn out happily, testament to the immense self-confidence developed during this perfectly balanced time of his life.

All his life, Franklin learned more from listening than from reading in solitude. He was able to absorb great quantities of information by hearing people talk.

Through that passionate interest in stamps, however, Franklin assimilated a great deal of knowledge, cobbling together bits and pieces of information to form a complicated tissue of associated interests. Each stamp told a story—beginning with the place and date of issue, the image represented on the front, postmarks providing the time and location of its travels—stories as alive in Franklin’s fantasy life as the adventure tales of James Fenimore Cooper had been for Theodore Roosevelt or Aesop’s Fables for Abraham Lincoln.

“The way you get ahead in the world, you get close to those that are the heads of things,” Lyndon told his college roommate when he finally arrived at Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos.

“Ambition is an uncomfortable companion,” Lyndon conceded in a college editorial. “He creates a discontent with present surroundings and achievements: he is never satisfied but always pressing forward.” This personification of ambition lacks comprehension of the impression he made on others. He failed to understand when to ease up and was often blind to the collateral cost of his own compulsive energies.

Empathy fired Lyndon’s efforts at Cotulla. “My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry,” Johnson later recalled. “And they knew, even in their youth, the pain of prejudice.” Because there was no school funding for extracurricular activities, he used half his first month’s salary to buy sports equipment, and then badgered the school board to include track and field events, baseball games, and volleyball matches in the school budget. In addition to his administrative responsibilities as principal, this one-man band taught fifth, sixth, and seventh grade classes, coached debating, and served as the softball coach, the drama coach, and the choir leader. At first, he had the children practice and compete against one another. Soon, however, he arranged field days with a dozen other regional schools.

And no one worked more fiercely than Lyndon Johnson. The first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night, “he didn’t give himself what we call spare time,” a fellow teacher said. “He walked so fast, it was like seeing a blur,” one townsman recalled. His unflagging energy, his ferocious ambition, and his compulsive drive to organize were now linked to something larger than himself. The success he sought was coupled with an equally powerful desire to transform the lives of his students. “I was determined to spark something inside them, to fill their souls with ambition and interest and belief in the future. I was determined to give them what they needed to make it in this world, to help them finish their education. Then the rest would take care of itself.”

Earlier than the three men we have studied, he had laid out an elaborate blueprint for a different kind of leadership, an executive competence and a distinctive, grinding pattern of behavior that would mark his management style the rest of his days. Already he had become a consummate political animal, a man with a dowsing rod inexorably drawn to every reservoir of power. The instinctive ability to locate the gears and levers of power in any institution, to secure wise and faithful mentors, and to transform minor positions into substantial founts of influence would accompany every stage of his upward climb.

In contrast to Abraham Lincoln, who was able to relax with poetry and drama; or Theodore Roosevelt, who was interested in birds, the mating habits of wolves, and the latest novels; or Franklin Roosevelt, who spent happy hours sailing, playing with his stamps, enjoying poker and genial social chatter, Lyndon Johnson could never unwind. Luther Jones never remembered him reading a novel, or, indeed, reading anything other than the newspapers and current magazines he obsessively devoured. He rarely went to movies or plays, for he disliked sitting in the dark for three hours unable to talk. At baseball games, he would insist on talking politics between innings and even between pitches. At social events, he danced with the wives of congressmen and government officials rather than with single girls, discussing the latest news and political gossip as they twirled across the floor. All his life, he would continue to work at this same compulsive pace, as if victory and success might somehow reclaim the steady love and affection he had been denied as a child.

How did the team accomplish so much, so quickly, and for so long? The answers require an appreciation of Johnson’s unsurpassed work ethic, the feeling among staff members that they were learning important skills, and the sense of shared engagement in a significant mission. No matter how late they stayed, nearly all the staff members agreed, Johnson closed the door behind them. No matter how early they arrived, he was already there.

