5 Ways We Can Learn About Note-Taking from da Vinci

This post is part of our ongoing Evernote Blog series, “Taking Note,” outlining the storied history and styles of note-taking. Throughout the coming weeks, we’ll explore how the practice of taking notes can improve your creativity and all the work you set out to accomplish.

Anatomist, botanist, artist, engineer, geologist, inventor, musician, philosopher, polymath, sculptor, scientist, and writer. Without a doubt, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was one of the most brilliant people to ever walk the planet. Mankind has never seen such prolific individual success across such a vast array of fields. Especially revered for his artistic works the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, he also imagined (through his expansive notebook collection) ideas for inventions that would become reality centuries after his death: The airplane, helicopter, calculator, machine gun, spring-powered car, and military tank.

Da Vinci’s diverse interests and knowledge crossed the worlds of art and science. With just the power of his imagination, he singlehandedly influenced the development of anatomy, geology, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

One of the things that made da Vinci the ultimate Renaissance Man was his prescient observations and copious note-taking. Even today, we’re inspired by his unique approach to taking notes, an eclectic mixture of musings, sketches, hidden messages, and to-do lists that have shaped the way that we think about creativity, design, and observation.

Let’s dive into some of his notebooks and discover five ways we can be inspired by da Vinci’s accomplishments in our own work.

1. Invoke your own system

We know that da Vinci invoked unique systems of note-taking by writing backward. As a left-handed writer, he took notes from right to left in a technique known as “mirror writing,” which he may have done in an attempt to keep his notes illegible to anyone other than him.

In his book, Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius, author Leonard Shlain notes that da Vinci’s style of writing is indicative that he accessed two different regions of his brain in his thinking: “Leonardo’s quirks of penmanship strongly suggest that….the traditional dominance pattern of one hemisphere lording it over the other does not seem to have been operational in Leonardo’s brain.” Most remarkably, da Vinci was able to accomplish so much with very little education or learning language from an early age. He didn’t learn Latin until his forties, and his long lists of vocabulary in his notebooks suggest that he taught himself.

Research suggests that da Vinci possessed incredibly rare cognitive attributes that allowed him to see, think, write, and visualize in ways that have never been seen before or since. Da Vinci constantly studied and observed, habits which were crucial to his note-taking technique. The things he saw helped strengthen his universal thinking — a blend of art and science — and he created a system to measure and track lifelong learning. His drawings helped establish a visual vocabulary that acted as cues to his writing. Together, they often lived in his journal side by side and were a rudimentary implementation of the Cornell Method, popular in academia today.

His system truly served his pursuit of knowledge and commitment to lifelong learning. Whether he was working hard to keep his ideas secret from interlopers (which has been debated), it’s clear that he was complacent about his work committed solely to paper. Despite the advances of movable type and the printing press, da Vinci was content not to turn his journals into published books.

How da Vinci can help you with today’s note-taking: Invent a system that works for you. Whether it’s borrowed from a legendary figure or cobbled together from books and professors, adopt a system and commit to it. For example, da Vinci’s system of observations and note-taking blended ideas, thoughts, and sketches (more than 13,000 filled his notebooks). He also was adept at blending learning from many different disciplines and used those skills interchangeably. A true generalist, he pioneered note-taking methods long before they became popular, including what would come to be known as the Cornell Method and mind mapping.

2. Always innovate

Long before they became common knowledge, da Vinci postulated ideas that were not only revolutionary but at the time, blasphemous: