Leonardo da Vinci
I've recently listened to a podcast called, "How to take over the World" and no it's not a dystopian/kill-people podcast. It's more about the characteristics of people who were able to accumulate large amounts of wealth, success, and fame. A perfect example of considerably the world's most treasured genius: Leonardo da Vinci. One attribute that separates him from many other people aside from his talent for the many passions in his life is his dedication to curiosity, learning, and obsession. He would take decades to finish works of art, involved in many diverse fields like art, engineering, science, etc paving the path for his ability to pause and ask, "Why?" This vast collection of knowledge yields many impressive results one of them being his beloved Mona Lisa where he combined his knowledge of design, art, and science to create the most realistic person possible. A great habit that Leonardo cultivated was his use of journaling for his creativity and intellectual curiosity endeavors. He was able to have a creative outlet and express his ideas of the nature of reality in these notebooks which surprisingly sell for many thousands of dollars.
“Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else, ” says Leonardo Da Vinci.
Marketing with your pal Seth Godin & Brules with Vishen Lakhiani
Seth emphasizes in his books the power of using the truth to market a product or service. This creates trust between the producers and consumers further increasing profit.
'“Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. Marketing helps others become who they seek to become”.
Seth makes a distinction between bad marketing and good marketing. Bad marketing is about hype, about interrupting customers, about pressuring to do what you want them to do, about scamming the customer into buying a product they may not need or want.
Good marketing helps customers, good marketing is a positive force in the World. “The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customer’s world view and desires so we can connect with them”
Marketing is a force of change. A marketer is only effective if he creates change.'
In Vishen Lakhiani's book, "The Code of the Extraordinary Mind" he breaks the successful individual into two separate branches: models of reality (beliefs) and systems of living (habits). Like a never-ending loop, both complement each other and improve each other. The first part (models of reality) has to do with the actions, beliefs, and identities that one adheres of an individual compared to society or culturescape as Vishen says. An example of a finished product is Elon Musk.
In his early days, he took advantage of the dot com bubble and started x.com the not-yet mature work of a major financial processing company PayPal.
"In September 2000, when Musk was in Australia for a honeymoon trip, the X.com board voted for a change of CEO from Musk to Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Confinity. In June 2001, X.com was renamed PayPal. On October 3, 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for US$1.5 billion." - Wikipedia, X.com.
Mr. Musk received $180 million dollars and invested both into his rocket company, Space X & Tesla, his EV company. Previously, the rocket industry was the only one which didn't comply with Moore's Law, "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years." He broke the "rule" of never venturing into the rocket industry and took advantage of the newborn industry as he also did for Tesla. I have a preference for SpaceX because it's so cool. He was able to create rockets that can be reusable which has never been done before and his driving motivation is to help humanity by creating a sustainable future.
The first step towards becoming extraordinary is questioning the beliefs that create our reality. The second step is to embrace individuality and express one's identity through a portfolio a company, a journal, and/or a YouTube channel. This includes not caring about other people's thoughts, creating your own model of reality for the world, and inspiring others.
Thanks for reading!