INSPIRING QUOTES

Awakening Insight Through Awareness

Apples had fallen from trees for millennia. Billions of people had seen them fall. But only one person paused long enough to wonder: Why do apples fall down to the ground?

That simple question opened Isaac Newton's mind to bigger possibilities. He realized the same force acting upon the apple might govern the moon's orbit and explain the motion of everything in the universe.

Newton’s creativity fueled his success across domains, from inventing calculus to advancing the field of optics. But arguably his most impressive accomplishment, the law of universal gravitation, began with questioning the obvious.

🔄 The Flexible Lens

The difference between seeing and seeing deeply can unlock creative inventions, insights, and breakthroughs.

Our awareness is like a flexible lens, capable of expansing or contracting, focusing inward or outward. With eyes wide open, we absorb the whole world in detail; with eyes closed, we perceive subtler layers within ourselves. Awareness, like creativity, isn’t fixed. It’s a dance between breadth and depth, between what we choose to ignore and what we dare to see.

When done masterfully the ordinary is either no longer what it seems or something new.

Revolutionary thinkers like Newton found truth not only by diving deeper into complexity, but by also stepping back and daring to question what everyone else overlooked. Then they challenged rules others followed without question.

Newton questioned gravity.
Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, questioned Wall Street.

CREATIVITY SPOTLIGHT

Challenging the Status Quo

Imagine it’s the 1990s and you walk into the CEO’s office at Fidelity or another mutual fund company bigger than religion, to propose changing their investment strategy.

“Fire all your hard working, well-trained, Ivy League degree holding analysts,” you say.

“How did you get this meeting?” The CEO glances toward the door as if considering her escape routes.

“You don’t need your analysts because you won’t need to pick stocks anymore,” you say. “No active management required.”

“That’s literally our core strength. Thanks for coming—“

But that whole system is flawed! you want to scream.

Instead you say, “You don’t need analysts because you can simply buy and hold the entire market through the S&P 500.”

The CEO ends the meeting with a click of her button, calling her assistant. At least you didn’t fall through a trap panel as you would in Squid Games.

As absurd as it sounds, could firing the analyst and stock picking teams really make sense? That’s akin to firing the R&D department at pharmaceutical companies, the admen at marketing agencies, and the athletes on sports teams. It’s an earth-rattling, provocative proposition.

In 1976 Jack Bogle launched the first index mutual fund, a type of passive management fund, at Vanguard. This fund simply bought every stock in the S&P 500 rather than using active management, which pick winners through research and analysis. At the time, it was mocked as “Bogle’s Folly.” Critics were convinced no serious investor would pay to own the entire market instead of betting on the best stocks.

For much of the 20th century, the financial world ran on a simplistic yet sensible assumption: Smart investors beat the market by (legally) outsmarting the market.

But what if this obvious assumption was... wrong?

🎾 Are You Playing the Wrong Game?

There's an analogy that compares trying to pick winning stocks with buying the whole market, and compares the difference to the gap between professional and amateur tennis.

In professional tennis, about 80% of points are won by the player who makes skillful shots. But in amateur tennis, around 80% of points are lost due to unforced errors.

Most investors behave as if they’re playing the professional version, aiming for brilliance and big wins through “skillful” stock-picking. But in reality, investing is more like amateur tennis: you win not by out-playing your opponent, but by making fewer mistakes.

Bogle’s insight was simple but radical: stop trying to win like a pro and start trying not to lose like an amateur. In a world obsessed with beating the market, Bogle saw that avoiding unforced errors was the real edge.

That’s not just a financial lesson. It’s a lesson in awareness and perception.

Sometimes the smartest move isn’t to outthink everyone, it’s to see the game differently.

Bogle’s simple approach, like an amateur tennis player avoiding errors, didn’t just challenge Wall Street, it reshaped investing, as the numbers reveal.

💸 A Bold Vision in Investing

Decades after being mocked, Bogle’s Folly defied predictions.

While pro investors may believe they’re playing to win, the numbers tell a different story: Amazingly, 9 out of 10 active funds can’t beat Bogle’s simple approach, and today, passive funds hold more than 60% of U.S. equity fund assets.

Sometimes the simpler way is the better way because it is the smarter way.

If passive investing beats most professional fund managers, this suggests that intelligence and research don't actually lead to better investment results. Consequently, the flip side is that less intelligence and less information don’t necessarily lead to inferior results. So, it’s possible you’ll observe less capable people make good investments in things they barely know, and this may give you a false sense of confidence and FOMO.

The most compelling takeaway from Bogle’s Folly is that it reveals a timeless truth which is applicable to stock market investing.

✨ The Simple Truth

The fact that eliminating stock research from a mutual fund actually improves investment returns reveals something deeper than just the benefits of low fees and tax efficiency. This insight evokes a prescient 2,500-year-old quote from the Laozi, the attributed founder of Taoism:

The ancient wisdom reveals a timeless truth about the limits of prediction. And it turns out that passive investing is not only effective but also counterintuitive. It exposes a mismatch between how most people think investing works versus how it actually works.

🪞 What This Means For You

What does this have to do with creativity? Everything.

The ability to look deeply at the ordinary is a key source of creativity. This is equally true for an artist striving for transcendence, a scientist seeking a cure, and a businessman aspiring to be a billionaire. Of course, this ability to see the unseen isn’t limited to transformative efforts. It’s something we all can cultivate.

It’s also worth asking yourself, “What obvious assumptions in my own field are waiting to be questioned?”

👁️ My Personal Lens

This idea of ‘seeing the ordinary deeply’ isn’t just theoretical for me. It’s something I try to practice. Here are three insights that I’d like to share.

One, when my observations are filtered through my own beliefs and biases, I find my perceptions moving further from their raw truth.

Two, perceiving the world through a childlike wonder is magical and powerful in helping me understand the raw truth.

Three, for me, awareness isn’t just cognitive, it’s a mix of science, intuition, and spirituality. I believe the experience of truly perceiving something might be one of the few bridges connecting our everyday experience with something deeper, maybe even divine.

BLINKS, THINKS & LINKS

Curiosity Candy

• 👀 Explore your visual perception and its limitations through 152 beautiful, interactive experiments with visual phenomena and optical illusions.
  

• 🔬 Interactive zoom-in, zoom-out tool that reveals layers of detail from subatomic particles to large galaxies.
  

• 🎶 Listen to this music. Can you hear anything extraordinary? Can you feel anything extraordinary?

ACTIONABLE PROMPTS

Practice to See the Profound in the Plain

Like Isaac Newton and Jack Bogle, anyone can train themselves to ask better “why” questions about the ordinary and obvious in daily life, work, and creative pursuits. Your awareness and perception need constant training and fortunately there’s no shortage of opportunities.

Try the prompts below to hone your awareness of things that on the surface might seem mundane.

• 🌿 One-Minute Scan

  • Step outside. Take a full minute to scan the natural world around you, not with the goal of finding something beautiful, but of letting something surprise you.

  • It could be the curve of a leaf, a dancing shadow, the temperature of the air.

  • That’s it. Take note of it.
    

• 🔍 Practice the Art of Noticing

  • Pick a familiar route, e.g., a walk you’ve taken dozens of times.

  • Today, walk it as if for the first time.

  • Notice four things (for four senses) you’ve never noticed before: a color or shape, a sound, a texture, a scent.

  • Write them down without judging them as important or trivial.
    

• 🛏️ Daily Assumption

  • Before bed, write down one assumption you made that day about yourself, someone else, or the world.

  • Then ask: Is it true?

  • And ask: What if the opposite were true?

Thanks for reading,

V.C. Hanna
Founder, Kreatio