Da Vinci's Principles - #4 Sfumato part 2

Looking a little more deeply into the Sfumato principle of da Vinci, I want to explore the point Mr. Gelb makes about "Incubation and Intuition."  Here's what he says.

"Great musicians claim that their art comes to life in the spaces between the notes.  Master sculptors point to the space around their work as the secret of it's power.  Similarly, the spaces between your conscious efforts provide a key to creative living and problem solving.  These spaces allow perceptions, ideas and feelings to incubate."

"Almost everyone has experienced 'sleeping on a problem' and awakening with a solution. But incubation is most effective when you alternate, as Leonardo did, between periods of intense, focused work and rest.  Without periods of intense, focused work, there is nothing to be incubated."

Have you ever gotten stuck on an idea?  You work and work and think and get input from others  It seems like the more you press, the further away the solution moves. It's kind of like visiting a friend who has a cat.  The more you try to lure the little moggie to give it a little pet, the further away it moves.  Have you ever noticed that the only people the cat seeks out are those that ignore it or who hate cats?  They always know.  Ideas can be just like that.

Work hard, go after the ideas, the solutions but don't be afraid to walk away and give it time to breathe, to expand on its own to a place where you can grab hold of it and own it.

(Have a look at the book, "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci" for exercises that will help you grow in this principle.)

Dimonstrazione Dimonstrazione'd

I’m going back for a second to what Michael J. Gelb in his book, “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci,” presents as Leonardo’s 2^nd Principle – Dimonstrazione – because I came across a terrific example of this principle operating in a person’s life – even if he doesn’t realize that he’s acting like Leonardo.

In an interview with Eater.com, Alton Brown talks about tools and how he approaches them.  He was explaining how he will be illustrating his newest cookbook (which will be #8 – don’t tell him it will be #11 or he will take you to task in no uncertain terms) using an iPhone.

<<Helen: I think you’ve brought a similar paradigm shift to the way that cooking and food information has been presented in books, too, though.  Your Good Eats books don’t feel like standard cookbooks.  They have a lot more going on.  They’re layered and they are multifaceted.  Was that another intentional choice?

Alton: Sure.  If I have an intentional choice with any form of media, especially where food is concerned, it’s to attempt to reinvent, or to break a rule.  Not because I’m trying to be an iconoclast, I’m not.

Helen: With a leather jacket here.

Alton: But what I am trying to do is to shake up forms, and find the dark little corners of any particular media form, and figure out a new way to approach it.  Books are the most frustrating of any of them because they just sit there.  They’re not temporal.  They don’t pass, you know, you can’t cover a cut with a music cue.  It sits there and stares at you, and you stare at it.  You’ve got to approach them differently.  My books have never been based on, “Okay, here’s a pretty picture of some food.  Now here’s the recipe for making the food.” I don’t do that because I don’t enjoy that.  I want even cookbooks to have a narrative.  I want to learn something, and I want to be taken someplace.  I want to be able to sit down and just read the book to read the book.  That’s how I kind of try to write books.  My new book is actually as conventional a cookbook as I guess I’m capable of.  It’s one hundred of my everyday cooking recipes.  But the book’s arranged by time of day instead of meal.  And every recipe gets a full-page photo that’s shot on an iPhone. So I guess even then, I can’t just do it like other people do.

Greg: Why the iPhone?

Alton: Because it is the visual tool of our age, as far as I’m concerned.  It’s funny, it forces you – every photo in my new book is taken from directly overhead.  I wanted to come up with a visual language that was more immediate.  I’m making a book for the Instagram crown, you know and so why not use that tool?  Why use fancy cameras and fancy lenses if I can use a tool, and find a new way to take advantage of that tool and do what it’s really good at, and stay away from the things that it isn’t very good at. Then a whole kind of new visual thing comes out of that and I like defining work sometimes by the tools.  Instead of deciding on a style and finding the tools for it, I’ll pick up a tool and say, “Okay, well, I’m intrigued by the tool.  Let’s style for it.” So the iPhone seems to be the perfect thing to do.  On top of the fact that nobody’s ever done it.  Another good reason, at least to try it.>>

There’s so much I love about his approach to what he does that’s expressed in this tiny snippet but for the Leonardo moment, “I like defining work sometimes by the tools.  Instead of deciding on a style and finding the tools for it, I’ll pick up a tool and say, ‘Okay, well, I’m intrigued by the tool.  Let’s style for it.’” (You can listen to or read the entire interview at the link to Eater.com above.)

Here’s the Leonardo exercise for our Leonardo/Alton moment: pick up a tool, any tool, and try to find as many things you can do with that tool as possible.  Re-invent it for uses it was never made for.  Need some help seeing what that might look like?  Try this.

Da Vinci's Principles - #3 Sensazione

The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

"Yet Leonardo reflected sadly that the average human "looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking."

"What is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen? The sweetest sound you've ever heard? The most exquisitely tender touch? Imagine a sublimely delicious taste and a haunting, delectable aroma.  How does your experience of one sense affect all the others?"

When I read this question, "What is the sweetest sound you've ever heard?", several things come to mind but one of the strongest is the Nikolaj Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade violin solo that the character Hardison (played by Aldis Hodge) plays in an episode of the TV show, Leverage.  Sounds like a weird combination, right?  Just close your eyes and listen to it.

Just let everything stop and listen again. You can find longer renditions of this piece of music that will give you more time to stop and immerse yourself in this powerful music for a moment in time.  That's what our senses can give us if we give them a moment in time.

There are a wide range of exercises laid out in the book to expand our awareness of our senses.  What are some of the things that come to your mind when you consider becoming more aware of the information you are taking in through your senses?

From the book, "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci" by Michael J. Gelb.

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.

Heros of Creativity

One of the indispensable tools for learning to use your creativity more effectively is the book, "How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci - Seven Steps to Genius Every Day" by Michael J. Gelb.  In this infinitely practical books, Gelb describes 7 characteristics embodied by Leonardo da Vinci that fed his creative genius. He gives some background to da Vinci's life and his active mind before heading into the workbook section of the book.

Gelb writes in his introduction, "But the key question remains.  Can the fundamentals of Leonardo's approach to learning and the cultivation of intelligence be abstracted and applied to inquire and guide us toward the realization of our own full potential?

"Of course, my answer to this question is: Yes! The essential elements of Leonardo da Vinci's approach to learning and the cultivation of intelligence are quite clear and can be studied, emulated, and applied.

"Is it hubris to imagine that we can learn to be like the greatest of all geniuses? Perhaps.  It's better to think of his example guiding us to be more of what we truly are."

A little later he says, "Baby ducks learn to survive by imitating their mothers. Learning through imitation is fundamental to many species, including humans.  As we become adults, we have a unique advantage: we can choose whom and what to imitate. We can also consciously choose new models to replace the ones we outgrow.  It makes sense, therefore, to choose the best "role models" to guide and inspire us toward the realization of our potential."

He presents these Seven Da Vincian Principles are:

Curiosita - An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.
Dimostrazione - A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
Sensazione - The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.
Sfumato (literally "Going up in Smoke") - A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.
Arte/Scienza - The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination.  "Whole-brain thinking.
Corporalita - The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.
Connessione - A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena.  Systems thinking.

The second section of the book covers each of these principles along with some extremely practical exercises that makes learning and practicing them attainable.

Over the next week, I'll share some of my personal experiences with each of these principles and hopefully inspire you to start your own journey in da Vinci's footsteps.