Disciple of Experience (Disscepolo della Sperientia)
How to sharpen your mind and become a self-taught person
Leonardo da Vinci used to sign off his letters, “Leonardo da Vinci, disscepolo della sperientia” (“disciple of experience”).
At the time, being non legittimo (aka not legit) meant Leonardo was banned from “Latin schools” and unable to follow in his father’s footsteps as a notary*. His father Piero could have legitimized him, but he didn’t (perhaps he saw that his son would have been a bad notary). This misfortune by circumstance was a blessing in disguise, the beginning of a life outside the norm that forged the Leonardo da Vinci we admire today — 500+ years later.
Leonardo became a self-taught man—a disciple of experience.
Was this easy? Did it help him fit in? No. But it did sharpen one of the greatest minds the world has ever seen.
“I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk!… They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors, but by those of others…. They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe — but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the words of others.”
Leonardo wasn’t railing against books per se, but rather, people who blindly follow them.
What does this look like in our own lives?
- Accepting what is without thinking for yourself
- Learning without implementing
- Reading salacious headlines without reading the full article or verifying the sources.
- Accepting one opinion without cross-referencing
- Avoiding the work.
Wolf. That last one in particular is a gut punch to me. It’s so easy for me to get distracted learning new things without using what I learn and applying my ideas. The problem — beyond there being an infinite amount of things we could spend our time learning — is we never actually get anything done.
But it’s as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”
What is a (nonfiction) book but a collection of information and wisdom collected by individuals or organizations? “Everything in our world was made up by people like us.” That means some information may be incorrect, wrong, or simply outdated. Plus, regurgitating books we read doesn’t mean we understand them. We must test things for ourselves. Putting what we learn into practice is how we cultivate wisdom and skill.
Not all learning is created equal. Getting good grades is how you pass your classes, but it doesn’t mean you’ve learned or truly know something. If you’re like me, most classes have gone in one ear and out the other.
To Be Or Not To Be:
We all want to be somebody. A mother. An entrepreneur. A photographer. More so, we want to be a great somebody. A great mother. A successful entrepreneur. A renowned photographer.
Labels can be a useful tool to focus us. We label ourselves to signal to others (and ourselves) what we are.
Sometimes we aim first: labeling ourselves before we begin. Sometimes we tell who we were—like we are listing job experiences: I was a UX designer at So&So startup.
Most of us would likely skip the work to get there if we could.
Meaning, if you could flip a switch and be a serial entrepreneur whose sold multiple successful companies and made billions, would you?
The funny thing about that is read or watch many interviews with people who have created success and they reminisce fondly of when they were just getting started. ‘If only I could do it again…’ Honestly, this is difficult to fathom, as someone who hasn’t built something successful yet. But part of me understands. You spend all this time and effort to get somewhere, and then you do! But now what? Of course, to me, spending an enormous amount of time and effort and getting nowhere is a worse fate. But doing nothing is worse of all.
Personally, I’d rather try and fail than have not tried at all.
Learning to Enjoy the Process
Perhaps it’s not where we are, where we want to be, or where we end up that matters. In the end, if we can learn to enjoy the journey, give it our all, grow, make friends, and laugh along the way, we become who we were meant to be.
The journey itself is required to become who we want to be. Not to say we need to constantly be juggling one disaster after another, or saying yes to every shiny thing that comes our way.
What separates those who do from those who don’t?
I can learn a million programming languages, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to build an app (let alone a useful one). We can spend a lifetime learning, but never implementing what we learn.
Experience is putting pen to paper. It’s failing again and again without a loss of enthusiasm.
Experience is being terrified of stepping into discomfort and the unknown, but doing it anyway.
Experience is doing the work and overcoming the obstacles that get in the way.
7 Ways to Cultivate a Discipline of Experience:
- Desire: We must want it more than anything.
- “Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
- This may sound super dumb, but if you want to be a yoga instructor, don’t study accounting.
- Don’t get me wrong, there’s value in following your curiosity (more on that shortly). If you’re curious about balancing assets and liabilities, by all means — study accounting. Just don’t study accounting to get better at yoga.
- This makes perfect sense on paper, but how surprising is it we often do the opposite, usually without realizing it.
- I have done this many times in my life. There are so many things we should do. Things society or our family tells us. Things our peers are doing that make us wonder why we aren’t doing them. And don’t get me started about the countless number of shiny things we could be doing. Not to say that everything our influencers tell us is wrong (Maybe putting money each month in a ROTH IRA or other retirement fund is a good idea).
