Leonardo Syndrome(thoughtfulatlas.bearblog.dev)
thoughtfulatlas.bearblog.dev
Leonardo Syndrome
https://thoughtfulatlas.bearblog.dev/leonardo-syndrome/
19 comments
On the other hand, there are many reports that Leonardo himself lamented not finishing things, and wrote “Tell me if anything was ever done” in his notebooks.
(I don't know the full context of this—searching online suggests the original was "Dimmi se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa"—but as you yourself say, Leonardo was prone to perfectionism and starting far more than he could finish and had a reputation for disappointing patrons, which seems to fit well with the author's main point, even if the example of the horse doesn't.)
(I don't know the full context of this—searching online suggests the original was "Dimmi se mai fu fatta alcuna cosa"—but as you yourself say, Leonardo was prone to perfectionism and starting far more than he could finish and had a reputation for disappointing patrons, which seems to fit well with the author's main point, even if the example of the horse doesn't.)
Also, his last words were, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.”
Be careful, often this sort of quotes from famous people are invented or at least not documented, although they usually describe the character correctly.
Sounds right.
I’m also not sure how damning the accusation is that he worked on squaring the circle. It wouldn’t be proven impossible for hundreds years after his time.
I guess you could say he chased something already widely accepted but not proven, but kind of big deal? I wouldn’t fault someone for spending some spare time on P ≠ NP just out of curiosity.
I’m also not sure how damning the accusation is that he worked on squaring the circle. It wouldn’t be proven impossible for hundreds years after his time.
I guess you could say he chased something already widely accepted but not proven, but kind of big deal? I wouldn’t fault someone for spending some spare time on P ≠ NP just out of curiosity.
Syndrome implies malady. Better words for this style as applied to Leonardo would be Power/Capacity/Knack/Talent/Aptitude.
There is a malady that looks like this where someone is just flaky or incompetent. But then it probably shouldn't be named after Leonardo if he was actually displaying genius levels of knowing when to quit.
“Syndrome” would be correct if the underlying reason for Leonardo’s planning and follow-through challenges were due to disordered Executive functions and cognitive controls.
Charles Babbage may be a more fitting example:
In the first room I saw the parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. “I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my Analytical Engine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the calculating machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.” After a few minutes’ talk we went into the next workroom where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. “I have never completed it,” he said, “because I hit upon the idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.” Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, “It is not constructed yet, but I am working at it, and will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have taken to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.” I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart.
— John Fletcher Moulton, 1914
In the first room I saw the parts of the original Calculating Machine, which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before and had even been put to some use. I asked him about its present form. “I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my Analytical Engine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed the idea was so much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the calculating machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.” After a few minutes’ talk we went into the next workroom where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it. “I have never completed it,” he said, “because I hit upon the idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.” Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism but I saw no trace of any working machine. Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, “It is not constructed yet, but I am working at it, and will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have taken to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.” I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart.
— John Fletcher Moulton, 1914
It is however somewhat reassuring to know that something like feature creep or second system syndrome predates the digital computer.
Sounds like he was working with agility! Do just enough work to find out you're building the wrong thing so that it informs your next attempt. Repeat!
I read somewhere that he had problems into obtaining parts manufactured with enough precision and that he was using wood and that was terrible
They did fashion them in modern times, from the designs, and it seems they did work.
They did fashion them in modern times, from the designs, and it seems they did work.
[deleted]
Yikes, this hit very close to home for me.
I think I have Leonardo Syndrome. The Internet being so vast, there's countless things to try out and hack away at, and I have countless unfinished projects hoarded away on my hard-drives. I'm not actually a hoarder in the typical sense of keeping old newspapers for posterity and I'm actually a minimalist, but when it comes to my digital life: the ease of being able to keep mountains of the proverbial 'old newspapers' is magnified a trillion^trillion times.
Leonardo would be paralyzed by the modern web. I find myself also becoming like a magpie, gathering little snippets of code that one day may come in handy, and my bookmarks are overflowing with interesting actionable URLs that I plan to revisit someday. I'm a digital hoarder who likes to procrastinate a lot. Probably need to change that, or is this a natural response to the sheer vastness of the web and the only sane way to approach it?
Leonardo would be paralyzed by the modern web. I find myself also becoming like a magpie, gathering little snippets of code that one day may come in handy, and my bookmarks are overflowing with interesting actionable URLs that I plan to revisit someday. I'm a digital hoarder who likes to procrastinate a lot. Probably need to change that, or is this a natural response to the sheer vastness of the web and the only sane way to approach it?
