What often differentiates smart people who have a major impact from those who don’t is their ability to cultivate their creativity.
Love every topic… Look for patterns in one area that you can model to solve a problem in another area.
A great way to bring more creativity to your engineering work is to expose yourself to great artists and their work.
For Steve Jobs, every time he ended a product presentation he would show an intersection of two street signs: arts and engineering.
Today, a lot of people believe everybody should specialize. We believe children should focus on a STEM education. Are we forgetting that the arts and the humanities are what make us creative?
Leonardo Da Vinci is possibly the most creative genius in history. He is the ultimate embodiment of somebody who combined the arts and the sciences.
He lacked a traditional education in science or engineering. But his painstaking efforts to model the human body and the flow of water in rivers and streams was unlike anything seen before. He tried to understand the world around him at new levels of detail. Leonardo correctly believed that being a better scientist and understanding anatomy made him a better artist. He was capable of creating amazingly detailed recreations of the human form and the nature around him in his art. He advanced every discipline he worked in from anatomy, science, painting, and engineering.
The genius was in creatively applying his multidisciplinary knowledge to make a bigger impact on each discipline.
It works both ways. If you want to be a more creative engineer, learn about art.
Leonardo thought everything and everyone in this world was connected. Art and technology are dependent. Engineering is founded in creativity. Great engineering is art.