For the young men, Johnson (though hardly older than they) proved an inspiring mentor, motivating them not only “to work harder,” observed one staffer, but “to be more imaginative, to think of new approaches that we could take to stretch the boundaries or the limitations under which we operated, to be more effective.” They considered him “the greatest organizer” they had ever seen; they marveled at his ability “to put first things first and more or less take them one at a time.” And yet, while focused on the present, he seemed to know what was coming next; they believed he could actually “see around corners.”

He seemed to have “a phenomenal memory not just for names and faces, but for the people behind those names and faces,” a historian remarked. What seemed an inborn trait, however, was a deliberately nurtured talent, as it was for Lincoln. Johnson’s driver Carroll Keach described the ritual the candidate would follow after each encounter on the campaign trail. He would murmur to himself, meditating out loud. “It was like he was going over his mental notes,” Keach recalled. “Who the people were, and little things about them, and who their relatives were,” as if he were making “a mental imprint in the back of his mind.” Even more importantly, though generally not self-reflective, Lyndon conducted “discussions with himself about what strategy had worked and hadn’t worked, and what strategy he should use the next time.” If things hadn’t gone well, he would scold himself. “ ‘Boy, that was dumb!’ ‘Well, you’ll just have to do better, that’s all.’ ”

“Why some people are able to extract wisdom from experience, and others are not,” Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas write, remains a critical question. Some people lose their bearings; their lives are forever stunted. Others resume their normal behaviors after a period of time. Still others, through reflection and adaptive capacity, are able to transcend their ordeal, armed with a greater resolve and purpose.

“Love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.”

What fired in Lincoln this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself. Taking stock, he found himself wanting. From the beginning, young Lincoln aspired to nothing less than to inscribe his name into the book of communal memory. To fulfill what he believed to be his destiny, a different kind of sustained effort and discipline was required, a willingness to confront weakness and imperfection, reflect upon failure, and examine the kind of leader he wanted to be.

after a long hiatus politicking, he felt that his legal prowess had atrophied while the profession had grown more complex and sophisticated in his absence, requiring greater powers of reasoning and “a broad knowledge of the principles” beneath the statutory law. No sooner had Lincoln returned to his law practice than William Herndon observed a decided change in his partner’s demeanor. Acknowledging “a certain lack of discipline—a want of mental training and method”—Lincoln began to apply himself mightily and, in Herndon’s experience, “no man had greater power of application. Once fixing his mind on any subject, nothing could interfere with or disturb him.”

The key to Lincoln’s success was his uncanny ability to break down the most complex case or issue “into its simplest elements.” He never lost a jury by fumbling with or reading from a prepared argument, relying instead “on his well-trained memory.” He aimed for intimate conversations with the jurors, as if conversing with friends. Though his arguments were “logical and profound,” they were “easy to follow,” fellow lawyer Henry Clay Whitney observed. “His language was composed of plain Anglo-Saxon words and almost always absolutely without adornment.” An Illinois judge captured the essence of Lincoln’s appeal: “He had the happy and unusual faculty of making the jury believe they—and not he—were trying the case.”

“No lawyer on the circuit was more unassuming than was Mr. Lincoln,” a fellow lawyer recalled. “He arrogated to himself no superiority over anyone—not even the most obscure member of the bar.” The seating arrangements at the tavern table reflected the hierarchy of the court. Judge Davis would preside, surrounded by the lawyers at the head of the table. On one occasion when Lincoln had settled himself at the foot among the common clientele the landlord told him: “You’re in the wrong place, Mr. Lincoln, come up here.” Lincoln queried: “Have you anything better to eat up there, Joe? If not, I’ll stay here.”

To capture human energy most efficiently, he broke the human body into components; he illustrated how each muscle works, calculated its power, and showed methods for leveraging it.

If you were able to eliminate all forces slowing down an object in motion, then it should be possible, Leonardo thought, for a body to stay in motion forever.