I could have written the same comment!
I leave incomplete projects when I have gotten what I want from them. Many times it is just for exposure to a library or language or pattern.
I learn by doing so to fully grok something I have to use it which leads to this situation.
I leave incomplete projects when I have gotten what I want from them. Many times it is just for exposure to a library or language or pattern.
I learn by doing so to fully grok something I have to use it which leads to this situation.
Who's to say that the projects are incomplete if you have achieved what you wanted from them? Sounds very much complete to me, even though the final result might not be useful to anyone else.
I do the same and yet I don’t consider them complete. The activity itself is complete, absolutely, but not finishing projects could become a hard to shake off habit. I also agree, life’s short, in the end many learning experiences don’t need to be full projects, some things are good enough and meet their purpose without the need of complete dedication.
See, this is what I do all the time in my free time but nothing is ever good enough to publish because that's never the point and I know that if I do finish and publish something I might be on the hook to support it or for unforeseen misuse. I don't want that liability, but not having projects I've brought to production somehow makes me unworthy of working user stories off a kanban board.
I certainly have it, but I think there are ways to fight back.
Github and strictly source-controlling all my personal projects has done wonders for my progress.
The crappy part still is when you hit a blocker and really have to bust your ass to get through it. The temptation to go sideways and do something else is extremely strong when you don't have a business owner standing behind you.
Github and strictly source-controlling all my personal projects has done wonders for my progress.
The crappy part still is when you hit a blocker and really have to bust your ass to get through it. The temptation to go sideways and do something else is extremely strong when you don't have a business owner standing behind you.
> Examples of his failure include not successfully squaring the circle
Seems kind of mean to attack a guy for failing to finish something later proven to be impossible.
Seems kind of mean to attack a guy for failing to finish something later proven to be impossible.
DaVinci is in good company. Another such slacker was Newton, who spent all of that time on alchemy but never did transmute lead into gold.
For Newton to be interested in alchemy loosely makes sense, given the time frame.
I don't really understand much about Jung, but apparently towards the end of his life he became increasingly interested in alchemy. He published on it quite a bit. It's a really weird chapter in his legacy.
I don't really understand much about Jung, but apparently towards the end of his life he became increasingly interested in alchemy. He published on it quite a bit. It's a really weird chapter in his legacy.
Alchemy is another expression, a symbolic language, as part of a larger mythological and psychological journey in Jung's life and inner world.
> Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture during these years as "my most difficult experiment." This experiment involved a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious through wilful engagement of what Jung later termed "mythopoetic imagination".
> From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form... In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline.
> Jung initially recorded his "visions", "fantasies", or "imaginations" — all terms used by Jung to describe his activity — in a series of six journals.
> ..In 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke about the Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that interview he stated:
> The years ... when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)
> Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture during these years as "my most difficult experiment." This experiment involved a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious through wilful engagement of what Jung later termed "mythopoetic imagination".
> From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form... In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline.
> Jung initially recorded his "visions", "fantasies", or "imaginations" — all terms used by Jung to describe his activity — in a series of six journals.
> ..In 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke about the Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that interview he stated:
> The years ... when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)
Perhaps I am missing something, but alchemy sounds completely in character with Jung's works.
Ah, would that we aspire to achieve and accomplish even a fraction of such glorious, brilliant failures.
>never did transmute lead into gold.
That we know of.
That we know of.
This isn't a "syndrome" it's normal adaptive behaviour. Like everything you encounter in the real world, 80% of everything you decide to start doesn't actually need to be finished. Sometimes you need to start something in order to learn you're not willing to pay the price to have it finished, or you don't really need it.
I agree. Yet this attitude - not finishing things - could become a bad habit. All in all Im happy to learn even from half finished things which in my opinion is the primary goal.
It's a good habit. The only time you can feel bad about it is when the pain you feel from "not finishing things" exceeds the pain from not finishing this particular thing, which means finishing this particular thing wasn't that important to you, so you were right not to finish it.
Worst. Sentence. Evar. But hopefully you get my meaning.
Worst. Sentence. Evar. But hopefully you get my meaning.
>> Leonardo da Vinci himself. Despite being one of the most famous polymaths and creators in history - who doesn’t know about him?! - he was also somebody prone to failure.
I actually prefer to think to myself: failure is not even trying. If not, I would not start many things and finish few, but never start anything at all...
