Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, designed flying machines, and dissected human bodies by candlelight to find out how a smile works. Benjamin Franklin printed newspapers, discovered what lightning is made of, and helped write the founding documents of a country. Richard Feynman won a Nobel Prize in physics and played drums in a samba band in Brazil.
From the video this guide was written for
We call them geniuses, and the word does a great deal of damage, because it says that what they had was given to them.
It was not. Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks run to thousands of pages, and they are not the notebooks of a man receiving visions. They are the notebooks of a man working: lists, questions, reminders to himself, the word tell me scrawled in the margins. Benjamin Franklin wrote an autobiography largely about the systems he built to improve himself, and was embarrassingly specific about them, down to the ruled columns in his little book. Richard Feynman spent his life insisting that he was not especially clever, only especially curious and unusually willing to look stupid.
That is the opening of 30 pages.