Walter Isaacson is a Gifted storyteller. a Career Journalist Who Has Steered Both Time Magazine and CNN, Isaacson Has Written Biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs And

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“The piece of career advice I’d give, which is the opposite of what I got, is know your strengths and go with your passions.”

I said, “well, I’m not good at TV. It’s not something I know very well.” The bosses I had said, “oh, yeah, but you can learn it. You can get the team, you can master it, and it’s a big enterprise. You know how to manage.” But I did not know myself well enough.

One of the things that made me OK as a leader at Time is I knew how to put together that magazine as well as anybody there. If somebody said, “we can’t put that picture in because it would crop badly,” I’d say, “no, just crop it from the left side, put it through the gutter, and bleed it on the right.” Or I had reported on a Henry Kissinger or a Madeleine Albright, so I knew reporting. When I got to CNN, I didn’t know how to make TV. I’d say, “well, why don’t we have [international correspondent] Christiane [Amanpour] in Baghdad doing something like this?” And they’d say, “Oh, no, we need a donut around a satellite that has to be done with the film.” And I had no idea what they were talking about.

I guess the piece of career advice I’d give, which was the opposite of what I got, is know your strengths and go with your passions to do things. And if you feel like you’re going to be pushed to do something that you don’t particularly like or know or understand, just say no.

I discovered I wasn’t very good at understanding the intricacies of television. Secondly, I didn’t like to deal with big egos in television. I’m on the other extreme on the kindness spectrum. There are all these big egos who just love having that red light go on, and they want to anchor the President’s press conference. They’re all being big ego-like, I was trying to please everybody, and I was a bad manager. I decided, “OK, I don’t manage big enterprises of high-ego people well. I don’t know television well. I will do things like be in print, and be in a think tank like the Aspen Institute, and not go try to do things that I’m not suited for.”

Grant: One of the most interesting things you’ve been doing at the Aspen Institute has been trying to re-imagine the future of innovation and education. You’ve just reinforced through the da Vinci book that we need to put the “A” in STEM, that the arts are often missing from technical education. How can universities do a better job of integrating disciplines?

Isaacson: I hear people being told they’ve got to learn coding. No, our machines are going to be able to code for us. If there’s anything artificial intelligence will do, it will have more object-oriented coding so that you don’t have to do it. You need to know how coding works. You need to know what an algorithm is. You need to know what a logical sequence is, and what the language of coding is. But just being a coder is not going to help.

It helped you in the 1970s when the engineers were leading the revolution. But now the revolution is about connecting life sciences and medicine to technology. It’s about connecting energy, music, creativity and art. It’s being like Steve Jobs, who never could code very well. Bill Gates could certainly code extremely well, but when they both do a music player, Bill produces the Zune and Steve produces the iPod. It’s because Steve had a feel for the humanities, what people are going to be desiring for the arts, for beauty. He knew that beauty mattered. I think that if you just go barreling down the path of needing to know coding better than anybody, you’re not going to have the creative connections that will make you an innovator.

Grant: Now I have some submitted questions for you. Here’s the first: If da Vinci were a college student today, what would he study?

Isaacson: Obviously, he would be cross-disciplinary. When people ask me, having studied Leonardo da Vinci, “what should I major in?” I always say do a dual major, and make it like music and physics, Spanish literature and applied math. Try to show that you can cross disciplines.

Grant: What would da Vinci think of the biography that you wrote?

Isaacson: I don’t know. It’s hard because he was not somebody deeply personal. In his notebooks, we have sketches of his boyfriend. We have other things, but not a whole lot of personal stuff. I think he would have been puzzled by the contemporary desire to know the personal, as opposed to just the work. Biographies didn’t quite exist back then, but Giorgio Vasari, who was a contemporary, did some lives of painters-type essays. They’re very non-personal. I think it’s something that’s only in modernity that we feel the personal connects to the profession in the art.

“I don’t think you have to master every subject, but I think you have to appreciate the beauty of it.”

Grant: What about the challenge of encouraging people to become polymaths? How we can build that in companies and universities?

Isaacson: I don’t think you have to master every subject, but I think you have to appreciate the beauty of it. When Einstein is doing General Relativity and having trouble with tensor calculus, he takes out his violin and plays Mozart. He actually loves music and plays pretty well. He says, “that connects me to the harmonies of the spheres.” It helps inspire him to understand the beauty of waves and motion and things like that.

