I found a nice little book today called Leonardo: Art and Science. (Not Martial Arts and Science; not the Ninja Turtle.) It’s got a wonderfully succinct narrative of his life alongside prints of his finished works, sketches, diagrams and manuscripts. What really struck me was the visibility of Leonardo’s progress. What some people call mistakes, I call progress.
For example, there’s a sketch of a woman’s lap, including her vagina that just makes me go: “Woah man… are you sure you know what that looks like man? You obviously haven’t seen a whole lot of those live, have you?” (He dissected hundreds of corpses to form the basis for modern anatomical knowledge.) Then I remember: This is Leonardo DaVinci. Look at his finished works. They’re stunning. Some of them will make you weep on sight. Give the guy a break. He’s The Virtuoso in training. Anyone looking at that one sketch wouldn’t know it, but only a few years down the line he becomes the most renowned artist in the world to this day.
There’s another painting from his early days where he has The Virgin Mary’s Arm doing M.C. Escher strange loops to compensate for an error in her placement relative to a table that she’s touching. If some schmo came to you and told you it was his painting, you would tell him not to quit his day job. Nobody starts out as a virtuoso. Including DaVinci.
So the next time you make a mistake, whether it be in business, art, or love, remember that it take literally a lifetime to become perfect at anything. Before any great painting or book or building is completed there go dozens or hundreds of drafts, reaching up for greatness like flowers to the sun.
Just stay focused. Or don’t. DaVinci took three years off painting to study geometry, and it only made his paintings all the better in the end. I wouldn’t recommend taking 3 years off a project to scroll through FaceBook. Other than that, anything that pulls your heart away from a project just might take you somewhere better.
So if you stumble, choke, riff it, or find yourself lost, take heart, and follow it. You’ll get there. To be on the way is to be there.
Stay up!
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Photo: iStock