Da Vinci's Principles - #2 Dimostrazione

A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

"Think of the best teachers you have ever had.  What makes a teacher great? More than anything else, it is the ability to help the student learn for himself. The finest teachers know that experience is the source of wisdom."

"Throughout his life he proudly referred to himself as uomo senza lettere ("man without letters") and discepolo della esperienza ("disciple of experience")."

"Leonardo championed originality and independence of thought."

How much good would come of looking at a beautiful picture of a delicious meal and the best of wines?  A little perhaps but how much better would it be to sit at the table and enjoy the real meal and drink the exquisite wine?  Thinking you know a fact can never take the place of testing it and making it live in your own experience.  Have you ever told a child not to touch the stove because it will burn them?  What do they do?  They touch the stove, of course, and prove your theory.  It's only then that they know that if they touch the stove, it will burn them.

"Leonardo saw how preconceptions and "bookish prejudices" limited scientific inquiry.  He knew that learning from experience also meant learning from mistakes.  He wrote, 'Experience never errs; it is only your judgement that errs in promising itself results as are not caused by your experiments."

How many examples can you think of that demonstrates this principle?

Here are some of mine.

• The old story of the lady who cut the end off her roast before she puts it in the oven to roast.  One day someone asked her why she did it.  "I'm not sure but it's the way I learned to do it from my mother."  To solve the reason for the practice, she called her mother to ask.  "Oh, that's easy," said her mother.  When I was first married, my oven was too small for the roast so I had to cut it for it to fit in the oven."
• On TV crime dramas, you have the lazy detective who decides who's guilty and manipulates the facts to meet his ideas.  I'm in the middle of watching the 1950s tv show Perry Mason and that's how Perry, Della and Paul Street always showed up Lt. Tragg and DA Hamilton Burger. In every episode Burger and Tragg always decided a crime had to be committed a certain way and never tried to ask the next question.  They were always absolutely sure that THIS time they had him.  Perry was going to fall on his face and they were going to triumph but they never did.
• The highly educated person who can articulate the most high flown ideas and theories who can't actually do a single one.  They're in every office, in every business of a certain size.  All theory and no common sense.  
• As a 19-year old, having been brought up in a very small town in Texas and in the Southern Baptist Church, I went through a very chaotic time.  The chaos and challenges of those times made me question a great many of the preconceptions I inherited from my family and the culture in which I lived.  There were things that I grew up watching adults do and listening to opinions generally held that I never understood.  There were assumptions that I just couldn't reconcile in my little heart.  Of course, I couldn't have articulated most of them but I felt uncomfortable and unsettled when they came up. There were other things that I accepted without question.
  
  As I went through this dark time, I began examining these beliefs and assumptions and decided that not one of them would be too precious to question.  Some of them I examined and decided I could still embrace and, of course, others were thrown overboard.  They didn't stand up to inspection and they had to go.  It ended up putting me at odds with much of American life and my experience with church but it also made me more confident in my values and beliefs.
  
  It's not easy to put everything on the table and it's certainly not comfortable.  But the interesting thing is that, although it gave me greater confidence, it also made me less willing to be dogmatic about my beliefs and practices and more open to the world around me.  Over time, my experiences have strengthened my core beliefs and softened some areas that were proved wrong.
  
  I love this clip from the comedy "Friends" where Phoebe challenges Ross' deeply held beliefs on evolution (and gravity).
  

I'm not going into more details because they don't matter.  They're mine and they don't have to be yours.  But you will expand your life and your ability to create by being willing to question yourself, put conclusions to the test and admit and learn from mistakes.

Leonardo made many, many mistakes.  All of those we would acknowledge as being masters of creativity made many, many mistakes.  As Professor Lester Lloyd-Reason says, "If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough."

Making mistakes aren't enough.  We have to admit them and learn from them. Then we can say with the best...

"How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci" provides a good few exercises that will help you begin to work through this Principle of da Vinci so that these thoughts move from head knowledge to heart knowledge and experience.