I come from the humanities background. I love engineering. I love math. My dad was an engineer, so that’s why I wrote about it some. But the reason I started writing about it is that I realized that we of humanities backgrounds always are doing the lecture, like, “oh, we need to put the A in STEM. You’ve got to learn the arts and the humanities.” You get big applause at places when you talk about the importance of that.

But we in the humanities, or in business or in finance and everything else, also have to meet halfway and learn the beauty of math. People tell me, “oh, I can’t believe somebody doesn’t know the difference between Mozart and Haydn, or [King] Lear and Macbeth.” And I say, “Yes, but do you the difference between a resistor and a transistor? Do you know the difference between an integral and a differential equation?” They go, “oh, no. I don’t do math. I don’t do science.” You know what? An integral equation is just as beautiful as a brushstroke on the “Mona Lisa.” You’ve got to learn that they’re all beautiful.

Grant: Which biography has changed you the most?

Isaacson: Leonardo. Every day I think of things that are so mundane but that Leonardo was curious about. Why do the ripples move differently than the wind on the face of the water? Ben Franklin asked that as well. As a kid, we probably asked that. But I now pause to look at the ripples and how the light hits the ripples and how they create luster.

Grant: There are multiple questions on how you get to know the details of people’s lives. Do you have favorite ways of starting an inquiry to really understand someone?

Isaacson: One thing I feel as a biographer is that for a guy, if you’re writing — from Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, Einstein, Leonardo — it’s often all about dad. If you look at memoirs from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Richard Nixon, they talk about their fathers. Steve Jobs keeps talking about the influence of his adoptive father. Einstein’s father goes bankrupt trying to do the electricity for certain cities. Leonardo is living up to his father because Leonardo is illegitimate, and his father never makes him an heir. I could give a hundred examples, but it begins with the relationship to parents.

Grant: When you think about the different innovators that you’ve profiled, how did they define success?

Isaacson: They were not after money. Steve Jobs could have made a lot more money at Apple. He was always trying to make the product better. Remember the new Mac that came out in 2000? It’s sort of that beautiful, curved thing, and it’s in a few colors. It’s slightly translucent, and there’s a handle on it. They said, “well, this is a desktop machine. We don’t need the handle. People aren’t really supposed to move it around. A handle will cost another $60.” Jobs said, “No, the handle is there because it makes the machine approachable. My mom is afraid of her computer. But if there’s a little thing she can put her hand in, she can touch it and knows it won’t break. It makes her connect emotionally to the computer better.” That was right, but it cost money, so the Mac didn’t make as much.

Likewise, Leonardo doesn’t deliver the “Mona Lisa” to the cloth merchant, doesn’t deliver “Adoration of the Magi” to the church. He’s doing it and keeping it. Whether you’re on the board of directors of an airline or starting a company, sometimes you have to say, “we can’t have our lodestar be return on investments, profits and relative margins. Those are our only lodestars.” A lodestar has to be, are we making a product people will always love? [Amazon founder] Jeff Bezos does that. Steve Jobs did it. Leonardo did it.

Grant: What’s next for you?

Isaacson: I don’t think I’m going to try to do another big biography. I’ll probably do a book about the 1890s in New Orleans, a woman named Lulu White, who was Creole. She opened Mahogany Hall, which was the best music and sporting house in Storyville, the red light district. She hires Jelly Roll Morton to be a pianist, and then young Louis Armstrong comes and plays.

But what happens is crossing the color line is very important back then in New Orleans with the Creole society. One of her friends, Homer Plessy, goes down to Frenchmen Street and boards the train. They ask him to sit in the colored car. He refuses, and that becomes Plessy v. Ferguson, and they have to start drawing the color line after that. America did not need to draw a color line, especially in places like New Orleans, where it was very variable. I want to do something about race, class, sex and all that jazz.

Grant: In closing, for an audience of students aspiring to be more creative, more innovative, are there any other tips that you would offer or myths to bust?

Isaacson: I’ll just tell you something small. The tongue of the woodpecker is three times longer than the beak. And when the woodpecker hits the bark at 10 times the force that would kill a human, the tongue wraps around the brain and cushions it, so the woodpecker can do woodpecking.

There’s absolutely no reason you need to know that. It is totally useless information, just as it was totally useless to Leonardo. But just like Leonardo, every now and then, it’s good to just know something for pure curiosity’s sake.