This week, PBS premiered “Leonardo da Vinci,” a two-part documentary by Ken Burns, whose previous films, most notably, “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” and “The Vietnam War,” set the gold standard for documentaries. His new “Leonardo da Vinci” is platinum—a superbly done portrait of a genius and highly recommended for its inspiring view of discovery and creativity.
Among the many experts who contributed to Burns’ documentary is Walter Isaacson, the author of “Leonardo da Vinci,” the bestselling authoritative biography of the ultimate Renaissance Man. Near the end of his 525-page book, Isaacson provides a fascinating summary he calls “Learning from Leonardo,” in which he extracts 20 best practices for creativity. With sincere gratitude to Mr. Isaacson, I’ve adapted three of the 20 as lessons that you can use to develop your story.
Go down rabbit holes.
Isaacson describes one of Leonardo’s notebooks that contains “169 attempts to square a circle.” The lesson for you is to allow yourself to go down those rabbit holes, to make multiple attempts to develop your message. Because you spend all your waking hours thinking about your business, all those thoughts are always present in your mind. Some of them are useful, some are not. Those are your rabbit holes. But there is no such thing as a bad idea. Even if an idea feels tangential or trivial, consider it. Assess its relevance later. You don’t want to discover that you’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Your challenge is to decide which ones to keep and which ones to discard.
The way to do that is to brainstorm. Get all of your ideas out of your mind and onto an external surface so that you can consider and evaluate them. You can write your ideas on sticky notes, a legal pad, a whiteboard, a digital whiteboard, or in one of the many brainstorming software programs available. In that view, you can evaluate each item and follow it down it’s rabbit hole to ensure you capture all necessary and relevant ideas.
Do your data dump in your preparation and not your presentation.
Get distracted.
Isaacson reports that Leonardo tended to “wander off on tangents,” as is evident by his explorations into such diverse fields such as art, botany, physics, human anatomy, and physiology. As history has shown us, each of Leonardo’s “wanderings” produced significant discoveries that became invaluable contributions to humankind.
The lesson for you is to wander, to step away from your story development. Educators call this technique “distributed learning,” the opposite of “massed learning,” the latter, a synonym for cramming. Point made.
“Distributed learning” is also known as “spaced learning,” in which you create a draft, put it aside, and then return after a brief period to discover new directions, words, and ideas. Think of spaced learning as a productive version of the Etch A Sketch toy: write something, clear the screen, and return later with a fresh point of view.
Kevin Cashman, the CEO of Korn Ferry, takes his creative breaks by “going for a walk, taking a shower, or going for a drive,” as he describes in his book, The Pause Principle. I take mini breaks away from my writing by scrolling through social media, as described in this prior blog.
Procrastinate.
Isaacson tells us that for Leonardo, “creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel.” But for businesspeople, who are always pressed for time, there is no marination period. Instead, they seek the shortest distance between two points; they work on the end product during the creative process. They edit—from wordsmithing to whole sentences and paragraphs—as they go along. Unfortunately, this impedes the creative process and results in an uneven end product.
The solution is called Splat and Polish. Start by unloading a “Splat!” of ideas in whatever order they came out, free form, a Data Dump. But don’t stop to edit. If you can’t think of a word, simply write an “x” and fill it in later. Just let the ideas flow. Organize them later, and even later still polish them into words, sentences, paragraphs and, ultimately, into slides.
Brainstorm, Spaced Learning, and Splat and Polish won’t necessarily produce the Mona Lisa, but it will make your story clear.