He looked for ways to prevent the momentum of an object from draining away, and he studied ways that a system could create or replenish its own impetus.

His drawings served as visual thought experiments. By rendering the mechanisms in his notebooks rather than actually constructing them, he could envision how they would work and assess whether they would achieve perpetual motion.

In reasoning so, he showed that, as we go through life, there is a value in trying to do such tasks as designing a perpetual-motion machine: there are some problems that we will never be able to solve, and it’s useful to understand why.

What prevents perpetual motion, Leonardo realized, is the inevitable loss of momentum in a system when it rubs against reality. Friction causes energy to be lost and prevents motion from being perpetual. So do air and water resistance, as he knew from his studies of bird flight and fish movement.

Through a set of experiments with heavy objects moving down a slope, he discovered the relationship among three determinants of friction: the weight of the object, the smoothness or roughness of the incline’s surface, and the steepness of the incline.

Through his work on machinery, Leonardo developed a mechanistic view of the world foreshadowing that of Newton. All movements in the universe—of human limbs and of cogs in machines, of blood in our veins and of water in rivers—operate according to the same laws, he concluded.

Using geometry to understand the laws of perspective taught him how math could extract from nature the secrets of its beauty and reveal the beauty of its secrets.

In the mid-1490s Leonardo put aside his work on anatomy; he would not return to the subject for another decade.

he was right in his general view that the human brain receives visual and other stimuli, processes them into perceptions, then transmits reactions through the nervous system to the muscles. More important, his fascination with the connection between the mind and the body became a key component of his artistic genius: showing how inner emotions are manifest in outward gestures.

“In painting, the actions of the figures are, in all cases, expressive of the purpose of their minds,”

As he was finishing his first round of anatomical studies, he was beginning work on what would be the greatest expression in the history of art of that maxim, The Last Supper.

In his notebook, he proclaimed his intention to fathom what he called “universale misura del huomo,” the universal measure of man.17 It was the quest that defined Leonardo’s life, the one that tied together his art and his science.

Between the first and second versions, Leonardo had been studying light and optics, and the result is an artistic use of light that was new in the history of art.

The questions about what contributions Leonardo’s colleagues made to the second Virgin of the Rocks highlight the role that collaboration played in his studio.

But as evident in his notebooks and in the process that led to his drawing of Vitruvian Man, much of Leonardo’s thinking was collegial.

In order to make money, Leonardo at times helped his apprentices produce pieces as if on an assembly line, as had been the practice in Verrocchio’s studio.

“Designs circulated between master and pupil using a kind of cut and paste technique involving master drawings and cartoons,”

Leonardo would create the compositions, cartoons, studies, and sketches. His students would copy them with pinpricks and work together on painting the finished version, often with Leonardo adding his own touches and making corrections.

The angel, like the one he painted for Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, is an example of Leonardo’s proclivity for gender fluidity. Some nineteenth-century critics saw it as a mark of his homosexuality, especially since the positioning and outward gaze of the disturbingly alluring angel make him seem a proxy for the artist.

The androgynous nature of the figure is heightened by comparing the angel to what is generally regarded as a preparatory study for it, a drawing by Leonardo, called Head of a Young Woman. The facial features of the young woman are virtually identical to those of Uriel/Gabriel.

With a few simple lines and brilliant strokes, concise and precise, he is able to create a sketch of unsurpassed beauty. At first glance it captivates you, then its deceptive simplicity draws you into a prolonged and profound engagement. The pioneering Renaissance art historian Bernard Berenson called it “one of the finest achievements of all draftsmanship,” and his protégé Kenneth Clark proclaimed it “one of the most beautiful, I dare say, in the world.”

The goal of Leonardo’s argument was to elevate the work of painters—and their social status—by linking their art to the science of optics and the mathematics of perspective. By exalting the interplay between art and science,

that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy. A great painter depicts both, he said.

