Leonardo Da Vinci (Book)

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci, referenced across Kyle’s notes as a touchstone for relentless, polymathic curiosity. In John Quincy Adams, it serves as the comparison point for Adams himself — a man who “seemed to know everything about everything,” reciting Homer in Greek and probing every science — “a Leonardo Da Vinci kind of relentless curiosity about how things work” (Polymath, Curious). The note preserves Kyle’s favorite item from the book: Leonardo’s notebook entry “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,” which Isaacson reads not as eccentric trivia but as evidence of how drilling down into random curiosities (“be more like Leonardo”) led him from the woodpecker’s tongue to the muscles of the human tongue.

In the Charlie Munger long-read, the book is cited for the perfectionism problem: Leonardo left works unfinished because, as Vasari explained, his conceptions were “so subtle and so marvelous” they were impossible to execute faultlessly — he “saw faults even in the things that to others seemed miracles.”

Context: Leonardo da Vinci (2017) by Walter Isaacson is a biography drawing heavily on Leonardo’s surviving notebooks, presenting him as the archetype of curiosity-driven genius across art, anatomy, engineering, and natural science.

Where this appears

• John Quincy Adams — the comparison for Adams’s polymathic curiosity; Kyle’s favorite “woodpecker’s tongue” notebook entry as a model of drilling into random curiosities
• Charlie Munger — A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom, Revisited — cited on Leonardo’s perfectionism leaving works unfinished, conceptions “so subtle and so marvelous” they couldn’t be executed faultlessly