What You Can Learn From History's Greatest Innovators | Walter Isaacson | The Knowledge Project 121

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Smart people are a dime a dozen. Isaacson studies creative people who see patterns across fields.

  Working at Time, Isaacson noticed that intelligence rarely amounts to much on its own. What set Franklin, Einstein, Jobs, Leonardo and Jennifer Doudna apart was creativity: an interest in everything knowable, and the pattern-spotting that let them make mental leaps others missed. He writes chronologically because that's how lives and character develop. A Louisiana mentor told him the state produces preachers and storytellers: 'For heaven's sake, be a storyteller.' He edits on screen, then prints everything at night, reads it on paper the next morning to catch 'kludgy' sentences, and then reads it aloud.

• 02

  His biographies are not how-to books. Learn from many lives and play your own cards.

  When people, Elizabeth Holmes among them, told him they used his Steve Jobs as a manual, he said 'don't try this at home'. There's only one Jobs, and only one Leonardo. You need to study many lives, see what makes each person effective, and work out what fits you. Isaacson admits that as a manager at Time and CNN he was never comfortable being brutally honest. Jobs ('if something sucks, I tell them to their face') kept only A players. Doudna has prospective lab members meet everyone first, so that people feel they fit. Franklin was the diplomatic 'glue' among passionate, upright and brilliant founders. Each style worked for its owner.

• 03

  'Impute': everything signals something the moment people see it.

  Mentor Mike Markkula's 1979 memo listed empathy, focus and the awkward word 'impute'. Jobs insisted on four-color boxes for the original Mac despite the cost, because the box had to impute delight. Opening an early iPod felt like opening a Tiffany jewel box. Isaacson contrasts this with junky remote controls and software that seems to announce a bad experience. Jobs put products before profits. Chasing profit leads to cutting corners, and building an insanely good product brings the profits.

• 04

  Care about the beauty of the parts nobody sees.

  When Jobs and his father built a backyard fence, his father insisted the back facing the scrubland be as beautiful as the front: nobody else would know, 'but you will know.' So Jobs fussed over the original Mac's circuit board inside a sealed case, and had about 30 team members' signatures engraved inside it, where only they would know. Isaacson watched Jobs and Jony Ive handle about seven prototype European plugs, discussing their chamfers and how each would feel in the hand. The flip side was perfectionism that delayed shipping, until Apple put up a sign: 'Real artists ship.'

• 05

  Creativity comes from in-person collisions in diverse places, and then disperses.

  Jobs designed Pixar's headquarters so everyone had to cross the atrium and bump into each other. Florence in the 1470s, Philadelphia in the 1770s and Silicon Valley in the 1970s became cradles of creativity because diverse people and ideas gathered there. Such places burn out when tolerance is crushed, as with Savonarola's bonfires of the vanities. Zoom recreates maybe 60% of it. The CRISPR scientists started in person and then worked across three continents. Today, creativity is spreading to Austin, Nashville, New Orleans, Boston's Kendall Square and even Memphis, where CRISPR is being used to treat sickle cell.

• 06

  Leonardo shows that curiosity, not raw horsepower, is within everyone's reach.

  Einstein had a processing power most of us can't match. Leonardo probably wasn't as rigorous as his mathematician friend Luca Pacioli. What he had was insatiable curiosity about things the rest of us stop noticing. Both Leonardo's and Einstein's notebooks ask why the sky is blue. Leonardo sprayed water into light, wondered why fish swim faster in water than birds fly in air, and dissected heart valves well beyond anything his art required, purely for delight. He was illegitimate, gay, left-handed and distracted, yet Florence embraced him. Children are all curious, Isaacson says, until grown-ups tell them to quit asking dumb questions.

• 07

  Perfectionism cost Leonardo many finished works, but it made the Mona Lisa.

  Leonardo completed only a handful of paintings. He kept the Mona Lisa, commissioned by a Florentine merchant as a portrait of his wife, through Milan, Rome and France, adding thin layers until his death. He understood that the center of the eye sees detail and the periphery sees shadow and color better. If you look directly at the corners of her lips, they don't turn up. Shift your gaze and the smile appears. He and Michelangelo, a gregarious figure and a loner, were commissioned as rivals to paint opposite walls of Florence's town hall, and both quit.

• 08

  Don't specialize too soon. Go deep on a few things, but also go wide.

  At Time, one of the last general-interest magazines, Isaacson might write about medicine one week and music, business or politics the next, which trained him to see patterns. 'You can learn anything,' as Sal Khan says. He studied tensor calculus to understand general relativity, then left the equations out of the book. Read original sources where you can: Einstein's 1905 special relativity paper has one footnote and is 'gloriously written'. Leonardo left more than 7,000 notebook pages, and paper's 'battery life is almost infinite'. Then triangulate with interviews.