There wasn't much Leonardo da Vinci couldn't achieve. He had enough talent and smarts for at least 10 people. Does that make you feel like you don't have much in common with this genius of the High Renaissance? Let me introduce you to the Great Equalizer - human error.

Author Michael J. Gelb, wrote in his book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci a few stories about Leonardo that make the genius of the High Renaissance seem more like us and, yes, makes us seem more like him.

Leonardo experienced, " . . . colossal mistakes and staggering blunders," Gelb says. And some of these errors in judgment wasted huge sums of money.

For instance, can you imagine how much it must have cost to try to divert the Arno River? (The Arno River flows 150 miles to the Ligurian Sea. It's drainage basin covers 1, 184 square miles.) Leonardo tried - and failed. This must have sent huge sums of lira down the river and left Leonardo up the river without a paddle.

Another calamity this multi-talented genius orchestrated took place when he tried to automate the kitchen of Ludovico Sforza, one of the wealthiest and most powerful princes of Renaissance Italy. Gelb relates, "Asked to preside as head chef for a major banquet for Sforza and 200 guests, Leonardo created a grand plan to make each course of the dinner a small work of art.

The innovative Leonardo built a powerful stove and a complex system of conveyor belts to move the dishes around the kitchen. He even thought to install a complicated sprinkler system in case of a fire. He did indeed, put his generous talents to work. How could he miss?

Fate (or should I say Murphy's Law) stepped in, however, and made the preparation of Leonardo's fabulous dinner seem more like something you would have seen in a Three Stooges movie.

The day of the event Leonardo discovered the kitchen staff did not have the artistic talent to carve the food into miniature treasures. Not to be stopped by this minor detail, the Renaissance genius invited more than one hundred of his artist friends to do the carving.

Talented as they were, the artists were not used to working in a kitchen. The artists created true works of art from the food; the dishes were moving along on the conveyor belts. But with so many people loading food and plates onto the conveyor belts, they became overloaded and came to a horrifying halt. That's when the fire started, which set of the sprinkler system, which washed Sforza's guests' dinners and part of the kitchen out the door (and into the Arno River, probably).

Now, don't you feel more like a Leonardo da Vinci?