Name: The Da Vinci Curse
Rating: 4.2 (101 reviews)
Author: Leonardo Lospennato

What’s in it for me? Learn what it takes to overcome your Da Vinci curse!

You know Leonardo Da Vinci already. He was a universal genius: a painter, a sculptor, an architect, an anatomist. He never specialized in one particular field, and this wasn’t a big issue back in those days.

Today, however, things have changed quite a bit. In fact, society doesn’t seem to have much time for Da Vinci people – that is, the Renaissance men and women of our time. These individuals never really get around to mastering one field of knowledge fully and thus become almost obsolete in today’s highly complex knowledge society.

But don’t worry, these blinks will provide you with an understanding of why some people (including you?) cannot get around to specializing in one field, and maybe more importantly, teach you how to overcome the curse.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why competition is likely to paralyze any desire for specialization;
how to identify an activity that’ll lift the Da Vinci curse; and
why you should distinguish between cow, dog and star activities.

Multi-talented people don’t fit into a world focused on specialization.

Doctors who specialize in spinal surgery, psychologists with expertise in adolescent schizophrenia, physicists who study gravitational waves: The list of specialists in today’s society is long – and for good reason.

In fact, specialists have never been more important than today.

This is because knowledge has been rapidly growing since Da Vinci’s era in the sixteenth century. And as knowledge accumulates, expertise becomes more and more important.

Take the spinal surgeon. The intricacies of the spine demand absolute precision during surgery. That’s why it requires years of specialized training to acquire the expertise necessary to not make a single mistake.

This means that someone who is interested in spinal surgery, but also wants to be a maestro on the violin and become a top chef, will have to make a tough decision: if you want to master a highly complex skill, you can only dedicate yourself to one thing.

Indeed, this is the struggle of all multi-talented people.

Multi-talented people feel a strong drive to realize all their talents, but fear that they don’t have enough time. Furthermore, they are typically highly curious, but struggle to commit to the practice that mastery requires. They get fascinated by a new field and dive into it with a passion. But once they’ve mastered the basics, the initial appeal fades away.

Take the author as an example. He fell in love with classical music when he was 18 and began learning the violin. But only a few months later, his interest vanished, he stopped going to classes, and he moved on to something else.

Finding our personal calling starts with creating a long wish list, and then drawing up a short list.

Now that we know we need a calling to lift the Da Vinci curse, how exactly do we find it? The author proposes a three-step approach that starts with preselection.

In the preselection stage we write out a creative inventory of every activity we would like to do.

Imagine for a moment that you have infinite time and money. How would you decide to spend your life? Write down all the activities that come to mind, including jobs, hobbies and even one-time experiences – for example, getting a degree in psychology, scuba-diving in Thailand, learning the piano, etc. And make sure to include your wildest dreams, like becoming a pop star or walking on the moon.

The second step in the quest for our calling is a systematic evaluation of our creative inventory.

Now that we have a basic assessment of our creative inventory, it’s time to move to the next step: a more pragmatic and systematic evaluation of our activities.

Our previous list pinpointed our intersection of talent, money and fun. We now need to refine our list by asking two crucial questions: First, how much income potential does each activity involve? Second, how fulfilling will each activity be?

We need to balance fear, overcome procrastination, surmount blocks and manage our narcissism.

The first two steps allowed us to determine and evaluate the activities we like. Now, step three ensures that our newly minted plan won’t fail. Let’s see what we need to know about the common traps and obstacles of following a new calling.

First of all, we need some fear – but not too much.

Key ideas in The Da Vinci Curse

What is The Da Vinci Curse about?

The Da Vinci Curse (2012) plagues people who have too many talents and interests: they are always learning, but never invest enough time and energy into one thing. They are always swapping their job, their hobbies or even home and never become fully engaged in the many domains to which they’re drawn. These blinks describe their particular problems, analyzes the causes and provides a powerful systematic approach to combat the curse.