I actually prefer to think to myself: failure is not even trying. If not, I would not start many things and finish few, but never start anything at all...
>Examples of his failures included not successfully squaring the circle, multiple engineering designs that didn’t work such as a giant crossbow and a flying machine, misunderstanding several aspects of the heart, and experimental painting designs that resulted in the slow degradation of a painting.
The author is counting experiments and learning as failures. The squared circle is outright impossible. Only when expectations are set to God on Earth is Leo a "failure".
The author is counting experiments and learning as failures. The squared circle is outright impossible. Only when expectations are set to God on Earth is Leo a "failure".
We’re broken by the language: work vs play is a bad distinction. When you apply criterion from “work” to “play” it appears as though there are many failures and false starts. We should do both, and at the same time.
Honestly, this sounds to me like an analytical/creative mind with ADHD.
You make it sound like it is a bad thing when in fact it’s just the current perception in our modern super productivity culture. I sometimes wonder what would the world cultural heritage look like without the contribution of various people who we’d now pathologise with ADHD.
Leonardo would be valued in our culture. After all, he was insanely productive and his failures were better than most people's successes. What we pathologize is people who can't get anything significant done, and who don't have the social capital to make it work.
To the contrary, I'm a person with ADHD, and most days I'm thankful for it. But I also do have a huge amount of started or sketched side projects, that I wish I had the will power to finish, but I don't.
P.S. ADHD is not a sickness/illness. It's differently wired brain.
P.S. ADHD is not a sickness/illness. It's differently wired brain.
Parent didn't say anything bad about ADHD. This reflects your own interpretation.
Syndrome. Fuckin' stupid. I explore things because I like them. Frequently things I'm exploring are years ahead of where the world needs them and I'm doing big lifts to make them "work" but even when they work the world doesn't need them.
OP sees the things they didn't finish as failures. The win is enjoying exploring something, not what the world thinks about it or uses.
For sure there's things I plan to go back to and hope to get back to. And finished things I hope the world cares about one day... but yeah. Exploration of reality isn't a game of capture the flag. If you do get it, so what? The only reason to really do hard things, like really really really hard things is because you liked pursuing it.
OP sees the things they didn't finish as failures. The win is enjoying exploring something, not what the world thinks about it or uses.
For sure there's things I plan to go back to and hope to get back to. And finished things I hope the world cares about one day... but yeah. Exploration of reality isn't a game of capture the flag. If you do get it, so what? The only reason to really do hard things, like really really really hard things is because you liked pursuing it.
There is also another term for this: ADHD. Even though ADHD does not really have anything to do with attention, it is more of a motivation-issue, which can led to starting new, promising projects instead of finishing projects, because you find more and more obstacles.
These kind of people just do what they want. They have no internal obligation to complete a project, even if they at some point agreed to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-QW-0yi86c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-QW-0yi86c
Breadth First Search
Yahoo/Google/Microsoft syndrome: the tendency to arbitrarily cancel projects without warning, usually after an acquisition is made.
As a side note, the "presentation" letter that Leonardo sent to Ludovico Sforza to apply for a job remains a masterpiece:
https://lettersofnote.com/2012/03/28/the-skills-of-leonardo-...
https://lettersofnote.com/2012/03/28/the-skills-of-leonardo-...
I hate I’m saying this but this reticle strangely feels validating to me. I’ve definitely finished things before but I have a string of 80-90% finished products that I just can’t muster the drive to finish.
Finishing (i.e. shipping) stuff is a pain.
At some point, we reach the part where the fun stuff is done. We've learned pretty much everything we can, from the exercise, and it's "90%" done.
That last 10%, however, is a bear. Many, many folks never bother with it.
In a lot of cases, that's fine. The main purpose was learning, and there's really not enough "market pull" to justify finishing the project.
If there is a requirement to see it through to completion (like, say, a contract, with your signature on it), then we need to complete that last 10%, even if it's boring.
There's a joke: "90% of the project is completed in 10% of the time. 10% of the project is completed in 90% of the time." (there are many variants, thereof).
Ever notice how, when a new building is going up, it appears to be "complete," in an astonishingly short time? Then, it's twice as long, before the doors open?
That's because making the exterior and structure is straightforward, and can be done by just about anyone. Framing, windows, doors, roofing, masonry, etc., are skills, but not extremely specialized.
