To sleep or not to sleep. That is a question whose answer Leonardo Da Vinci pondered little. For he, more than any other, embodied the latter and prospered because of it. Taking only a twenty to thirty minute nap every few hours, Leonardo wrote. He wrote. He painted. He invented. He dined with the best of them and drank with the worst of them. “Wine is the divine liquor of the grape” wrote Da Vinci in a remark that requires no further explication. The man lived a life of mirth.

One look at the contents of his journals, and Isaacson’s characterization our subject as “absorbed” appears a gross understatement. At risk of repetition of common knowledge, I throw out only a few of his great conceptions: helicopter, scuba gear, the Mona Lisa. He forewent the dreams of the night to live the dreams of the day. By sleeping little, he added years to his life and gave himself over to a monstrous ambition to understand. Perhaps even more telling are not the grand thoughts but the minutae that pack the margins of his pages. Drawings of anatomically perfect hands. Scriblles on modes of developing a more mechanically accurate clock. Diagrams of effective drawbridges and war machines. Many, if not all, of us struggle to access and express our deepest creativities and innter thoguhts. Leonardo DaVinci had no such wall. The cavern between subconcious conceptions and their development existed not.

Perhaps his voracity and emblamatic erudition were a function of sleeping less or the other way around. Perhaps awaking from a deep sleep we are well rested enough to think. We have an idea and fail to express it for we are too thoughtful. Taleb would say “thinking is time-consuming and generally a great waste of energy”. Da Vinci didn’t think. To think here is not to be curious. To have the passion to explore. Rather, it is to think about thinking. To overthink. Taleb intends to say that when we analyze our own thoughts, we lose them. They get clouded by self-conciousness, embarassment perhaps, and especially the notion that we should be doing something else. This prevents truest expression and is a wall without footholds for climbing.

What if Da Vinci wore a Whoop? What if he looked at his app and saw that he was working on only 9% recovery every day? That his sleep quality was shot and his function declined. You might suggest that he wouldn’t care and would go about his way of life with conviction. I decline this belief. Even if slightly, he would alter his regimine if even a little. Twenty minute naps might become forty as he tinkered and tinkered. A man to whome exploration comes as easily as breathing would not take in information without experementing with it. He may have grown obsessed with the Whoop score at the sacrifice of his other pursuits.

Electing what data to consume, particularly in regards to oneself is deeply critical. More data can oft be far more harmful than less. For experimenting with changing habits when they need not changing is quite disruptive. Weighing yourself everyday, even checking grades everyday, the status of your bank account. These things put pressure where it’s not always needed and can get in the way of larger and better thought out pursuits. I caution obsession with short time scale data and instead advocate pursuit of the duration. Food tastes better low and slow. So do you.

But perhaps if Da Vinci had paid attention to his Whoop and altered his sleep he would have painted ten Mona Lisa’s. Who knows? I certainly don’t.