How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci

Taking a break from transcribing video interviews and came across this article on procrastinating.

Thought you might enjoy it too.

How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci

A few quotes:

If Leonardo seemed endlessly distracted by his notebooks and experiments — instead of finishing the details of a painting he had already conceptualized — it was because he understood the fleeting quality of imagination: If you do not get an insight down on paper, and possibly develop it while your excitement lasts, then you are squandering the rarest and most unpredictable of your human capabilities, the very moments when one seems touched by the hand of God.

Productive mediocrity requires discipline of an ordinary kind. It is safe and threatens no one. Nothing will be changed by mediocrity; mediocrity is completely predictable. It doesn’t make the powerful and self-satisfied feel insecure. It doesn’t require freedom, because it doesn’t do anything unexpected. Mediocrity is the opposite of what we call “genius.” Mediocrity gets perfectly mundane things done on time. But genius is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. You cannot produce a work of genius according to a schedule or an outline

And here’s my favorite quote from the article:

Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we subordinated every other obligation to follow it.

I think at this point we all could benefit from remembering why we entered this profession. What if you put away the stress of worrying about your job for a day? Or put that to-do list off and just did what you wanted to do? What if you took photos that you actually wanted to take rather than those boring photos the business section expects? It’s easy to fall into the mundane routine of life as you work to make a living. Not sure about you, but I need to spend less time worrying about things out of my control and get back to my roots. Sure everybody needs to eat just don’t forget to feed your soul in the process.

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.