Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most of it doesn't work. If it doesn't work, you do something else. The thing that works, you do more of.
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"Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve."
"The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."
"The greatest pleasure and the greatest knowledge is to understand why everything is as it is."
"He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast."
"The greatest good is that which is chosen in preference to all others."
This is a common modern paraphrase, not a direct quote from his notebooks.
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Work & MoneyFound in 1 providers: grok
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Most ambitions and experiments fail — that's expected, not shameful. The insight is about iteration: try things, notice what fails, abandon it without regret, try something different, and when you find what actually works, invest more energy there. It's a practical, unsentimental approach to life and work — treating failure as neutral data rather than defeat, and success as a signal worth pursuing further.
Da Vinci filled over 13,000 notebook pages with designs most of which were never built. He abandoned major commissions including the Battle of Anghiari mural and experimented with encaustic techniques that degraded The Last Supper. Yet he pivoted relentlessly across anatomy, engineering, and optics. His willingness to discard failed approaches without shame — treating each dead end as information — defined his extraordinary breadth.
The Italian Renaissance was reshaping how Europeans understood knowledge itself. Gutenberg's press had recently accelerated the spread of ideas, and Church authority over natural philosophy was eroding as humanists championed direct observation. Workshop apprenticeships meant learning through doing; failed attempts were intrinsic to craft. There was no codified scientific method yet — Francis Bacon wouldn't formalize empiricism for another century — making iterative experimentation genuinely radical thinking.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].
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