Visualization is a marvelous tool to sharpen all your senses, improve your memory, and prepare for accomplishing your goals in life. Visualization was an essential element of Leonardo’s strategy for learning and creating. As he wrote, “I have found on my own experience that it is of no small benefit when you lie in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the outlines of the forms you have been studying or of other note worthily things conceived by subtle speculation; and this is certainly a praise – worthily exercise and useful in impressing things on the memory.” Although intended as advice for painters, it applies equally well to artists of life.

From How to think like Leonardo da Vinci, by Michael J. Gelb, published by Delacorte Press, 1998.