265. Shipping is a Skill

<p>Leonardo da Vinci is easily the most-accomplished procrastinator who ever lived. He finished hardly any projects at all. He was great at many things, but he wasn’t great at shipping. The world would have been better off if Leonardo da Vinci had treated shipping as a skill.</p> <p>Far be it for me to criticize anything Leonardo da Vinci did. Despite his repeated failure to ship, he lives on today as one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived – enough so that I’m talking about him in a podcast 500 years after his death.</p> <h3>What Leonardo da Vinci procrastinated on</h3> <p>He foreshadowed the first law of motion, saying two-hundred years before Newton that, “Every movement tends to maintain itself.”</p> <p>He made a number of discoveries about the circulatory system: He was the first to notice the heart was the center of the blood system – not the liver. He described how an area of the aorta functioned, but since he never published his observations, it’s named after a different scientist, who re-discovered this area two-hundred years later. He correctly described how blood flow affects the opening and closing of heart valves – findings that were proven correct only recently – 450 years later.</p> <p>He wrote or planned to write treatises on topics including painting, anatomy, human flight, geology, and astronomy. Much of what he wrote would have broken new ground in these fields, and set them ahead a couple centuries – if only he had published it. Even his greatest masterpiece, the <em>Mona Lisa</em>, Leonardo never finished. His patron never got their painting, and Leonardo never got paid. It was still in his studio when he died, more than fifteen years after he had begun the painting.</p> <h4>Okay, so some of Leonardo’s procrastination was iceberg-building</h4> <p>Much of Leonardo’s failure to ship was a part of his creative process. It was the <a href= "http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/creative-waste/">creative waste</a> that made the underwater part of his <a href= "http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/iceberg-princ