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Don’t forget to take a break from planning your elaborate Halloween costume to ask yourself how things went this wrong for you.
- Tim Siedell
Around the time that he reached the unnerving milestone of turning thirty, Leonardo da Vinci wrote a letter to the ruler of Milan listing the reasons he should be given a job. He had been moderately successful as a painter in Florence, but he had trouble finishing his commissions and was searching for new horizons. In the first ten paragraphs, he touted his engineering skills, including his ability to design bridges, waterways, cannons, armored vehicles, and public buildings. Only in the eleventh paragraph, at the end, did he add that he was also an artist. "Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible," he wrote.
- From Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
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If life is one damned thing after another, then let that be your strategy and take them on one at a time.
Not two or three at a time. Just one. And then another. And another.
George Washington was dying. The rumor spread quickly through Manhattan neighborhoods ravaged by influenza, the "contagious distemper" first diagnosed on Roman streets half a century earlier. Impartial to class, color, or politics, the disease was more democratic than the young American republic whose ruling elite it threatened. At a boardinghouse on Maiden Lane, Congressman James Madison took to his bed, too sick to argue with Alexander Hamilton over the secretary of the treasury's audacious plan to consolidate federal power by having the government in New York assume the debts and revenue sources formerly reserved for individual states.
- From Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation by Richard Norton Smith
[Photo by Jessy Paston at Unsplash]
