Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.

Leonardo da Vinci was comfortable being illegitimate, gay, a misfit, a heretic. But he also respected other people. He didn't get into disputations. He was a genius but he had a certain humility. In his notebooks you see lists of people he wanted to grill about things like how the water diversions in Milan work; he was always interested in learning from other people.

Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

The Mona Lisa, to me, is the greatest emotional painting ever done. The way the smile flickers makes it a work of both art and science, because Leonardo understood optics, and the muscles of the lips, and how light strikes the eye - all of it goes into making the Mona Lisa's smile so mysterious and elusive.

Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.