The Renaissance Worker - by Alex - Still Wandering

Just finished Walter Isaacson's Leonardo da Vinci biography. Six hundred pages about a man who couldn't decide between being a painter, engineer, anatomist, architect, botanist, mathematician, or theatre designer—so he did all of them. The book treats this as genius. Today, we'd probably tell him to focus. Leonardo designed flying machines while painting portraits. He dissected corpses to understand how muscles create smiles. He studied water flow to paint better hair. His notebooks jump from military fortifications to cloud formation to the mechanics of the human eye, sometimes on the same page. What struck me was his refusal to separate his interests. He was all of these things simultaneously, and each interest fed the others. We've spent the last century trying to become specialists. One job title. One LinkedIn headline. One professional identity. That model is dying. The economy is starting to reward Leonardo-like behaviour again. People are maintaining parallel careers everywhere.

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• Nancy Zuo