How to Think like Leonardo

What does it mean to be a genius? Is genius born or made — or both? How do you practice brilliancy? How do you cultivate aliveness? How do you develop your multiple talents, loves and abilities and how can you evolve in every aspect that amounts to the complex equation of you? 

        “What does it mean to be a genius?”, is a broad question, you can be a genius by natural talent or through curiosity and love of learning you can become a genius.  There is also the point that the subject controls the act if someone is a genius or not.  You can be well versed in one act but not another, a physicist may be considered a genius in their respective field but when asked questions on human behavior or even art they may know absolutely nothing.  Sometimes people are natural born geniuses but have no real experience or life experience; you may know how to draw and the motions of it but don't know how to draw once you put a pencil on paper.  A quote I always say, “knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but, wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. ” In a sense, an excess of information doesn’t equal deeper knowledge and cannot replace experience, ones perception can change when IQ becomes just a number.  A genius is both born and made, some people have natural talents in which they nurture into their genius, other study and use their curiosity to learn whatever they can and learn for the sake of knowledge.  Leonardo’s intense curiosity and desire to understand all things lead him to develop a detective-esque lifestyle, having an insatiable appetite to discover and absorb the world inside and outside him.  He believed that “the knowledge of all things is possible. ” So in a sense, it is both, geniuses are both made and born.