Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, a scientist, and an engineer. Michelangelo was a sculptor, an architect, and a poet. Here’s how you can become like da Vinci and Michelangelo.
#1 Be Good at More than One Thing
Being good at more than one makes it easier to be be great at all of them. This is due to the power of analogical thinking - what you do when you use information from one problem to solve another. It gives you an approach you may not have have considered. You can pull knowledge from one area and apply it to another to be innovate and find solutions. It pays to have disparate fields of interest. The more different they are, the more likely you will create something new by transferring ideas between them.
The list of innovative products and solutions that result from disparate interests are numerous; possibilities are endless if you really branch out, combining three or more. Combining Music, Medicine, and Technology could lead to music therapy techniques that use medical data to create personalized wellness solutions for mental health and well-being. Combining Astronomy, Fashion Design, and Materials Science could create futuristic collections made with smart textiles and sustainable materials. Combining Neuroscience, Engineering, and Virtual Reality we get neuro-rehabilitation: brain-computer interfaces with personalized virtual environments to rehabilitate neurological conditions.
#2 Take Time Off
A secret to coming up with new ideas is on-and-off thinking. This is putting down one project to work on another. Creative breakthroughs happen when we let go of focusing on a problem, take a break, and re-charge. The brain momentarily returns to a feeling of excitement and being alive.
After being fired from Apple, Steve Jobs was re-hired and returned to turn the company around. But we forget in the interim he started Next, a minicomputer that appeared at the time to be a hugh flop. It was expensive and few applications could run on it. The only thing it seemed to be useful for was animations and as such, its main user was Pixar. When Jobs retuned to Apple, the company was in such poor financial state its new CEO, Jobs, did not take a salary. He could afford to do that as he didn’t need the money. He had become a billionaire when Pixar was acquired by Disney.
#3 Borrow from Others
Research suggests that older prototypes existed for more than one-hundred of the inventions that have been credited to Leonardo di Vinci. Similarities are said to exist between his illustrations and those from the Middle Ages, ancient Greece, Rome, the Persian Empire, and Egypt. Leonardo´s innovation was to combine different functions from existing ideas. By reconstituting existing inventions he created something new.
Conclusion
If you want come up with new ideas, strive to become like a Renaissance Man/Woman. Be good at more than one thing. Practice the guitar or go into the shop or your art studio when you get home. Write a song, a poem, or a novel. Take a dance class. Bake something. When you find yourself stuck, take a break, give the project a rest, and go work on something different. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and to borrow from others. Few invent something completely original. Those who are successful build on the accomplishments of those before them. Just give credit where credit is due.