Steve Jobs Once Cited Leonardo Da Vinci’s Example To Explain Why All ‘Major’ Thinkers Had This Trait That Made Them Exceptional

Steve Jobs once argued the greatest innovators are “both the thinker and doer in one person,” invoking Leonardo da Vinci to prove that creativity and execution rarely succeed apart.

What Happened: Addressing engineers in the early 1990s, the Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) co-founder said, “The doers are the major thinkers. … Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side thinking five years out what he would paint? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed all his own paints.”

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Jobs’s point is that discovery flows from hands-on mastery. “It’s very easy to take credit for thinking,” he said. “Dig a little deeper and you find the people who really did it were also the people that worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.”

Veteran biographers note Jobs often cited Renaissance polymaths to justify Apple’s marriage of hardware, software and design.

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Why It Matters: The thinker-doer thesis now frames a broader debate over when entrepreneurs hit their stride. Census Bureau data show founders aged 40-plus are likelier to build high-growth firms than their twenty-something peers, a pattern echoed by late-blooming icons such as Ray Kroc at McDonald’s Corp. (NYSE:MCD) and Sam Walton at Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT).

The gap reflects years spent “doing,” honing skills and spotting problems first-hand before leaping to “think” up solutions.

Modern CEOs frequently echo Jobs. Tesla Inc.’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Elon Musk reposted the quote last year with a one-word endorsement: “True.” Venture capitalist Paul Graham tells founders to “learn by building” because abstract ideation rarely survives first contact with users.

For Jobs, that convergence of art and engineering remained Apple’s guiding doctrine until his 2011 death. “There is no difference in our industry,” he said. “The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”

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