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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of both Robert Greene's Mastery and Leonardo da Vinci, but I think using da Vinci as an example of patience is fairly misleading. After having read numerous biographies on the man, my conclusion is that it's remarkable that he managed to get as much done as he did. He was the ultimate dabbler, interested in and curious about virtually everything. His works took a long time to complete because he generally was distracted by some minor detail for years on end. If the ideal is productivity, then surely Michelangelo is a far better role model.

Of course, the real question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at. Doing very few things very well (alternatively, creating a small number of high-quality things) is a better ideal, to my mind.

'It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.' - Friedrich Nietzsche

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> Of course, the real question here is whether productivity is what one should be ultimately aiming at.

This is a very good question also for the society as a whole. We are technically able to sustain the whole population with a fewer and fewer percentage of people working on holding up our living conditions (food, water, heat, housing, network communication, etc.).

On top of that we (as a society) create lots of bullshit work which we again try to perform as efficiently as possible. And as soon as productivity increases, we work hard to create more demand for more of the same nonsense, and if that doesn't work anymore, we invent a new type of bullshit.

Why are we doing that? (Well, I'm aware of the typical cynical answer: reducing violence and crime, but there must be a better way to achieve this.)

What if we concentrate on improving our living conditions, and on top of that, everyone who wants to work just picks their favourite problem and tries to find a solution for it, valuing quality over being the first, valuing long-term solutions over short-term minded crap?

> Why are we doing that?

What do you expect? The natural course for "the leisure majority class" would be a colorful ever-varying ever-shifting mixture of play, hobbyist endeavours, gamble, drugs, bohemian lives, sports, creative outputs of all kinds, a mild occasional flavour of anarchy. Actual human weathers instead of perpetual eternal grey September. Either "we, collectively", or our grown structures don't seem to prefer that.

Make-work and bureaucracy and petty in-fights and peer politics are the fallback behavioural patterns --- almost everywhere people aren't, mentally speaking, "fighting for a cause" (whether it's a small firm trying to survive or grow to 'more leisurely levels', or collectively-militarily, or post-war reconstruction, or faked-but-masterfully-orchestrated as Big Consulting somehow manages to ;)

How do we decide who gets to be part of the leisure class and who gets to be part of the working class? Assuming we decide that we cut the bullshit work and let everyone not working live on something like UBI.

The working class would be the new upper class so a lot of people would try to be part of it. Nice communist Utopia.

Any particular biographies on da Vinci you'd recommend? Particularly any that made him come across as a dabbler. I think I have a similar method of working on personal projects, and I'm curious to see how it worked in others.

Flights of the Mind is the best straight-up autobiography that I've read on him. The new Isaacson book is supposed to be great as well. It sounds silly, but How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci is also surprisingly pretty decent.

Also, check out this link: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/martin-kemp-leonardo-da-vin...

I only read one but it was great: Leonardo by Daniel Arasse

I think productivity is productivity, even if it's hard/impossible to measure. Quality is a productive output, just like quantity is.

There was some teaching expirements (don't hold me to its quality) with ceramics. Students either focused on quality or quantity. Iirc.. the quantity group produced better quality by the end. Quantity was just a good way of practicing productivity, which could then be used to produce quality.

>Doing very few things very well (alternatively, creating a small number of high-quality things) is a better ideal, to my mind.

I think you need both. Focused minds can construct incredible things in their discipline. Open minds can apply the ideas and tools from multiple disciplines in novel ways.

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