“The eye, which is said to be the window of the soul, is the principal means by which the brain’s sensory receptor may fully and magnificently contemplate the infinite works of nature.”

“Hearing is less noble than sight; as soon as it is born it dies, and its death is as swift as its birth. This does not apply to the sense of sight, because if you represent to the eye a beautiful human body composed of proportionately beautiful parts, this beauty . . . has great permanence and remains to be seen.”

Painting had been classified as mechanical because it was a craft based on handiwork, like that of goldsmiths and tapestry weavers. Leonardo refuted this by arguing that painting is not only an art but also a science. In order to convey three-dimensional objects on a flat surface, the painter needs to understand perspective and optics. These are sciences that are grounded in mathematics. Therefore, painting is a creation of the intellect as well as the hands.

Leonardo then went one step further. Painting requires not only intellect, he said, but also imagination.

That, in a nutshell, was Leonardo’s signature talent: the ability to convey, by marrying observation with imagination, “not only the works of nature but also infinite things that nature never created.”

Like his love of art and science, his ability to both observe and imagine were interwoven to become the warp and woof of his genius. He had a combinatory creativity.

But as with many of his paintings and all of his treatises, Leonardo had a higher standard for using the word finished, and he never released his paragone nor any treatise on painting for publication. Pacioli was being overly kind when he ascribed to Leonardo the virtue of diligence.

Instead of publishing his notes on painting, Leonardo fiddled with them for the rest of his career, just as he did with many of his paintings. More than a decade later, he was still adding thoughts and making new outlines for a treatise. The result is a medley of notes in a variety of forms: entries he made in two notebooks during the early 1490s, known as Paris Manuscripts A and C; a set of ideas compiled around 1508, later repackaged in what is now called the Codex Atlanticus; and a lost compilation from the 1490s, Libro W. After Leonardo’s death, his assistant and heir, Francesco Melzi, drew on these notebook pages to produce in the 1540s what is known, in various versions and lengths, as Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting. In most editions of that work, Leonardo’s paragone was published as the opening section.

Leonardo’s reliance on shadows, rather than contour lines, to define the shape of most objects stemmed from a radical insight, one that he derived from both observation and mathematics: there was no such thing in nature as a precisely visible outline or border to an object. It was not just our way of perceiving objects that made their borders look blurred. He realized that nature itself, independent of how our eyes perceive it, does not have precise lines.

“You must diminish the sharpness of those objects in proportion to their increasing distance from the eye of the spectator,” he instructed. “The parts that are near in the foreground should be finished in a bold determined manner; but those in the distance must be unfinished, and confused in their outlines.” Because things appear smaller at a distance, he explained, the tiny details of an object vanish, and then even larger details begin to vanish. At a great distance, the outlines of the forms are indistinct.

When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”

His ingenious composition shows his mastery of complex rules of natural and artificial perspective, but it also shows his flexibility at fudging those rules when necessary. His ability to convey motion is evident in the gestures of each of the apostles, and so is his famed ability to follow Alberti’s injunction to make movements of the soul—emotions—known through movements of the body. In the same way that he used sfumato to blur hard lines delineating objects, Leonardo blurred the preciseness of perspective and of instants in time.

It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.

Leonardo was masterful at conveying moti dell’anima, motions of the soul. “A picture of human figures ought to be done in such a way as that the viewer may easily recognize, by means of their attitudes, the intentions of their minds,” he wrote. The Last Supper is the grandest and most vibrant example of this in the history of art.

In most of his portraits, and all of those that were fully painted, Leonardo avoided the conventional approach of the period, which was to portray subjects in profile. Instead, he preferred to show his subjects facing the viewer or in three-quarters view, which allowed him to imbue them with a sense of motion and psychological engagement. Ginevra de’ Benci, Cecilia Gallerani, Lucrezia Crivelli, and Mona Lisa are posed this way.

