The conventional wisdom is that if you don’t set a goal, you won’t get where you want to go. You might be   receptionist who has the goal of one day becoming a novelist or a construction worker who wants to own your own company. You dream about it and have confidence that you can do it. Yet day after day you go to your job and the book you mean to write never gets written; the company you mean to run never gets started. It’s a common problem: We set our goals, but then don’t know how to get from here to there.

Artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci was fully aware of this tendency in himself and in others who were learning to paint. Here’s what he had to say to those who aspired to greatness: “[We] can only comprehend one thing at a time. Let us suppose that you…were to glance over the whole of this written page: You would instantly judge it to be full of various letters but you would not in that time recognize what the letters were, nor what they might mean. And so you have to proceed word by word, and line by line if you wish to gather information from these letters. Again if you wish to climb to the top of a building you will have to go up step by step, otherwise it will be impossible to arrive at the top.”

November 2008 Newsletter