- However, just because we should be doing something, doesn’t mean it’s right for us.
- Competition alone should make us hesitate. If you hate selling (or even find it boring) but do it anyway, how are you possibly going to compete against people who thrive selling and get a bowl of sales for breakfast??
- To be good at something, you gotta want it first — more than anything.
- Experiment: Be Empirical & Go Hands On
“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” — Leonardo da Vinci
Being book-smart only gets you so far. The problem with relying only on books (or videos — any media really) is everything is at the very least second-hand experience. It’s also extremely easy to get into the habit of reading book after book (or video after video) without actively applying it in your own life. The best way to see if a principle, tactic, habit, or idea… works in your life is to test it yourself. Experiment. Teach.
- Be Curious
“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.” — Leonardo da Vinci
If there’s one trait that is responsible for Leonardo’s numerous ideas and inventions it's his unflappable curiosity. Leonardo’s mastery of art was fueled by scientific curiosity. Curiosity is foundational to creativity. Being curious opens us up to trying new things, asking questions, better observations, and stepping outside of the norm. Kids have a natural curiosity they are driven by. They do it without even having the vocabulary to know what they are doing. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way our curiosity is beaten out of us. But curiosity is a trait — it’s something that we can hone. If you don’t think of yourself as curious, perhaps it’s simply because you haven’t been developing your curious “muscles” lately.
- Challenge Received Wisdom
“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” — Leonardo da Vinci
Most (if not all) Everything we learn is based on what we’ve learned from our surroundings and our perceptions. Our collective knowledge is continuously changing (and not evenly distributed). Take textbooks for example. A biology textbook is (ideally) the best collective information we know about how life works. Broadly, just think about how much has changed since the internet was invented in the late 1990s. Things that seem 100% factual today, could be completely off-base tomorrow. Not to mention there are usually opinions behind information. Challenging received wisdom isn’t about throwing everything away or making up random things, rather taking ownership of what we know and testing it for ourselves. “Strong opinions loosely held.”
- Approach Learning with a First-Principles Thinking
“The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.” — Leonardo da Vinci
One strategy we can apply to challenge received wisdom is approaching things from a first-principles mindset. I heard about first principles from interviews with Elon Musk. Effectively it means approaching things from their fundamental atoms or roots and building up from there. This allows us to see things for what they truly are and challenge assumptions we may be throwing around without actually considering if they pan out in reality. Some received wisdom might be sound, or perhaps it’s based on assumptions. Assumptions are built on top of more assumptions, stacked into a neat pile that looks like reality, like it’s existed since the birth of time, but ultimately are built on false or misinterpreted ideas. Thinking from first principles allows us to view things from the ground up, ideally without the (potential) baggage that has come before. It’s also worth noting that things change over time. What was true in the past, might need to be reconsidered in the present. As it’s said, “All facts have a half-live”.
- Take Note
“Who sows virtue reaps honor.” — Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci kept copious records and drawings of his experiments and ideas. Taking notes gives us the opportunity to ground ourselves and inspect our thoughts. This could simply be making a simple list of everything we do each day and how much time is going to each item. Or it could be a journal practice, like Morning Pages. The act of writing itself helps codify what we learn into our minds, but reviewing our notes is also a valuable habit to develop.
How many ideas have you forgotten simply because you didn’t write them down or record them?
On guitar, I have a difficult time keeping song ideas in my head. If I didn’t record my ideas in voice memos or on video, there would be countless good ideas I would have lost. The same goes for writing ideas.
- Practice
“Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.” — Leonardo da Vinci
Of course, you can’t have experience without practice. Experience is earned through hard work. Experience happens on the field. There’s practice — honing your skills. And there’s testing and shipping your ideas. Pen to paper. Hitting publish on your video. Getting feedback from real users for your app. Practice is usually uncomfortable and non-conformative work to boot. To be good at something, we need to put in the reps. Day after day.
Each of these 7 applications of discipline not only cultivates discipline itself but unleashes your creativity.
Disscepolo della sperientia.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, I hope you found it helpful.
How are you cultivating experience discipline?
Are there other applications (besides the 7 above) that I’m missing?
What areas are you good at and which ones would you like to improve in? (Examples and stories encouraged)
Stay Curious, Josh Waggoner
