Think Like Da Vinci: 7 Easy Steps to Boosting Your Everyday Genius

3) 11:30 a.m. Holding the telephone with a vise grip and with my head cocked to the right side causing a pain in my arm and shoulder. Similar to my toothbrush observation. Holding on to objects with an over-effort … “for dear life.”

4) 4:30 p.m. While eating a sandwich in a hurry, I saw how I would gobble the food down without paying attention to what I was eating. Speed was important and this made me lose contact with the taste and even knowing exactly what the sandwich consisted of.

5) 5:30 p.m. I also noticed the sunset today and the warmth of the sun contacting my face allowed me to slow down and see what was in front of me (i.e., bringing me more into the present moment).

6) 9:30 p.m. Sorting through today’s mail. Having to take time with the junk mail (i.e., junk material objects). Felt like my life was/is taken up with sorting & filing & fixing & handling material objects. I become a “caretaker” of these objects!

7) 10:30 p.m. As I hold this pen in my hand, I’m noticing how little effort is required to actually write. The pen works very well without the extra effort of pushing.

Choose any question from the previous exercises – for example: What people, places, and activities allow me to feel most fully myself? – and hold it in your mind for a sustained period, at least ten minutes at a time. A good way to do this is to take a large sheet of paper and write the question out in big, bold letters. Then:

Find a quiet, private place and hang it on the wall in front of you.

Relax, breathe deeply, allowing extended exhalations.

Just sit with your question.

When your mind starts to wander, bring it back by reading the question again, out loud. It is particularly valuable to do this contemplation exercise before going to sleep, and again upon waking. You will find that if you practice it sincerely, your mind will “incubate” insights overnight.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS EXERCISE

A powerful complement to contemplation, stream of consciousness writing is a marvelous tool for plumbing the depths of your questions. Choose any question, and working in your notebook, write your thoughts and associations as they occur, without editing.

Devote at least ten minutes to writing your responses. The secret of effective stream of consciousness writing is to keep your pen moving; don’t lift it away from the paper or stop to correct your spelling and grammar – just write continuously.

Stream of consciousness writing yields lots of nonsense and redundancy but can lead to profound insight and understanding. Don’t worry if you seem to be writing pure gibberish; this is actually a sign that you are overriding the habitual, superficial aspects of your thought process. As you persevere, keeping your pen on the paper and moving it continuously, you’ll eventually open a window through which your intuitive intelligence will shine.

Take a break after each stream of consciousness session.

Go back to your notebook and read aloud what you have written.

Highlight the words or phrases that speak to you most strongly.

Again, look for themes, the beginnings of poems, and more questions.

Contemplate the metaphor of the poet’s motto: “Write drunk, revise sober.”

The contemplation and stream of consciousness exercises are excellent tools for personal and professional problem solving. Let’s consider the role of Curiosità in problem solving a bit further.

CURIOSITÀ AND CREATIVE

PROBLEM SOLVING

Think back to your school days. We all remember what curiosity did to the cat. But what happened to the kids who asked too many questions? A common refrain from overworked, beleaguered teachers was “We don’t have time for all these questions; we’ve got to get through the curriculum.” Now persistent question askers are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or “hyperactivity” and treated with Ritalin and other drugs. If the young Leonardo were alive today and attending grade school, he would probably be on medication.

“Why is the sky blue? Leonardo’s answer: “I say that the azure that the air makes us see is not its proper color, but this color comes from warm, damp air, evaporated into minuscule and imperceptible particles, which, being struck by the light of the sun, become luminous below the obscurity of the mighty darkness which covers them like a lid.”

Although we all started life with a Da Vinci-like insatiable curiosity, most of us learned, once we got to school, that answers were more important than questions. In most cases, schooling does not develop curiosity, delight in ambiguity, and question-asking skill. Rather, the thinking skill that’s rewarded is figuring out the “right answer” – that is, the answer held by the person in authority, the teacher. This pattern holds throughout university and postgraduate education, especially in a class where the professor wrote the text. (In a classic study at a top university, summa cum laude graduates were given their same final exams one month after graduation, and they all failed. Researcher Leslie Hart summarized the results: “Final exams are final indeed!”) The authority-pleasing, question-suppressing, rule-following approach to education may have served to provide society with assembly-line workers and bureaucrats, but it does not do much to prepare us for a new Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci’s life was an exercise in creative problem solving of the very highest order. The principle of Curiosità provides the primary key to his method. It begins with intense curiosity and an open mind, and proceeds with a stream of questions asked from different perspectives.

“First, there are questions about the construction of certain machines, then, under the influence of Archimedes, questions about the first principles of dynamics; finally, questions which had never been asked before about winds, clouds, the age of the earth, generation, the human heart.”

– KENNETH CLARK ON LEONARDO’S NOTEBOOKS

You can increase your problem-solving skills, at work and at home, by honing your question-asking ability. For most people this requires shifting the initial emphasis away from focusing on “the right answer” and toward asking “Is this the right question?” and “What are some different ways of looking at this problem?”

Successful problem solving often requires replacing or reframing the initial question. Questions can be framed in a wide variety of ways, and the “framing” will dramatically influence your ability to find solutions. Psychologist Mark Brown offers the example of an evolution in questioning that resulted in a major transformation of human societies. Nomadic societies were based on the question “How do we get to water?” They became agrarian and stable cultures, Brown says, when they began asking “How do we get the water to come to us?”