Isabella instead insisted on being portrayed in the classical profile that conveyed courtly decorum. As a result, Leonardo’s drawing of her is lackluster. We cannot see into her eyes or mind or soul. She seems to be posing. No thoughts or emotions seem to be churning inside. The fact that she could have viewed Cecilia’s Lady with an Ermine and then asked Leonardo for a conventional pose indicates that she had more money than taste. That may be one reason Leonardo had no desire to turn the drawing into a painting.

Had he wished to comply with Isabella, it would have been a lucrative commission, one that he could have mostly delegated to his assistants. But Leonardo, although not wealthy, was beyond that. He occasionally led his patrons on—perhaps he even thought he might eventually gratify their wishes—but he rarely allowed himself to be subservient to them.

**Note:** Leonardo didn't prioritize monetization

He was pursuing more ambitious paintings as well as his endeavors in anatomy, engineering, math, and science. Painting a conventional portrait for a pushy patron did not interest him. Nor did money motivate him. He painted portraits if the subject struck his fancy,

we should put aside our romantic image of the artist alone in his studio creating works of genius. Instead, Leonardo’s studio was like a shop in which he devised a painting and his assistants worked with him to make multiple copies. This is similar to the way it had been in Verrocchio’s bottega. “The process of production is more in keeping with the commissioning of a superbly made chair from a major designer-craftsman,” Kemp wrote after the results of the technical analysis. “We do not ask if a certain glued joint in the chair was made by the head of the workshop or one of his assistants—providing the joint holds and looks good.”

Instead, the proper and more interesting questions to ask are: How did the collaboration occur? What was the nature of the team and the teamwork? As with so many examples in history where creativity was turned into products, Leonardo’s Florence studio involved individual genius combined with teamwork. Both vision and execution were required.

“It has always been thought that Leonardo’s pupils and assistants created these works by copying Leonardo’s painting or his cartoons or even his drawings,” Francesca Fiorani noted, “but these ‘copies’ were actually produced while the original was in the making and they reflect alternative solutions Leonardo imagined for it.”

The image of a squirming boy with what looks like two mothers conjures up Leonardo’s own childhood being raised by both his birth mother, Caterina, and his slightly younger stepmother. Freud made much of this, writing, “Leonardo gave the boy two mothers, the one who stretched out her arms after him and another who is seen in the background, both are represented with the blissful smile of maternal happiness. Leonardo’s childhood was precisely as remarkable as this picture. He had two mothers.”

For most people, “unfinished perfection” would seem to be a contradiction in terms, but sometimes it suits Leonardo. Among other things, he was the master of the unfinished. Vespucci was correct when he said that Leonardo was the new Apelles in that regard.

This inability to ground his fantasies in reality has generally been regarded as one of Leonardo’s major failings. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Suction pumps now drain swamps. Along the route of the canal that Leonardo drew there is now a major highway. Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality.

To understand Leonardo, it is necessary to understand why he moved away from Florence, this time for good. One reason is simple: he liked Milan better. It had no Michelangelo, no cadre of half-brothers suing him, no ghost of his father hovering. It had royalty rather than republicans, with jubilant pageants rather than the after-stench of bonfires of the vanities. It had doting patrons rather than oversight committees. And the foremost patron there was the one who loved Leonardo the most, Charles d’Amboise, the French royal governor who had written a flowery letter reminding the Florentines how brilliant their native son was.

Florence was the artistic center of the Italian Renaissance, but Milan and its nearby university town of Pavia had become more intellectually diverse. Charles d’Amboise was dedicated to creating a court like that of the Sforzas, which included painters, entertainers, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Leonardo was the most valued jewel because he embodied all of those vocations.

if posterity is poorer because of the time Leonardo spent immersed in passions from pageantry to architecture, it is also true that his life was richer.

