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The Da Vinci Curse
Life Design for People With Too Many Interests and Talents
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.
- Everyone who feels drawn to many fields but can’t choose one
- Those who change their hobbies and jobs constantly and struggle to finish projects
Leonardo Lospennato is a Renaissance spirit who has studied engineering, worked for eBay and IBM, and written articles as a journalist. He now follows his calling as a modern-day luthier making custom electric guitars and basses.
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The Da Vinci Curse
Life Design for People With Too Many Interests and Talents
- Read in 12 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 7 key ideas
Synopsis
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.
Key idea 1 of 7
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.
Key ideas in this title
- Multi-talented people don’t fit into a world focused on specialization.
- Da Vinci people fear competition and struggle to find the field in which they can thrive.
- To lift the Da Vinci curse, Da Vinci people need to find an activity that involves many of their talents.
- Finding our personal calling starts with creating a long wish list, and then drawing up a short list.
- The second step in the quest for our calling is a systematic evaluation of our creative inventory.
- We need to balance fear, overcome procrastination, surmount blocks and manage our narcissism.
- Final summary
