Da Vinci, Steve Jobs and the Thread that Joins the Arts and the Sciences
“Talent hits a target that no one else can hit. Genius hits a target that no one else can see.”– Arthur Schopenhauer
In most of the Apple product launches, Steve Jobs showed a slide with two street signs intersecting at the corner of “liberal arts and technology”. This image summarizes one of the core ideas by which Jobs lived and worked. Originally inspired by the great Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci, it shows what, according to many biographers and historians including Walter Isaacson, is the true definition of genius.
“[Jobs] saw the beauty in both art and engineering, and his ability to combine them was what made him a genius” — Walter Isaacson.
True geniuses do not distinguish between arts and sciences. For them, it’s all the same, or as Isaacson says, “Art is a science and science is an art”.
Merging the arts with the sciences is something that we blindly ignore these days. Today we have a clear division between artists, like singers, writers, actors etc and scientists, like engineers, physicists, mathematicians and so on. Therefore, we see very lesser and lesser number of multifaceted personalities like physicists who sing, engineers who write or mathematicians who act.
However, if we look back at the great people from history, they were all multifaceted. Einstein loved pulling out his violin and playing Mozart when he got stuck between theories. He said it helped him to reconnect with the harmonies of the cosmos.
In his book about da Vinci, Walter Isaacson frequently says:
“Creativity is the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation.” — Walter Isaacson
Some people are great in a particular field, like Leonard Euler in mathematics and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in music. But the most important geniuses are those who see patterns across nature’s infinite beauties.
If we look at da Vinci, he was nothing of a superhuman. “Leonardo wasn’t so smart. He didn’t have the theoretical brainpower of a Newton or an Einstein or the math skills of his friend Luca Pacioli. But he was just curious about everything. The person most curious about more things than anyone else in history”, wrote Isaacson in his biography of Leonardo.
The secret behind the geniuses of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci is very clear. They never distinguished between the arts and sciences. For them, they were one. It is the act of living at this intersection, which allowed them to show interests in many fields and flourish. Or in other words, to become what we now call ‘true genius’.