One of the things that could have most benefited Leonardo in his career was a partner who would help him follow through and publish his brilliant work. Together he and Marcantonio could have produced a groundbreaking illustrated treatise on anatomy that would have transformed a field still dominated by scholars who mainly regurgitated the notions of the second-century Greek physician Galen. Instead, Leonardo’s anatomy studies became another example of how he was disadvantaged by having few rigorous and disciplined collaborators along the lines of Luca Pacioli, whose text on geometric proportions Leonardo had illustrated. With Marcantonio dead, Leonardo retreated to the country villa of Francesco Melzi’s family to ride out the plague.

Leonardo was among the first to fully appreciate that the heart, not the liver, was the center of the blood system. “All the veins and arteries arise from the heart,” he wrote on the page that includes the drawings comparing the branches and roots of a seed with the veins and arteries emanating from the heart.

He wanted to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history. ... “He had no real understanding of the way in which the growth of knowledge was a cumulative and collaborative process.”41 Although he would occasionally let visitors glimpse his work, he did not seem to realize or care that the importance of research comes from its dissemination.

During the period when he was probing the human body, Leonardo was also studying the body of the earth. True to form, he made analogies between the two. He was skillful at discerning how patterns resonate in nature, and the grandest and most encompassing of these analogies, in both his art and his science, was the comparison between the body of man and the body of the earth. “Man is the image of the world,” he wrote.

“The body of the earth, like the bodies of animals, is interwoven with ramifications of veins, which are all joined together and are formed for the nutrition and vivification of this earth and of its creatures,” he wrote, echoing his words from almost two decades earlier.5 And on the following page he added, “Its flesh is the soil, its bones are the arrangements of the connections of the rocks of which the mountains are composed, its cartilage is the porous rock, its blood is the veins of waters; the lake of the blood, which is throughout the heart, is the ocean; its breathing and the increase and decrease of the blood through the pulses in the earth is thus: it is the flow and ebb of the sea.”

One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. We can see that in Leonardo. As he wrestled with his earth and water studies during the early 1500s, he ran into evidence that caused him to revise his belief in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy. It was Leonardo at his best, and we have the great fortune of being able to watch that evolution as he wrote the Codex Leicester. There he engaged in a dialogue between theories and experience, and when they conflicted he was receptive to trying a new theory. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity.

Throughout his life, he was brilliant at discerning patterns and abstracting from them a framework that could be applied across disciplines. His geology studies show an even greater talent: not letting these patterns blind him. He came to appreciate not only nature’s similarities but also its infinite variety. Yet even as he abandoned the simplistic version of the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, he retained the aesthetic and spiritual concept underlying it: the harmonies of the cosmos are reflected in the beauty of living creatures.

But I suspect the main reason that Leonardo decided to paint Lisa del Giocondo is that he wanted to paint her. Because she was somewhat obscure, not a famed noble or even the mistress of one, he could portray her as he wished. There was no need to cater to or take directions from a powerful patron. Most important, she was beautiful and enticing—and she had an alluring smile.

Was he observant enough to notice a case of anisocoria, in which one eye is more dilated than the other, which occurs in 20 percent of humans?

**Note:** I have this

By being around him, viewers are stimulated to observe the little details of nature, like the cause of a dilated pupil, and to regain our sense of wonder about them. Inspired by his desire to notice every detail, we try to do the same.

So the world’s most famous smile is inherently and fundamentally elusive, and therein lies Leonardo’s ultimate realization about human nature. His expertise was in depicting the outer manifestation of inner emotions. But here in the Mona Lisa he shows something more important: that we can never fully know true emotion from outer manifestations.

“As a well-spent day brings a happy sleep,” Leonardo had written thirty years earlier, “so a well-employed life brings a happy death.”

He enjoyed the challenge of conception more than the chore of completion.

Be curious, relentlessly curious. “I have no special talents,” Einstein once wrote to a friend. “I am just passionately curious.”4 Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity.

Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure.