The interior stuff, though, requires a lot of skill. You can't just bring in some half-trained hammer monkey. You need the experienced finish carpenters, and the expensive painters, etc. These folks are harder to schedule, and won't rush the job. Their work is what people will see, up close, every day, so it needs a lot of polish, and has to be robust.
Same with any product.
I'm writing an SDK, right now. It was probably 90% complete, last week, but I wrote a pretty beefy test harness for it, and I am now implementing a whole bunch of "live server" unit tests. I am finding bugs in my implementation (I always do), and I'm fixing them, as I go along. I'm also encountering the "little things," that I forgot to implement.
Once I have the unit tests all humming along to my satisfaction (I tend to write unit tests after the fact, for SDKs. I write about that here[0]), I'll flesh out the documentation.
Only then, when I can release the project as a standalone package, will I return to the main app, that is my initial consumer of the SDK, and I'll need to integrate it; replacing an older SDK (that I also wrote).
Lot of boring stuff, but it means that I don't have to worry about this very critical (and dicey) communication infrastructure, when working on the main app.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/blah-blah-blah/testing-harness-...
At some point, we reach the part where the fun stuff is done. We've learned pretty much everything we can, from the exercise, and it's "90%" done.
That last 10%, however, is a bear. Many, many folks never bother with it.
In a lot of cases, that's fine. The main purpose was learning, and there's really not enough "market pull" to justify finishing the project.
If there is a requirement to see it through to completion (like, say, a contract, with your signature on it), then we need to complete that last 10%, even if it's boring.
There's a joke: "90% of the project is completed in 10% of the time. 10% of the project is completed in 90% of the time." (there are many variants, thereof).
Ever notice how, when a new building is going up, it appears to be "complete," in an astonishingly short time? Then, it's twice as long, before the doors open?
That's because making the exterior and structure is straightforward, and can be done by just about anyone. Framing, windows, doors, roofing, masonry, etc., are skills, but not extremely specialized.
The interior stuff, though, requires a lot of skill. You can't just bring in some half-trained hammer monkey. You need the experienced finish carpenters, and the expensive painters, etc. These folks are harder to schedule, and won't rush the job. Their work is what people will see, up close, every day, so it needs a lot of polish, and has to be robust.
Same with any product.
I'm writing an SDK, right now. It was probably 90% complete, last week, but I wrote a pretty beefy test harness for it, and I am now implementing a whole bunch of "live server" unit tests. I am finding bugs in my implementation (I always do), and I'm fixing them, as I go along. I'm also encountering the "little things," that I forgot to implement.
Once I have the unit tests all humming along to my satisfaction (I tend to write unit tests after the fact, for SDKs. I write about that here[0]), I'll flesh out the documentation.
Only then, when I can release the project as a standalone package, will I return to the main app, that is my initial consumer of the SDK, and I'll need to integrate it; replacing an older SDK (that I also wrote).
Lot of boring stuff, but it means that I don't have to worry about this very critical (and dicey) communication infrastructure, when working on the main app.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/blah-blah-blah/testing-harness-...
I wonder if we would even have heard of the guy if he would have sticked to one problem and attempted to finish it entirely.
It's the paradox of many successful individuals. We look at some of their flaws and become frustrated because it seems they are messing up a great situation that we would kill to be in. In reality, however, it's this very same personality mix that propelled them forward and the reason we've heard of them to begin with.
He was still Leonardo.
And making experimental paints that happened to not last very long is also not a failure to finish something. It's just an experiment.
> misunderstanding several aspects of the heart
These few words don't really give his work justice. He discovered/theorized how the aortic valve and its leaflets worked that was correct and wasn't really conclusively proved for another 400 years. (He was nonetheless wrong about blood circulation, generally)
> to the Mona Lisa - which in itself is unfinished
I don't know. He worked on it for 4 years, taking it with him everywhere, and if it is really unfinished it may be because his right hand was simply starting to paralyze. There's more to be said about perfectionism in the Mona Lisa than Leonardo syndrome.
Leonardo definitely started far more than he could finish (disappointing a lot of patrons), and had a somewhat self-aggrandizing streak in what he claimed he could do, but the examples here are not super accurate. As much as I wasn't crazy about the Walter Isaacson bio its worth reading if you want a better picture of his accomplishments and failures.
At the end of the day he is remembered because he did actually have a very large set of detailed ideas, drawings, plans, and accomplishments. Most of us would love to have created a work of art as unfinished as the Mona Lisa.