Category: Lighthouse letters

Dear Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, 

It’s already unbelievable that we’re writing a letter to you in 2026 when you departed this world in 1519. However, very few people in history represent so well the spirit of craftsmanship and the practice of principled curiosity you embodied, so this first honorary lighthouse letter is addressed to you.

For those who’ve not had the chance to learn about your story, let us share a few lines about what you did with your life. In approximately 67 years, you painted the Mona Lisa (1503-1519), drew the Vitruvian Man (1490), engineered a flying machine, a rudimentary submarine or a self-supporting bridge (amongst many other inventions) and wrote more than 13,000 pages of pioneering concepts in anatomy, hydraulics, optics, geology, astronomy and mechanics. Not bad at all for someone who was the illegitimate son of a notary in Tuscany, who at the age of 14 walked into a workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, in Florence, to learn his craft as a humble apprentice.

Your observation, hands-on making, artistic judgement, scientific investigation and collaboration across disciplines are definitely an aspirational north star for many of us. Even the fact that your work was developed in collaborative environments (bottegas) where masters, assistants and apprentices contributed to commissions together is, in essence, at the heart of what we do at the Studio five centuries later. The Medicis now have different names, but the dynamics of the profession have not changed much...

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By: Alvaro Sanmartin Cid

Leonardo da Vinci’s picture file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This file comes from the Wellcome Collection, a website operated by Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation based in the United Kingdom.

Welcome back! If you’re new here, this is Minds Studio’s beam of light, sent out roughly twice a month, written by someone in our network, for people who feel aligned with what we do even if we haven’t met yet.

I’m Belle, nice to e-meet you. I’d much rather make you a good cup of coffee and have a face-to-face chat, but maybe next time?

It’s hard to talk about Minds Studio without going back to my own mind. I am an immigrant – twice over, in fact. Artist, queer, dog lover, and a millennial who had to face all those soul-sucking jobs just to keep paying rent. Who didn’t?

Rushed to deliver, to find more clients, to multitask, maximising the efficiency at minimum cost. Twenty phone calls while on holiday, managing a team of 25 people at 24, in my third language. I do love a good challenge, but since joining Minds I realised that’s not the way I want to keep going, and thanks to the universe, I found there are more like-minded people out there.

And that goes beyond my professional life. I didn’t have a particularly good experience studying myself. I ended up paying money for a well-engraved trauma that, to this day, I’m still working on dissolving. Experiencing a communal way of learning changed everything –  the approach, the rhythm, the humanness. It’s beautiful and long-lasting. Minds shaped me so strongly that it made me want to be part of a Community of Practice for every topic I’m curious about…

Belle Sacchi

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Welcome to Minds Studio’s first lighthouse letter. This message -in a virtual bottle- is our first beam of light to keep in touch with people we crossed paths with before- and some we don’t know yet- who feel aligned with Minds Studio’s purpose. You’ll find here our most personal reflections, the companies we admire, some projects we feel proud of, and a collection of our Minds Network members’ stories.

We aim to share our thoughts twice a month, but that’s not a promise- we believe we’ll find our own rhythm, and we all know that sometimes life gets in the way (in a good way). All our letters will be imperfectly human-written by someone in our network. If you resonate with any of them, we’d love you to respond with a letter of your own! (When was the last time you wrote one?)

The Studio was born in 2019 from a personal need to build lasting learning experiences I could feel proud of. Not yet another course. Not a rinse-and-repeat curriculum. I wanted to design something deeper and more meaningful, although I didn’t know the shape of it back then. Slowly, it’s grown to be a space for calm, humanity, depth and craftsmanship for many-including myself. As the years passed and the AI rush accelerated, I caught myself thinking about our role as humans and doubling down on the values we’ve always stood for. We need to focus and do fewer things better, not more things worse.

Great artisans have always kept and honoured this wisdom, surviving centuries of social upheaval, economic crisis, and technological evolution. Not by resisting change, but by holding firm to something deeper than the present trends: curating with care over mass production, cultivating relationships over transactional business, focusing on craftsmanship over convenience. This is not a price point. It is a philosophy. And it is, above all, timeless.

Is technology reshaping the way we learn? Undoubtedly. Much like globalisation reshaped fashion, making everything faster, cheaper, and more abundant-but not better. The world has been flooded with instant knowledge and frictionless answers. And like fast fashion, much of it will not last because it’s not about finding answers but exploring questions. Here is what no algorithm can manufacture: the feeling of a room where something shifts, a moment when we quietly experience something unique that changes the way we see the world. Those shifts arrive slowly and then suddenly, due to a particular alchemy of curiosity, human presence and shared discovery emerging in an environment that no technology has yet found a way to replicate-because it was never about technology in the first place. It’s a spark that suddenly lights up and changes the world you can see.

That is the light Minds Studio has always been searching for and beaming out, wherever we go. Our power lies in a collective that has always set its craft apart from the mainstream: bringing with us creativity, sensibility, and the patience to do things properly. Like many lighthouses, this approach may feel slow and somehow out of fashion, but some might find it life-saving.

Learning and making things that last move in the same direction. At Minds Studio, they always have.

Welcome to the first of the lighthouse letters, crafted to last.

Alvaro Sanmartin Cid

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