Retain a childlike sense of wonder. At a certain point in life, most of us quit puzzling over everyday phenomena. We might savor the beauty of a blue sky, but we no longer bother to wonder why it is that color. Leonardo did. So did Einstein, who wrote to another friend, “You and I never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.” We should be careful to never outgrow our wonder years, or to let our children do so.

Observe. Leonardo’s greatest skill was his acute ability to observe things. It was the talent that empowered his curiosity, and vice versa. It was not some…

Start with the details. In his notebook, Leonardo shared a trick for observing something carefully: Do it in steps, starting with each detail. A page of a book, he noted, cannot be absorbed in one stare; you need to go word by word. “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them,…

See things unseen. Leonardo’s primary activity in many of his formative years was conjuring up pageants, performances, and plays. He mixed theatrical ingenuity with fantasy. This gave him a combinatory creativity. He could see birds…

Go down rabbit holes. He filled the opening pages of one of his notebooks with 169 attempts to square a circle. In eight pages of his Codex Leicester, he…

Get distracted. The greatest rap on Leonardo was that these passionate pursuits caused him to wander off on tangents, literally in the case of his math inquiries. It “has left posterity the poorer,” Kenneth Clark lamented. But in fact, Leonardo’s willingness to pursue whatever shiny…

Respect facts. Leonardo was a forerunner of the age of observational experiments and critical thinking. When he came up with an idea, he devised an experiment to test it. And when his experience showed that a theory was flawed—such as his belief that the springs within the earth are replenished the same…

Procrastinate. While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave. He told Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he explained, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Most of us don’t need advice to procrastinate; we do it naturally. But procrastinating…

Let the perfect be the enemy of the good. When Leonardo could not make the perspective in the Battle of Anghiari or the interaction in the Adoration of the Magi work perfectly, he abandoned them… ([Location 7650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B071Y385Q1&location=7650)) “Real artists ship,” which means that sometimes you ought to deliver a product even when there are still improvements that could be made. That is a good rule for daily life. But there are times when it’s nice to be like…

Think visually. Leonardo was not blessed with the ability to formulate math equations or abstractions. So he had to visualize them, which he did with his studies of proportions, his rules of perspective, his method for calculating reflections from concave mirrors…

Avoid silos. At the end of many of his product presentations, Jobs displayed a slide of a sign that showed the intersection of “Liberal Arts” and “Technology” streets. He knew that at such crossroads lay creativity. Leonardo had a free-range mind that merrily wandered across all the disciplines of the arts, sciences, engineering, and humanities. His knowledge of how light strikes the retina helped inform the perspective in The Last Supper, and on a page of anatomical drawings depicting the…

Let your reach exceed your grasp. Imagine, as he did, how you would build a human-powered flying machine or divert a river. Even try to devise a perpetual-motion machine or square a circle using only a ruler and a compass…

Indulge fantasy. His giant crossbow? The turtle-like tanks? His plan for an ideal city? The man-powered mechanisms to flap a flying machine? Just as Leonardo blurred the lines between science and art, he did so between reality and fantasy. It may not have…

Create for yourself, not just for patrons. No matter how hard the rich and powerful marchesa Isabella d’Este begged, Leonardo would not paint her portrait. But he did begin one of a silk-merchant’s wife named Lisa. He did it because he wanted to, and he kept working on…

Collaborate. Genius is often considered the purview of loners who retreat to their garrets and are struck by creative lightning. Like many myths, that of the lone genius has some truth to it. But there’s usually more to the story. The Madonnas and drapery studies produced in Verrocchio’s studio, and the versions of Virgin of the Rocks and Madonna of the Yarnwinder and other paintings from Leonardo’s…

Genius starts with individual brilliance. It requires singular vision. But executing it often entails working with others. Innovation is a team sport.…

Make lists. And be sure to put odd things on them. Leonardo’s to-do lists may have been the greatest testaments to pure…

Take notes, on paper. Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we work up the initiative to start writing them, will be around to astonish and…

Be open to mystery. Not everything needs…