Combinatorial Creativity and the Birth of Belief

“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.” — Erich Fromm

I was watching a YouTube video recently and heard about the book Hidden Genius by Polina Marinova Pompliano. I’m addicted to books that do any type of analysis of people with unique brains. As I do with all new books since ChatGPT Voice Mode came out, I went to a park and had a conversation with my most knowledgeable friend—who has read every book—and had a analogical conversational journey about this one.

As I expected, it was enjoyable to hear a different angle on geniuses and what makes them unique. During the learning, I heard for the first time the term combinatorial creativity. It is introduced as the ability to form new ideas by connecting seemingly unrelated concepts, memories, or insights. Chapter 1, “Unleashing Your Creative Potential,” argues that creativity isn’t just an artistic gift but a skill anyone can train—rooted in curiosity and flexible thinking. One of the phrases I live by is “do new.” This is something I’ve learned over the years about the plasticity of the brain and the importance of learning and doing new things. Even something as simple as choosing a different restaurant or trying a new dish can stimulate brain growth. This idea is based on research highlighting the value of not just knowledge-based learning, but also experiential learning. I’m constantly trying to connect dots between things I see, feel, and experience—often through analogies. Analogies help me learn, but they also store memories in places that are easily retrieved. This was something I learned from the book Moonwalking with Einstein and the idea of the memory palace.

Hidden Genius draws on examples like Leonardo da Vinci, whose brilliance came not from isolated genius, but from his ability to bridge gaps between disciplines. What hit me as I walked around the park, surrounded by spring cherry blossom colors, was that this same creative capacity is not only key to invention or problem-solving—it is also fundamental to how we form beliefs. Over the past few weeks, with the chaos in the markets, I’ve had many meetings with macro thinkers where we talked about what’s happening and how this might look in the end. For me, that ending includes Bitcoin as a major part of the solution. But for most macro thinkers I’ve met over the years—especially recently—they believe it is worthless or a scam. As I was walking, it hit me that there is a connection between creativity and statements like "worthless" or "scam." These, to me, are absolute statements—like “never” or “always.” I learned a long time ago in psychology that those types of statements are bad for relationships—but especially for making money. The world operates on probability distributions, not certainties. When we use absolute statements—like “Bitcoin is worthless” or “this will never work”—we flatten the curve of possibilities and ignore the range of outcomes that define real-world complexity. I’ve learned to avoid absolutes in discussions because they shut down curiosity and the flexibility needed to adapt. Beliefs, much like creative breakthroughs, are rarely binary; they emerge from the messy interplay of experience, emotion, and knowledge. In many ways, belief is a psychological response to uncertainty—an emotional synthesis that helps us navigate the unknown by assigning meaning to a probable, not guaranteed, path forward.

This insight reshaped how I understood my path to Bitcoin. The idea that belief is a form of creativity helped me make sense of my journey—not as a conversion to a preexisting ideology, but as an act of personal synthesis. I didn’t wake up one day and choose Bitcoin; it emerged as the answer to a growing internal question. I love markets because, as Andrew Lo has said, they are constantly evolving like biology. They are never static. Markets are living organisms that change, and monetary systems have a history of changing. Yuval Noah Harari has said money is humanity’s greatest story, and when the system breaks down, we seem to create a new story—and once time has passed, people accept that story.

Watching the monetary system privilege the wealthy and centralized power structures while ordinary people struggled left me disillusioned. Over the years, I tried to solve the puzzle of how technology could fix this problem—ironically, a problem that rapid innovation and technology helped create. These emotional undercurrents—distrust, frustration, a yearning for autonomy—were the raw material. Combined with my interest in decentralization, technology, and fairness, they crystallized into belief. This wasn’t blind faith. It was creative belief, shaped like a solution to an emotional equation. As Hidden Genius suggests, creativity often stems from personal tension—an internal discomfort that forces a new way of thinking. Bitcoin, for me, became the product of such a synthesis.

The psychology behind this process aligns with theories of belief formation in cognitive science. Beliefs aren’t purely rational conclusions—they’re often post-rational justifications for emotional or experiential realities. Psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have shown that we “feel” before we “think,” and then build rational structures to support emotional intuitions. Creativity works similarly. It takes what we already know and feel, reassembles it, and gives us something that feels novel but coherent. This is exactly what happened with Bitcoin for many people, myself included. The feelings of unfairness in the current financial system didn’t dissipate until I found a creative structure that made sense of them. Three of my children have dedicated their lives to helping others in the social work and medical fields, yet none of them can afford to live where they want. My son traded Bitcoin during COVID, and his success—and subsequent losses—sparked my curiosity to understand it. My experiences with my children tied back to my macro thought process on how this can end in a good way for them. My time in Brazil, where I witnessed poverty and the inability of young children to escape their inevitable futures, also contributed to my experiential curiosity for a solution. Bitcoin became the belief that connected emotional experience to a broader intellectual framework—a system of values, technology, and economic philosophy.

The Bitcoin community reflects this same dynamic on a collective level. What unites many Bitcoin believers isn’t just a shared investment—it’s a shared story. On platforms like X (formerly Twitter), people bond over experiences of inflation, job insecurity, or distrust in government institutions. They draw upon history (like the collapse of Weimar Germany), economic theory (sound money), and emotional longing (freedom, fairness, autonomy). These elements are creatively recombined into a belief system where Bitcoin becomes a symbol, not just a tool. Hidden Genius points to how creativity often emerges from shared pain and shared imagination. The Bitcoin community has built not just a decentralized network of computers, but a decentralized network of meaning—a belief creatively built from collective psychological need.

Contrast this with those who resist Bitcoin, and the creative-belief framework becomes even clearer. People who are rigid in their thinking—or insulated by wealth and privilege—lack both the emotional push and the cognitive flexibility required for belief formation. As Hidden Genius notes, creativity requires openness to ambiguity—a tolerance for the discomfort of the unknown. Those entrenched in legacy systems often see no problem to solve; they are not emotionally or practically disrupted. Without pain, there’s no yearning; without yearning, no synthesis. In psychological terms, this is the difference between assimilation and accommodation. Nobody thinks of themselves as “elite,” but the reality in my mind is this: if you use absolutes regarding Bitcoin, you are likely in a position of comfort. The people driven to it are rebels—they are frustrated, looking for hope in a world where the corporate ladder leads to hopelessness, where people are trapped. One of my daughters has to commute for almost two hours to get to her job at 6 a.m. in New York City. I got into my office early at Morgan Stanley at her age, and five years later, I was opening a new office for the firm in Brazil. That ladder of success doesn’t exist for her—or for many young people in this new world. It has changed due to technology, debt, deficits, and inflation. Elites assimilate new information into their existing worldview (“Bitcoin is a scam” or “a speculative bubble”), while creative believers accommodate by restructuring their worldview to include it. Many times, these nonbelievers lack hope too, but at their age, they just seem angry. This openness is what separates belief as transformation from belief as conformity.

Ultimately, Hidden Genius is a book that helped me see that belief and creativity are twin engines of human progress. Whether it’s a scientific breakthrough or a personal conviction, both are born from the same process of making meaning out of chaos. My belief in Bitcoin was not handed to me—it was constructed, step by step, out of discontent, curiosity, and hope. The Bitcoin community reflects this on a larger scale, proving that technological revolutions often follow emotional revolutions. Creativity doesn’t just invent things—it builds frameworks that people can believe in. It offers not only solutions to external problems but answers to internal questions about fairness, autonomy, and the future.

In this light, belief becomes more than opinion—it becomes a creative act. Just as Leonardo da Vinci combined anatomy, art, and engineering to understand the world, modern believers combine emotion, philosophy, and innovation to construct visions of the future. Bitcoin, to its believers, is one such vision: a combinatorial belief shaped by necessity and hope. I almost titled this paper Bitcoin and the Hidden Genius of Belief, but I didn’t. Why? Because those who already believe Bitcoin is a scam or worthless likely wouldn’t have read it. If you’ve made it this far, then I made the right decision. The ability to hold space for uncertainty and explore the unfamiliar is itself a mark of creativity. For the nonbelievers: ask your children if they believe in Bitcoin. If they do, take the time to ask why—and open your mind. Don’t tell them it’s worthless or a scam. Maybe, just maybe, they have experiences and perspectives like Leonardo da Vinci. Maybe they are under your nose—a Hidden Genius.