WITH MICHAEL GELB
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SFR: It feels like Da Vinci fever is sweeping the nation. As someone who has written a few books based on a Da Vinci framework, to what do you attribute that?
MG:
Well, I wrote
How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day
in 1998, five years before the novel and now the movie phenomenon, and I intuited that Leonardo is an archetype of human potential and human possibility. There's something almost mythological about him that taps into something really deep into the collective unconscious of the human psyche, so this phenomenon that we are seeing is just an expression of Leonardo the archetype, Leonardo the myth, and it's really interesting to note this is not the first time this has happened. There have been these Leonardo crazes since his death.
Do the reasons behind these Leonardo crazes differ?
I have a thesis I'll just lay out: I believe that Leonardo Da Vinci was almost like a prophet of the evolution of consciousness. He saw that the spirit goes beyond traditional boundaries of the masculine and feminine. He portrayed himself and most of his figures in a remarkably androgynous way. He's pointing us to this growth. Early evolution in human societies was dominated by a materialistic goddess culture; then we wanted control of the Earth, control of the world around us. We don't want to be subject to famine, we don't want to be subject to weather events, so there's a premium put on the ability to control our world, the more masculine consciousness. What he seemed to understand and suggest was that humanity is going to have to mature by finding the balance between those two modes. So I think there's a yearning, a fundamental yearning, that people feel for wholeness and he represents it.
How do words like 'archetype,' 'androgyny' and 'Jungian' mesh when you go into a corporate situation for your workshops?
Well, I take these archetypes and these myths-I take the figures of not just Leonardo, but many of the great geniuses in history-and I take their inspiration and their methodology and translate it into language that people who work in companies can understand and apply to do a better job, to get more work done in less time. If you learn to think like an artist and you apply that, and balance it to thinking like a scientist, if you actually orient yourself to do both-they get it and they're inspired. So, I say, 'While we can craft a strategic plan in a more efficient and effective way, while figuring out how we can integrate your vision, mission, values, strategy with recruiting and hiring incentive and compensation, training and development, while we're figuring all of that out, would it be OK with you if we also considered how you apply all these principles to enrich the quality of your personal lives while improving the lives of your children?' And they all go, 'Sure!'
Let's touch on the juggling a little bit. How does a person shift from juggling to writing a book about it [More Balls than Hands: Juggling Your Way to Success by Learning to Love Your Mistakes]? Especially a book that applies juggling to the world at large.
Well, juggling is a beautiful metaphor. It's about a playful approach to learning, but recognizing how serious it is. One of the things that I observed in the world of business when I'm consulting, is that over-seriousness is a warning sign of mediocrity. The coolest thing for me is, I've written 10 books and I do these seminars all over the world, but it's all about the stuff that I apply myself. So, yeah, I worked my way through graduate school as a professional juggler. I really did juggle with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones on a giant stage shaped like Mick Jagger's mouth [at the Knebworth Rock Festival].
Did you juggle
with
him?
Just on Mick's tongue! It was a vast ocean of denim and hair.
How do you get some poor accountant to get into something like juggling, or have them write a poem in front of their co-workers? That's my biggest fear.
You know, I'm leaving tomorrow to go to the training directors forum. Four hundred training managers of major companies from around the world, and tomorrow night I'm teaching them how to juggle. [The next] night I'm leading a wine tasting for them and a poetry contest. People always say when I'm doing that particular exercise with them, 'You know, we're accountants, not poets,' or, 'We're biochemists or financial managers or engineers' or whatever it is. And after the second glass of wine everybody is a poet.
That's very Symposium of you.
It is very
Symposium
, which I wrote about in my Plato chapter of my book, "Discover Your Genius." That whole tradition is something that we have lost touch with to our detriment, so getting into our poetry, you can't take it out of context. I don't just say, 'We're going to just drink wine and write poetry.' I give them a presentation on the principles of thinking like Leonardo and link those principles with cutting-edge research on how the human brain actually functions.
If you met Leonardo Da Vinci today, what would you hope he would say to you?
I was speaking at a conference of therapists, family therapists, about six years ago and Jean Houston was speaking there. She's the goddess of goddesses, genius anthropologist student of Margaret Mead. She also knows quite a bit about shamanism. She came over to me and whispered in my ear, 'Leonardo is very pleased with you." So when anyone asks me that question, I say I would just look at his eyes and body language and make sure that was indeed the case, and then we would talk about the principles and how to apply them.
Michael Gelb will lead a workshop, "Grace, Play and Power" at 7:30 pm, Saturday, June 24 at Body, 333 Cordova Road, 986-0632. The fee is $12.
