Book review - How to think like Leonardo da Vinci

I finally finished reading the book How to think like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelp. It's a book about maybe the most creative genius ever lived in our planet. At the same time it's a self help book to learn to be more creative, more focused and more yourself.

Book started all fine with interesting history review of Leonardo and the time he lived in. This historical aspect continues whole-out the book and everything is reflected to Leonardo's history at some point. That makes the book both interesting and different.

Book tells about Leonardo's findings and creations and also gives good hints on how to take those in to use in everyday life. Book is full of exercises, some of them interesting, some of them not. After a while, I got really bored with exercise after exercise. I even got the feeling, that maybe there are this many exercises because there wasn't enough other things to fill out the book. Maybe that wasn't the reason after all, but it just tells how bored I got with those.

It's difficult to give a review for a book like this. I mainly liked it, but then I really hated some parts of it. I would have liked to hear more about Leonardo and theories about his work and not so much about everything else. Book turned out to be too much of a self help book for creativity. Maybe I'm bit pessimistic here, but I guess not that many have actually completed all of those exercises, which play such an important role in the book. So book loses much of it value due to it having too many and too time consuming exercises. That's a pity, since it has all the ingredients for great book.

If you want to learn something about Leonardo and some ways to be more focused and more creative, read this book. It does have lot of good things in it, but still it didn't hit the jackpot for me.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen