Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (Nobel Prize, Medicine, 1937) might have described creativity as “seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought”.

The skier’s answer to your interview question, Jason, illustrated “seeing what everyone else can see and using full awareness to achieve the objective”. As you say, this is analogous to our responsibility as investment managers to be mindful of all possibly relevant influences on ourselves, and the investment objective, while crafting and managing a solution to an organic problem with a life of its own.

If we never cross the boundary of what others have done, we are like the monks before the printing press who spent their lives copying old texts by hand. This is no longer a highly paid activity.