A few days ago, I went with some family members to an exhibit about Leonardo da Vinci. The museum’s website had reminded me that da Vinci was an artist, a scientist, and an inventor—a real Renaissance man. A lot of us with ADD have myriad interests, and my daughter and I both love science and art and the intersection of the two. It would be fun to see how a creative genius put his own varying interests together. But I hadn’t anticipated another ADD connection.
At one point, my mom was peering at a model of a machine that da Vinci had invented, a contraption of wood and metal and gears. It was hard to tell what it was for, so she leaned over to read about it. Turns out it was some kind of clock mechanism, but without hands or clock face.
“Da Vinci was a typical ADD engineer,” said a curator who was standing there. “He didn’t finish things. He came up with the ideas, but he had people to finish things for him.”
There’s a lesson here for those of us with ADD, I think. Like da Vinci, many of us are creative but not good at finishing things. We can certainly work on getting better at finishing. But another option is to collaborate with people who are less ADD. Please hear that I’m not suggesting anyone just dump unfinished projects on other people. I’m talking about setting things up so some people’s organizational skills complement other people’s innovative thinking.
I often notice successful people with what look to me to be ADD traits. What’s helped for some of them, I suspect, is collaboration with organized partners: colleagues, spouses, administrators, graduate students, medical staff, or co-authors.
Apparently, it worked for da Vinci.
“Alas, Leonardo's interests were so broad, and he was so often compelled by new subjects, that he usually failed to finish what he started.” Sound familiar? It’s from a short bio of da Vinci on the website of the Museum of Science in Boston.
A lot of people on Amazon liked Garret LoPorto’s book The Da Vinci Method, which I haven’t read. Sounds interesting though.
