Great minds

180 people who found the thing

Grouped by the five patterns this assessment reports, rather than by field. Somebody who has just been told they are a Guide learns nothing from a list of physicists. The pattern is the constant; the field is the variable.

Hover or focus a name for the highlights. Open it for the rest.

They thought by making. The idea was not real until it existed as something you could look at, hold or hear.

Leonardo da Vinci

1452-1519 · Painter, engineer, anatomist
- Left around 13,000 pages of notebooks, written in mirror script
- Dissected some thirty human bodies to draw anatomy correctly
- Finished very few paintings and abandoned far more than he completed
- Designed machines nobody could build for another four centuries
The patron saint of people who are told they lack focus. He was chronically unable to finish, and the unfinished work still changed painting, anatomy and engineering. The notebooks were not preparation for the work; they were the work.
Hokusai

1760-1849 · Printmaker
- Made the Great Wave at around seventy
- Changed his artist name more than thirty times, each marking a new phase
- Produced an estimated 30,000 works
- Wrote at seventy-five that nothing he had made before seventy was worth counting
He believed he was still getting better at eighty-nine, and said so in writing. If you are worried you have started too late, he had not started the work he is famous for at an age when most people have stopped.
Frida Kahlo

1907-1954 · Painter
- Began painting seriously while immobilised after a bus accident at eighteen
- Painted using a mirror fixed above her bed, which is why so many are self-portraits
- Had around thirty operations across her life
- Sold few paintings while alive and is now among the most recognised painters in the world
The making came out of the constraint rather than despite it. She did not paint herself out of vanity; she painted herself because she was the only subject within reach.
Johann Sebastian Bach

1685-1750 · Composer
- Produced a new cantata most weeks for years at a stretch
- Walked around 400 km to hear an organist he admired
- Fathered twenty children, ten of whom survived to adulthood
- Was largely forgotten for eighty years after his death
A working musician on a deadline, not a genius in a garret. The quantity is the point: he wrote that much because the job demanded it, and the quality came out of the quantity rather than instead of it.
Georgia O'Keeffe

1887-1986 · Painter
- Destroyed most of her early work to get other people's teaching out of it
- Moved to New Mexico at fifty-two and stayed for the rest of her life
- Kept working into her nineties, moving to clay as her eyesight failed
- Resisted every reading of her flower paintings offered by critics
She burned the work that was imitation before she made the work that was hers. That is an unusual amount of nerve, and it is the step most people skip.
Charlie Chaplin

1889-1977 · Filmmaker and performer
- Grew up in workhouses after his mother was committed
- Wrote, directed, produced, scored and starred in his own films
- Kept making silent films for a decade after sound arrived
- Reshot one scene in City Lights 342 times
The obsessive retaking is the part worth noticing. What looks like effortless comic timing was the survivor of hundreds of attempts nobody ever saw.
Ada Lovelace

1815-1852 · Mathematician
- Wrote what is generally considered the first algorithm intended for a machine
- Saw that a calculating engine could handle symbols, not only numbers
- Her notes on Menabrea's paper ran three times longer than the paper
- Called her approach poetical science
She understood the machine better than the man who designed it, because she was interested in what it meant rather than what it did. The imaginative leap was the contribution.
Yayoi Kusama

1929- · Artist
- Has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo since 1977
- Walks to her studio across the road each morning and works all day
- Was making immersive mirrored rooms in the 1960s, decades before anyone else
- Has said making art is what keeps the hallucinations survivable
The work is not decoration around a life, it is the mechanism by which the life is possible. Few people state the bargain that plainly.
Alexander McQueen

1969-2010 · Fashion designer
- Left school at sixteen and apprenticed to a Savile Row tailor
- Sewed rude messages into the linings of suits made for the establishment
- Named head designer at Givenchy at twenty-seven
- Cut patterns himself long after he could have handed it to anybody
He learned the rules properly on Savile Row before breaking any of them, and that order matters. Breaking a rule you never learned is just not knowing it.
Zaha Hadid

1950-2016 · Architect
- Built almost nothing for the first fifteen years of her practice
- Won the competition for the Cardiff Bay Opera House and watched it be cancelled
- First woman to receive the Pritzker Prize, in 2004
- Trained as a mathematician before she trained as an architect
Fifteen years of drawings that no one would build. Her paintings of unbuildable buildings are now in galleries, and the buildings came afterwards.
Vincent van Gogh

1853-1890 · Painter
- Started painting seriously at twenty-seven, after failing at art dealing and preaching
- Made around 2,100 works in ten years
- Sold very little during his lifetime, though not literally nothing
- Wrote roughly 900 letters, mostly to his brother Theo
Ten years of work, from a standing start, in his late twenties. He was not a prodigy and never behaved like one; he was a late beginner who worked extremely hard.
Beatrix Potter

1866-1943 · Author, illustrator and mycologist
- Self-published Peter Rabbit after six publishers turned it down
- Wrote a serious paper on fungal spore germination that the Linnean Society would not let her present in person
- Bought and farmed 4,000 acres in the Lake District
- Left her land to the National Trust
Rejected as a scientist, she took the drawings that science had no use for and built something else entirely with them. The same skill, redirected.
Louise Bourgeois

1911-2010 · Sculptor
- Had her first retrospective at seventy-one
- Worked for four decades in relative obscurity before that
- Made the giant spiders, her best-known work, in her eighties
- Ran a Sunday salon for young artists in her own house for years
Forty years of being overlooked, then thirty of being celebrated. She did not change what she was doing when the attention arrived.

