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Creation is discontinuity. It can’t be derived from trend models. It can’t be generated from a market map on a white board in some business school. It comes from the heart. It comes from the soul. It comes from talent. A discontinuous function is the perfect and most profound metaphor for creation. To graph it, one must lift her pencil off the page and put it down in an entirely different place, a place that no one following the curve up to that point would have or could have predicted.

The beauty of creation is just that—the unknown. The surprise. The ability to show people something they’ve never seen before. That gap between the end of one curved line and the beginning of the other is the leap taken to create something. It’s the daring expression of one’s identity and the courage to show it to the world. It’s what it means to be human.

A creator makes a product that connects to his customer. Designers make designs that other people make into products. Design skills can be taught; the ability to create cannot. Not all designers are creators and not all creators are designers. We believe in creators.

Behind many of today’s brands are computers crunching numbers to forecast trends. Since they all use the same data, they make the same predictions and then produce the same products. They imitate. They make slight improvements. But they don’t create. These businesses are soulless. Hollow.

Creators know that to be better, they have to follow their vision. Data refine their path; they don’t set it. No amount of data can define the creator’s vision. They create products that are deeply personal, instinctual, and unexpected. They see what the rest of us can’t.