(Excerpt from The Good Men Project)
In 1501, Michelangelo, the greatest artist that ever lived, accepted a commission to carve a marble sculpture of the biblical David to be placed high atop a buttress on the Florentine Cathedral in Italy. He started the work on a mass of uninspiring marble, chiseling away chunk by chunk until he got the desired figure. It took four years for Michelangelo to carve the famous sculpture out of an 18-foot-tall marble block that other artists including the famous Leonardo da Vinci regarded as an unworkable and inferior marble mass.
When Michelangelo was asked by the pope about the secret of his genius, particularly in regards to the statue of David, largely considered to be the greatest sculpting masterpiece of all time. Michelangelo responded by saying, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”