Leonardo Da Vinci might’ve been the greatest polymath to ever live.
He was an artist creating paintings like the Mona Lisa, The Vitruvian Man, and The Last Supper
He was an engineer designing the first versions of tanks, helicopters, and scuba gear.
He studied anatomy dissecting over 20 human bodies and filling his notebooks with the most accurate diagrams of a human at the time
And on top of this he was a chemist making all of the materials for his art and sculptures himself.
The really crazy thing though is that, I didn’t even begin to name all the fields that he advanced.
I just finished a 500 page book on Leonardo and I am honestly amazed at just how many fields Leonardo was a master in, and as I was reading it I came to realize that he was able to do everything that he did because of a habit that continues to be repeated over and over again throughout history.
This habit that we’re going to go over today is what made Leonardo a polymath genius.
So if you are someone who feels like they’re being put in a box, like you feel trapped in a sort of niche field, this article is especially for you, because so many of the great geniuses of history understood something very important, and that’s that in order to truly think like a genius, you have to be a master at many fields, and Leonardo is the perfect example of that, which leads me to the first point.
I - The Difference
Okay so to start what even if a polymath? a polymath by definition is “A person with expertise in a significant number of different subject areas”. The main thing that separates Leonardo from everyone else is exactly this, that instead of just being someone who had a deep knowledge in one single field, he was able to take from all these different fields and create something that no one else had before. You can think of it like a painting pallet. On the pallet you have all these different colors. Everyone else might be a master at one color. So maybe there was a master of yellow or a master of blue. during the renaissance this would be things like painting, or engineering, or anatomy. But what Leonardo did was master multiple colors. He was able to master blue and yellow and because of this he was able to mix the two colors together to create green. Or in a real sense he was able to combine multiple fields together to create something new.
The difference between a polymath genius and everyone else is that the polymaths are able to take a concept from a field and apply that concept to a different field without a second thought. Because they’ve mastered multiple fields they’re able to create something new and make things that are unique and different and I mean that is what the geniuses do. The key concept here though is to become a master in multiple fields so that you can blend the two together. Looking back to history this has happened over and over again to make breakthroughs.
The wright brothers obsessively studied the movement and the flights of birds before building the first ever machine that could fly. On top of this they took a lot of concepts from riding a bike and applied it to their flying machines as well
Issac Newton actually wrote more about theology and alchemy than about physics which was where most of his accomplishments lie, and he wrote in a way where he almost looked at theology and physics as in the same field.
Steve Jobs was constantly taking from different fields and applying them to his products at apple. He was actually obsessed with Da Vinci and was inspired by him to take on this philosophy and he one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard on being a polymath, he said “I’ve never believed that they’re separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don’t believe that the best people in and of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don’t see that. People bring these things together a lot.”
That’s the real difference between a polymath genius and everyone else. The polymaths are not stuck in one hyper specific niche field, but they’re able to take concepts from different fields and apply it to whatever they are working on. You can think of it like white light shining through a prism. The people who only look at the rainbow see all the different colors that there are, but if you can see the whole picture, it is all of the colors of the spectrum merging together right at the prism that make the white light. Or said in real life terms the regular person only see’s all these different fields separately. They see biology as one thing, mathematics as another, psychology over here, art over there. But the polymaths don’t really see that distinction, a polymath see’s all this different fields united. So as a polymath your job is to be that prism. To be that person that can bring all those colors together into that white light.
Chances are you’re not currently thinking like these though, and that’s okay because it’s not entirely your fault. In school you’re not taught like a Polymath. Even when you look at the schedule of a school you have all these different sections like math, science, literature, art all separated from each other. But the worst part is, is that all of as you go through the system you’re sort of forced to become more specialized, to dive very deeply into one specific niche field and never explore outside of the niche.
