You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown

You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown I often find myself contemplating the greatest creators in history — those rare artists, designers, and thinkers whose work transformed how we see the world. What constellation of circumstances made them who they were? Where did their ideas originate? Who mentored them? Would history remember them had they lived in a different time or place? Leonardo da Vinci stands as perhaps the most singular creative mind in recorded history — the quintessential “Renaissance Man” whose breadth of curiosity and depth of insight seem almost superhuman. Yet examples like Leonardo can create a misleading impression that true greatness emerges only once in a generation or century. Leonardo lived among roughly 10-13 million Italians — was greatness truly as rare as one in ten million? We know several of his contemporaries, but still, the ratio remains vanishingly small. This presents us with two possibilities: either exceptional creative ability is a ... Read full article.