Leonardo da Vinci — 13,000 Pages of "Why"

Painter of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper; anatomist who dissected the human body; engineer who sketched a proto-helicopter — Leonardo da Vinci's titles cannot be listed in full.

Yet what reveals him best is not the paintings but the notebooks: some thirteen thousand surviving pages on the beat of birds' wings, the vortices of water, the valves of the heart, the laws of light — every page crowded with "why?" He even left himself a memo: describe the tongue of the woodpecker.

Of what use is a woodpecker's tongue to painting? None. He simply had to know. Born illegitimate, denied formal higher education, teaching himself Latin, he carried instead a boundless curiosity and the habit of recording observation. Even his many unfinished works please me — here was a man who loved inquiry more than completion.

Creativity may be not talent but the total volume of curiosity. How many useless "whys" have you chased lately?

What do you work for?