Going back to Steve Jobs he said “Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place.” There is something magical about that place, the place where math and science and art all connect, and that is where the great polymaths of history were able to make their biggest accomplishments. Most people go nowhere near that line, because they are so buried in one specific niche, but that line is where innovation happens, it’s where progress is made, and it’s where the greats of history live, and if you haven’t trained yourself to think like a polymath then you’re probably not there yet, but that’s okay because the following habit or system or whatever you want to call it is something that so many of the greats have used to become great polymaths and it’s called the multi-discipline way of thinking. If you’ve ever read about Charlie Munger then you might’ve heard of it already, but in this video were doing to go in depth about the concept, and show you how you can apply it and use it in your own life.
II - Leonardo Da Vinci
But first we have to go over how Leonardo Da Vinci used it. I said earlier that Leonardo Da Vinci was probably the greatest polymaths who ever lived because I mean you can see it everywhere in his life. We currently still have a ton of his journals and in the journals you can sort of see how in his mind there were no lines drawn between different fields. You can just see how sporadic and crazy and all intertwined all of these pages are, and they are an exact reflection of how things were in his head as well. These pages are the best way to describe what the intersection of science and art looks like and Leonardo even once wrote “Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses. Especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to anything else.” Everything connects to everything else, that is the perfect way to think about multidiscipline thinking. There’s this great quote from Walter Issacsons biography on him that goes “Leonardo’s interest in machinery was linked to his fascination with motion. He saw both machines and humans as apparatuses designed to move, with analogous components such as cords and sinews. As he did with his anatomy drawings of dissected bodies, he drew machines disassembled to show how motion is transferred from gears to levers to wheels and pulleys, and his cross-disciplinary interests allowed him to connect concepts from anatomy to engineering.” and Leonardo showed this philosophy countless times throughout his life.
The most famous way he did this was probably with The Vitruvian Man. This is not only a phenomenal piece of art, but it is also completely rooted in science. He was obsessed with studying of the geometry of the human body using the work of Euclid, and he also studied this guy named Marcus Vitruvius Pollio who wrote a classical book called The Ten Books on Architecture and he rooted this painting in a philosophy that expressed that the human body is supposed to be in harmony with the universe. So you can see how he is thinking in multiple disciplines here. It’s not just a painting but it is the literal intersection of geometry, and anatomy, and art, and architecture, and philosophy, all at the same time. Thats what makes the Vitruvian such a masterpiece, not just that it is a phenomenal piece of art.
The exact multidiscipline way of thinking was used to develop his flying machine. Leonardo did a deep deep study of birds for this, and I mean it’s hard to describe just how obsessed with birds he was for this. He studied how they move for hours and kept a lot of them around his house. He watched the an and in what places it is similar to the human body. He once again used anatomy for this when trying to figure out what motions a human could make to power the machine. And on top of this he believed that air and water were very similar so he used water to run a lot of his experiments and see how stones dropped into the water act and how it would be similar to turbulence in the air. So you can again see how he took from all these different fields to make sketches for his ornithopter and his aerial screw which were at the intersection of anatomy and art and science.
Leonardo applied this way of thinking to everything that he did and this was in part how he was able to be such a genius, but what really made him be this way, what was it that made him think in a multi-discipline type of way, and the answer is that he was just relentlessly curious. And when I say curious he was actually one of the most curious people I have ever studied. He had this habit where he would carry around a notebook everywhere he went so he would constantly have a notebook on him, and then whenever he had a question about the world he would write it down. So in his notebooks there are all of these sporadic questions everywhere, for example take these three ““Why do fish in water move faster than birds in the air, though both are surrounded by fluid?” “Why does the wind move in waves, like water?” “The blood that moves within the veins flows like the water that circles in a whirlpool.” As you can see these three questions are three completely different questions from completely different fields all asked around different times, but they all have something to do with the other. And this was simply the effect of Leonardo following his curiosity. Because he followed his curiosity it led him to all these different pathways which he could then connect later.
It all goes back to that quote “Realize that everything connects to everything else”. The fish in the water connects to the bird in the air, the blood flows in the way that water flows. This is how Leonardo was able to do so much, because he constantly was applying different fields to whatever he was working on, and this is one of the most important skills that you can develop, especially when the modern world is constantly pushing you to become more and more niched into one specific field. So the next section is going to go over the steps for how to become a multi-disciplined thinker and become the ultimate polymath genius.
