Are Original Ideas a Myth ? The case for Steve Jobs and Leonardo Da Vinci
Creative tinkering and borrowing ideas
Steve Jobs , Leonard Da Vinci and inventing
Imagine, for a moment, that you could transport Leonardo da Vinci from his workshop in 15th-century Florence to the sleek, minimalist boardroom of Apple Inc. in 21st-century Cupertino. What would the Renaissance polymath make of the glowing rectangles that have become ubiquitous in our modern world? More intriguingly, what would he recognize in the piercing eyes and restless mind of Steve Jobs if he could meet him?
The connections between these two innovators, separated by five centuries, are more profound than you might think. Both men stood at the intersection of art and technology, their minds constantly whirring with possibilities that others couldn’t see. But here’s the twist: neither was truly an “inventor” in the purest sense.
Their genius lay not in creating something from nothing, but in their unparalleled ability to refine, reimagine, and revolutionize existing ideas.
Consider the iPhone, arguably Jobs’ magnum opus. When it debuted in 2007, it wasn’t the first smartphone. It wasn’t even the first touchscreen device.
The first smartphone was created in 1992, when IBM debuted the “Simon” personal communicator, a device that featured an early touchscreen, and the ability to send and receive emails and faxes, act as a pager, and perform other smartphone-like functions. It was available in mid-1994, at a price of $1099 without a contract.
What made it revolutionary was how it seamlessly integrated existing technologies into a user experience that felt like magic. Jobs, like a modern-day alchemist, took the lead of clunky mobile phones and transmuted them into gold.
This approach mirrors da Vinci’s work on the parachute. The concept wasn’t new — Chinese acrobats had been using rudimentary parachutes for centuries. But da Vinci’s keen eye and understanding of air resistance led him to refine the design into a pyramid shape, a configuration so effective that it wasn’t successfully tested until 2000, more than 500 years after he sketched it.
Both men understood a fundamental truth about innovation:
it’s not about being first, it’s about being better.
They were masters of what we might call “innovative refinement” — the art of taking an existing concept and elevating it to heights its original creators never dreamed possible.
But their similarities run deeper than mere methodology. Both da Vinci and Jobs were infamous perfectionists, often to the point of exasperation for those around them.
Da Vinci would spend years on a single painting, constantly refining and reworking.
Jobs was known to scrap entire projects at the eleventh hour if they didn’t meet his exacting standards.
This obsession with perfection was coupled with an insatiable curiosity that knew no bounds. Da Vinci’s notebooks are a testament to his wide-ranging interests, from anatomy to engineering to botany. Jobs, too, was a voracious learner. His famous Stanford commencement speech tells of how a calligraphy class he took on a whim later informed the design of the first Macintosh computer.
Cross pollination: borrowing ideas
Here’s where it gets really interesting: both men were masters of cross-pollination, taking ideas from one field and applying them to another.
Da Vinci’s flying machine designs were inspired by his studies of bird anatomy.
Jobs took the concept of a graphical user interface from Xerox PARC and refined it into the intuitive system that would define personal computing.
But perhaps their most important shared trait was their ability to see beyond the immediate. Da Vinci sketched designs for helicopters and tanks centuries before they became realities. Jobs pushed for a phone without buttons when the idea seemed ludicrous to most.
In essence, both da Vinci and Jobs were not just innovators, but visionaries. They didn’t just improve what existed; they imagined what could be. And in doing so, they shaped the future.
The search for original ideas
So the next time you swipe open your iPhone, take a moment to appreciate the renaissance of innovation it represents.
In its sleek lines and intuitive interface, you’re not just holding a piece of advanced technology.
You’re holding a piece of history — a modern incarnation of the same innovative spirit that drove Leonardo da Vinci to sketch flying machines and dissect human bodies in pursuit of knowledge.
The lesson? True innovation isn’t always about inventing something new. Sometimes, it’s about looking at the familiar with new eyes, about having the vision to see possibilities where others see limitations. It’s about being unafraid to borrow, to refine, to reimagine. In short, it’s about thinking different. And in that, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci were very much the same.