Also listed under Late starters, because a pattern is a disposition rather than a job.
Stanley Kubrick

1928-1999 · Filmmaker
- Was a staff photographer for Look magazine at seventeen
- Taught himself directing by reading books and making a film with the money
- Made thirteen features across forty-six years
- Researched each film for years before shooting a frame
Almost no output by industry standards, and almost all of it still watched. A useful argument against measuring a life in volume.
Ruth Asawa

1926-2013 · Sculptor and educator
- Learned to draw in a Japanese American internment camp from interned Disney animators
- Learned the looped wire technique from basket weavers in Mexico
- Founded a public arts high school in San Francisco
- Raised six children while making the work
She took a craft technique nobody considered art and made it into something museums could not ignore. The source being humble was never a problem for her.
Toni Morrison

1931-2019 · Novelist and editor
- Published her first novel at thirty-nine while raising two sons alone
- Wrote before dawn because that was the only time available
- Edited other writers at Random House for nineteen years
- First Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature
She wrote at four in the morning because there was no other hour. If you are waiting for conditions to be right, she is the argument that they will not be.

Also listed under Late starters, because a pattern is a disposition rather than a job.
Antoni Gaudí

1852-1926 · Architect
- Worked on the Sagrada Família for forty-three years
- Designed by building hanging chain models upside down rather than drawing
- Knew he would not see it finished and planned for that explicitly
- It remains unfinished a century after his death
He committed to something he could not live to see. That is a particular kind of relationship with your own work, and worth considering.
Coco Chanel

1883-1971 · Designer
- Grew up in an orphanage where the nuns taught her to sew
- Started with hats, at thirty-one, before any clothing
- Put women in jersey, a fabric then used for men's underwear
- Closed the business for fifteen years and reopened at seventy-one
The reopening at seventy-one is the striking part. The first collection back was panned by the French press and loved by American buyers, and she kept going.
Rabindranath Tagore

1861-1941 · Poet, composer, painter
- First non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913
- Wrote the national anthems of two countries
- Started painting seriously in his sixties
- Founded a school, then a university, on his own principles
He kept adding forms rather than deepening one. The paintings began when most people would have said the career was complete.
Jony Ive

1967- · Industrial designer
- Studied industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic, not a famous school
- Made hundreds of physical models for single products
- Was close to leaving Apple before the company changed direction
- Designs by holding the thing rather than looking at renderings
The insistence on physical models over screens is a working method worth stealing. You cannot feel a rendering.
Maya Lin

1959- · Artist and architect
- Won the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition at twenty-one, as a student
- Her entry was anonymous, as all of them were
- Faced sustained public attack over the design and did not change it
- Has worked on environmental subjects for decades since
Twenty-one, anonymous entry, and she held the line under national pressure. The anonymity of the competition is why it happened at all.
Miles Davis

1926-1991 · Musician
- Reinvented his sound at least five distinct times
- Hired musicians who could do things he could not
- Recorded Kind of Blue with sketches rather than finished parts
- Lost a large part of his audience with every change and kept changing
He treated a settled style as a problem to escape rather than an asset to protect. Very few people manage that even once.
M.C. Escher

1898-1972 · Printmaker
- Failed his final school exams
- Taught himself the mathematics after the pictures demanded it
- Corresponded with mathematicians who found he had discovered things independently
- Made his best-known work after fifty
He arrived at real mathematics by drawing his way there. The route matters: the curiosity came first and the discipline followed it.
Virginia Woolf

1882-1941 · Novelist
- Never attended university, and read her way through her father's library
- Co-founded the Hogarth Press and set type by hand
- Wrote that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction
- Kept a diary for most of her adult life
Setting type by hand meant she could publish what she liked, including her own experiments. Owning the means of production changed what she was able to write.
Akira Kurosawa

1910-1998 · Filmmaker
- Trained as a painter and storyboarded his films himself
- Could not get funding in Japan after a certain point and was financed from abroad
- Attempted suicide at sixty-one after a commercial failure
- Made some of his most admired work in the two decades after that
The recovery is the part to hold onto. He was finished by any reasonable measure, and then was not.
Octavia E. Butler

1947-2006 · Novelist
- Was dyslexic and painfully shy, and wrote from the age of ten
- Worked menial jobs and woke at two in the morning to write
- First Black woman to win both the Hugo and the Nebula
- Wrote affirmations to herself in her notebooks, including that she would be a bestselling writer
She wrote at two in the morning before shifts as a dishwasher and a warehouse worker, for years. The notebook affirmations were written long before any of it was true.
Lin-Manuel Miranda

1980- · Composer and writer
- Spent six years writing Hamilton
- Read the Chernow biography on holiday and started immediately
- Wrote In the Heights across seven years, beginning at nineteen
- Performs at open mics and freestyle events to stay loose
Six years on one show. The speed everybody assumes from the result was not there in the process.
Tove Jansson

1914-2001 · Author and illustrator
- Drew political cartoons against Hitler and Stalin during the war
- Created the Moomins partly as an escape from that work
- Wrote adult fiction later that many consider her best
- Spent summers on a tiny island with almost nothing on it
The children's work came out of the political work rather than instead of it. The gentleness was built deliberately by somebody who knew exactly what it was for.
Buckminster Fuller

1895-1983 · Designer and inventor
- Expelled from Harvard twice
- Decided at thirty-two, after a business failure and a bereavement, to run his life as an experiment
- Kept a detailed record of that experiment for over fifty years
- Held twenty-eight patents
He literally treated his own life as a research project with a hypothesis, and documented it. The Dymaxion Chronofile runs to hundreds of feet of shelf.
Emily Dickinson

1830-1886 · Poet
- Published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime
- Wrote nearly 1,800, sewn into hand-bound packets found after her death
- Rarely left her family home in her later years
- Her sister ignored her instruction to burn the papers
She made the work without any audience at all, for decades. Whether that is a warning or a model is worth deciding for yourself.

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