III - Multi-Discipline Thinking (4 Steps)
Okay so as always I like to break things down into steps because, steps are easy to remember, and they’re easy to apply. I broke down Multi-Discipline thinking into four steps so that you can start to think more broadly about whatever field your in. The formula is 1. Master One Field 2. Widen Your Learning (Follow Curiosity) 3. Spot The Patterns 4. Apply Across Fields (Build A Web)
Step One is to Master One Field. This step is really important because there is a very big misconception about being a polymath that needs to be cleared up, and that is that being a polymath is not being the jack of all trades but it’s about being able to think in multiple disciplines. The difference is that the jack of all trades is okay at many fields, but the true poly math is a master at one field and is able to bring in concepts from other fields to advance in that one field. This ultimately leads to advancements in the other fields as well ironically. This is why before becooming a polymath you have to master one field first. For Leonardo that field was art, for Steve Jobs it was personal computing, for Ben Franklin it was the printing press business. The main benefit of becoming a master of one craft first though is that you now have a formula for how to learn a craft, and so once you master a craft it’s a lot easier to add these tertiary fields to your mind.
Step Two is to Widen Your Learning. After mastered one field it’s then very easy to translate the skills of learning into literally every field, and so learning becomes a lot faster and a lot easier, but there’s a very important factor to this step and that’s that you absolutely have to follow your curiosity. For Leonardo Da Vinci while he was painting he became obsessed with light, because obviously painting is a lot of playing around with light and shadows, and so instead of just observing light he actually began studying it. It was like a branch of curiosity that he followed into a completely different field of optics. Steve Jobs while he was in college, well he wasn’t really in college he actually dropped out and still kept going to classes, but he stayed on campus and he only went to classes that interested him and that he was curious about. And so he took classes like Zen philosophy and Calligraphy. The point is that these other fields have to be something that you are interested in naturally. If you try to study something just because it will help your main field and it doesn’t peak your curiosity it won’t work because your mind won’t give importance to the new field. I know it sounds cheesy but this other field should call to you and you should follow your curiosity.
Step Three is to Spot The Patterns. This is probably the most important step. There are patterns that govern all the laws of nature, and as you start exploring other fields you will begin to notice these underlying patterns. A lot of these patterns will inevitably go back all the way to nature as that is where all things stem from. Leonardo said “Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws, she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity”. Leonardo showed this in his own life when he was studying bird. Instead of just observing the birds fly he tried to derrive the underlying principle for how they could fly, and so he came up with the concept of lift which could not only be applied to a bird but also to a machine. He also found that the concept of lift was not just applicable in air but in any wavelike substance like water. And so it was by finding this underlying principle of nature for how birds fly that he was able to form all of the connections between all these different fields. This step is so important and is probably one of the most valuable things you could ever develop in life because it is what leads to step 4.
Step Four is Applying Across Fields. Once you have the underlying principle you’re going to find that it is going to be incredibly easy to connect different fields to each other, and a lot of times you’ll find that, that underlying principle is actually the real discovery. When Issac Newton discovered gravity it was because he connected the falling of smaller objects to the orbits of large masses. For Leonardo it was lift that really showed him how similar air and water are. Steve Jobs was constantly making analogies about nature of his companies, comparing markets to bee colonies and stuff like that. This is the 4 step formula for thinking in multiple disciplines and its very clear that the genius in this lies in the third step, the finding of the underlying principle. Once you start seeing the world in this way it is very obvious to just naturally think in this way. So now that you have a good overview of thinking in multiple disciplines we have to go over some historical examples to really solidify this line of thinking.
