At the height of their productivity as Beatles, neither Paul McCartney nor John Lennon could read or write music notation. Clearly it didn’t keep them from making a cultural impact, and as with so much else in life, they regarded it humorously. As McCartney has said, they used to liken themselves to ancient Egyptian pharaohs, who relied on scribes rather than being literate themselves. It’s worth considering whether, all things considered, this inability was really a deficiency: not being rigorously schooled in the traditions and conventions of music could have given them just the freedom they needed to create fresh songs. And if you’ve struggled with procrastination, have you considered likening yourself to Leonardo da Vinci?
“Leonardo’s difficulties with sticking to tasks were pervasive from childhood,” says a ScienceDaily summary of a 2019 paper by clinical neuroscientist Marco Catani. “Accounts from biographers and contemporaries show Leonardo was constantly on the go, often jumping from task to task.” Regarding his life at a distance of half a millennium, we may consider Leonardo not just a genius but a highly productive one, with a body of work including numerous inventions built and unbuilt as well as paintings like Lady with an Ermine, The Last Supper, and the Mona Lisa — which nearly joined the man’s pile of abandoned projects. As Nicolas Cole writes at Inc., scholarship suggests that Leonardo “painted the Mona Lisa on and off for a few years starting in 1503, left it unfinished, and didn’t complete it until close to his death in 1519.”
“While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave,” writes Walter Isaacson in his biography Leonardo da Vinci. His explanation: “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” When the non-Renaissance men of the world say things like that, it comes off as self-aggrandizing excuse-making. Many, perhaps most of us have spent so much time telling ourselves we’re preparing for a task that it just became another means of procrastination. But “procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer,” notes Isaacson.
Not that the patrons frustrated by Leonardo’s failures to deliver could always keep that in mind. After he worked at the Vatican for three years, Pope Leo X dismissed him with the judgment that he would never accomplish anything, “for he begins by thinking of the end of the work, before the beginning.” Even Leonardo himself made a deathbed apology “to God and Man for leaving so much undone.” Having examined the nature of both Leonardo’s challenges and his brilliance, Catani comes to the conclusion that he exhibited traits consistent with a condition only given a name well within living memory, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). When we find ourselves compulsively fleeing from the incomplete work at hand, we’d do well to bear in mind not just Leonardo’s example, but also the words of aphorist Aaron Haspel: “We all suffer from a cluster of psychological disorders; it used to be known as personality.”
Related content:
The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It
The Art of Structured Procrastination
Miranda July Teaches You How to Avoid Procrastination
Leonardo da Vinci’s To-Do List from 1490: The Plan of a Renaissance Man
Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
