Leonardo da Vinci on Creativity
By AI Anyone Team · 2026-08-02 · 7 min read · Historical Figures
How Leonardo actually worked, drawn from the notebooks: relentless observation, cross-domain borrowing, and the habit of never finishing.
Thousands of pages of Leonardo's notes survive, and the striking thing about them is not the flying machines. It is the mess. A single sheet can carry a study of a shoulder joint, a sketch of swirling water, a note about money owed, a reminder to ask a specific person a specific question, and a small profile of a face, all crowded together in mirrored handwriting. Nothing is filed. Nothing is resolved. It reads less like an archive than like a mind caught mid-thought.
That mess is the method. Leonardo did not keep a notebook to record finished thinking. He thought on the page, and the page shows the thinking happening.
Drawing was how he looked, not what he made
The habit underneath everything else is observation, held far past where most people stop looking.
Leonardo drew the same things over and over: hands, horses, water, faces, plants, the folds in cloth. Not to produce a portfolio of hands. To find out what a hand actually is. He would draw a shoulder from four angles, peel back a layer, and draw it again. He dissected human corpses when that was unpleasant, socially awkward, and technically miserable work, because he wanted to see what a muscle did when it moved an arm, and no book was going to tell him.
The practical point: drawing (or writing, or diagramming, or building a rough prototype) is not the output of understanding. It is the instrument that produces it. You cannot draw a hand badly for long without discovering exactly which part of it you do not understand. The gap in the drawing is the gap in the knowledge, and it shows up immediately.
So the first habit worth stealing is not "be observant." It is: pick an externalizing tool and use it to find your own gaps. Sketch the system before you build it. Write the explanation before you claim you understand the thing. The version on paper will be honest about what you missed.
How he actually looked
Three things separate his observation from ordinary looking:
- He varied the conditions. Water in a fast channel, water hitting an obstacle, water falling into a pool. Same subject, changed circumstances, so the pattern underneath becomes visible.
- He looked at the boring parts. Not just the dramatic gesture but the wrinkle behind the knee, the way a cloth sags where it is unsupported.
- He looked longer than the task required. The painting needed a plausible hand. He wanted the mechanism behind it.
The notebook is a workspace, not a record
Told to keep a notebook, most people produce a diary or a tidy commonplace book. Leonardo's pages are neither. They mix registers freely: technical drawings next to grocery items, geometric puzzles next to jokes and fables, an anatomical study next to a memo about an unpaid bill.
Two entry types stand out because they are so easy to copy.
Questions written down as questions. He filled pages with things he did not know, phrased as open problems: why the sky is blue, why a bird can hover, what makes the tide move. Writing a question down does something a mental note does not. It survives, it accumulates, and it can be answered later by a different version of you.
To-do lists made of people. Some of his lists are pure sourcing: find out how people walk on ice in the north, get the mathematician to show him how to square a triangle, ask a particular builder how a particular tower was constructed. He treated other people's expertise as a queryable resource and kept a running list of who to ask about what.
Almost nobody keeps that habit. Most of us have a task list. Few have a question list, and fewer still a list of who could answer each one.
Cross-domain transfer was the whole engine
Leonardo's real advantage was not raw talent at any one thing. It was that his fields leaked into each other, constantly, on purpose.
The anatomy work fed the painting: knowing which muscle pulls the corner of a mouth is why his faces read as alive rather than arranged. The water studies fed the hair and the drapery: he noticed that curling water and curling hair move in related ways, one pushed by current and one falling under its own weight, and he drew both with the same attention to how a flow turns back on itself. His work on how light falls off gradually across a curved surface fed the soft, edgeless transitions his portraits are known for. Optics fed perspective. Mechanics fed the anatomical drawings, which he sometimes rendered like an engineer's exploded diagram of a machine.
None of this happens if the fields are kept in separate boxes. It happens because everything went into the same notebook, in no particular order, where an idea about water could sit two inches from an idea about hair until somebody noticed they were the same idea.
The modern version is unglamorous: keep one capture surface, not seven. Let unrelated things touch. Connections get made by proximity, not by search.
If you want a sense of how this felt from the inside, it is worth asking him. Put a question to Leonardo in a conversation about a specific abandoned project, the bronze horse for the Sforza court or the wall painting of the battle that would not dry, and ask what he thought he was solving when he started. The answer he gives to "why did you stop" is usually more interesting than the abandonment itself.
The shadow side is real, and it was expensive
Any honest account has to include this: Leonardo did not finish things.
The list of unfinished or destroyed work is long and includes projects he badly wanted. A monumental bronze horse for the Duke of Milan got as far as a full-size clay model and no further; the metal went to cannon and the model did not survive. A large battle scene failed because he insisted on an experimental wall technique that would not set. Patrons waited years for portraits that never arrived. Anecdotes from the period have patrons complaining that he began by preparing materials and ended without a picture.
Read the notebooks and you can see why. The attention that made him extraordinary was the same attention that pulled him off task. A question about casting the horse becomes a question about metallurgy, which becomes a question about furnace design. Every project opened three more, and each was genuinely interesting.
The habits do not come free. Adopt the curiosity without guardrails and the scattered attention comes with it.
What to actually do with this
The transferable version, minus the mythology:
- Keep one notebook, and let it be messy. Mixing domains is the feature. Do not sort your interests into separate systems.
- Write questions, not just tasks. Keep a running list of things you do not understand. Revisit it monthly. Some will have answered themselves; the ones that have not are your real work.
- Keep a who-to-ask column. Next to each open question, name a person or a source. Curiosity converts to knowledge through specific people.
- Draw, sketch, or prototype before you are ready. Use the crude version to locate your own ignorance rather than to display competence.
- Study one thing past the point of usefulness. Pick a subject adjacent to your work and go deeper than the job requires. That surplus is where transfer comes from.
- Then finish something small. This is the part Leonardo cannot teach you. Set a bar that is shippable, not perfect, and clear it on a schedule. Completion is a separate skill from creation.
Curiosity, in his case, was not a mood that arrived on good days. It was a standing practice: look, draw, write the question down, ask someone, look again. That part is available to anyone with a notebook and the patience to stare at something ordinary for longer than it seems to deserve. The finishing part you will have to solve yourself.
Start here: open a conversation with Leonardo da Vinci and ask him what he was actually trying to learn when he studied moving water, and how it changed the way he painted hair. Then push on the follow-up: what would he have finished, if he had to choose only one?