IV - Historical Examples
Since we already covered Da Vinci a ton we’re going to use a different example this time. Let’s use Edwin Land. Honestly it is an absolute crime that no one talks about Edwin Land because he was a genius. Edwin Land is the founder of polaroid but he literally said that he wanted Polaroid to be at “The intersection between art and science” and it really was. Polaroid didn’t even start as a camera company they started as a polarizing filter company who wanted to put polarizers on cars. This meant that Edwin Land was pretty much a physicist studying light, and he completely mastered this field. He was also very interested in chemistry and psychology though, and the result of all these fields coming together was when one day his daughter asked him “why can’t I see my photo right away”. He then mixed light with the chemistry to make mix the colors in the camera into the photo, and sold the camera with the psychology knowing that people would buy it to see the picture they took right away. This is peak polymath thinking and in the words of Steve Jobs talking about Edwin Land “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I want to do.”
Another person who thought in a very similar way was Walt Disney, and although when you think of Walt Disney you probably don’t think polymath genius he actually was a remarkable multidiscipline thinker. Obviously Walt was an animator at heart but by the time of snow white he had hired out most of the animation to other people so he was free to explore different fields that all ended up culminating into snow white.He brought in actors to show his animators about body movement (this is actually really similar to what Da Vinci did with anatomy for his paintings), he studied storytelling deeply and the psychology behind it way more intensely than for any of his other projects, and his team even created a new type of camera called the multi-plane camera to add more depth to the movie. All of these different fields coming together at Disney Studios to create what might have been the most successful movie in all of history. Just a side note that later on, on top of that he also made up the term Imagineering, which is the combinatin of imagination and engineering and that team is still around today making all the engineering behind the technology at the Disney Theme parks.
So it’s very clear that new things come about with multidiscipline thinking. Wether its new discoveries in science or some of the most beautiful works of art every made. But if it really is so useful to think in this way, then what is it that stops people from thinking in this way? Because obviouslyif it was easy to think in multiple disciplines everyone would, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
V - The Roadblocks
There’s two roadblocks to watch out for when pursuing the thinking of a polymath and those road blocks lie in step 2 and step 3. These are the two reasons for why most people aren’t modern polymaths.
The first reason is that curiosity gets conditioned out of most people. As a kid you are constantly curious and you are constantly questioning the world around you. I mean everyone knows that one annoying kid who asks you a question and when you give an answer they just keep asking why why why why. That’s really important. It’s a curiosity about the world. Not really about anything specific but just about everything. In this way, even if you have already mastered a field just by being curios about the world around you you naturally learn different things from different fields. However as you get older that curiosity sort of gets numbed down by society, people begin to conform and ridicule the ones who are willing to look foolish and ask these why questions all the way down into the unknown. And so in order to be a polymath you have to bring back that spark of curiosity you had as a child. I actually think about the Frankenstein movie that just came out where the monster is created and everything is just new to him, the leaves, the sun, the water everything, and he’s constantly curious. This is the type of curiosity Da Vinci had and it comes from a childlike spirit. So this might sound crazy but it helps to just go for a walk and just imagine as though you are experiencing everything for the first time. This way you can see what calls out to you, what questions come to mind, and just follow your curiosity, just like Frankenstein.
The second roadblock that comes up is that people tend to look for facts instead of principles. After your curious and start looking through different fields its very easy to fall into the niche trap again and this is why step three is so important. A lot of people when attempting to think in multiple disciplines get sucked into separating the two fields completely. Maybe one of your fields is physics and one of your fields is art. But the idea is to find the principles behind why things are why they are. When Leonardo was painting a lot of his art involving water he didn’t just want to paint how the water looked, but he actually wanted to understand why the water moved the way it did. That why question is the principle. For water this was the principle of flow which can then be applied to multiple fields and because Leonardo understood this he was also able to create some of the best paintings involving water at the time.
Other then these two roadblocks thinking in the way of a polymath is really not that difficult, it is simply just something that you have to live by. To be relentlessly curious, to constantly be looking for these principles in nature, and to be constantly applying these principles into whatever your doing. And the key is just repetition. Because the more that you do this the easier it will become and the more natural it will be to think in this way, and that’s when you really get to Leonardo or Steve Jobs level of genius.
And always remember this Da Vinci quote “Realize that everything connects to everything else”