In late 2022, after leaving my full-time role in banking, I began looking for a new direction. As I searched for creative ideas, I found myself thinking about the Jewish people: Einstein, Freud, Brin, Spielberg, and Zuckerberg, all of whom have helped shape the modern world; the wall built to keep out zombies in World War Z , built on the principle that one person must always challenge the other nine; and Start-Up Nation, the book that tells the story of Israel, a small, resource-constrained country that faces constant challenges yet has become one of the world's leading start-up ecosystems by density.
Searching for a Creative Method
Setting aside genetics and culture, I kept asking myself whether there was a specific creative method from the Jewish people that we could learn from. Research on Israel often suggests that its success does not come from any inherent “national exceptionalism,” but from factors that can be studied and replicated: compulsory military service that develops leadership and adaptive thinking from an early age, waves of immigration that bring diverse perspectives, and a culture that is comfortable with failure. In other words, creativity here is not a mystery. It is a system.
In Vietnam, I had never encountered a school or workplace that taught creative thinking in such a structured way. That led me to enrol in Cracking the Creativity Code, a Coursera course taught by Professor Shlomo Maital of Israel's Technion Institute of Technology. The course introduced ZiZoZi, short for Zoom In - Zoom Out - Zoom In, a method that Israeli students practise from their university years.
The course defines creativity in a highly practical way: creativity is the ability to expand the range of available choices. It is a skill that can be developed through practice, not a gift reserved for a select few. I learned it and enjoyed it so much that I made not just one, but two videos about it on the Moneyholic™ YouTube channel. If you are interested, you can watch An Introduction to ZiZoZi and Three Steps to Practise ZiZoZi to explore further. I call this my First Enlightenment.
ZiZoZi has been with me since the early days of building Money X, through internal projects, work with start-up teams and SME operators, and my role as an advisor to start-up projects at FPT University Hanoi. Like Israeli students, I believe young people should practise this way of thinking while they are still at university, rather than wait until after graduation and employment to encounter it.
Start-ups Are Not Simply Trading
A truly creative idea creates value only when it has two elements: Discovery (novelty) and Delivery (usefulness). Without either one, it remains only half an idea.
Vietnam's business and self-employment movement is thriving. I see many people building and teaching “start-ups” around the latest trends, often inspired by business models that are popular in China. Yet in my view, much of what is called “start-up” is simply traditional commerce for making a living: opening a coffee shop like thousands of others, reselling an existing market product, copying a proven model from elsewhere, or pursuing short-term opportunistic trading. There is nothing wrong with these businesses or business models. They are legitimate and necessary. But calling them Start-ups dilutes a concept that deserves to be understood more precisely.
A genuine start-up must be creative: both novel and useful. Its solution should be at least ten times better than existing alternatives in at least one dimension of its value proposition, with the capacity to scale non-linearly and achieve exponential growth.
That is why I prefer the word Creator over Founder. “Founder” describes the act of establishing something, a one-time act at the beginning. “Creator” describes a continuous mindset: always seeking to expand the range of choices and asking whether there is a way to do something ten times better. That is why, at Money X, you will find Creator Hub rather than the conventional Founder Hub. We do not want to celebrate merely having established or laid the foundation for something. We want to celebrate the act of creating without end.
Intuition Guides Creativity
In August 2025, YouTube recommended the Nhận Thức Mới channel to me. I watched it and became a regular viewer. It is one of the most valuable knowledge channels I have encountered on the platform, naturally alongside Moneyholic™. Its content speaks directly to questions I often reflect on, particularly ontological questions about the origin of life, the purpose of existence, and consciousness, as well as the role of intuition in stories about great inventors.
Einstein is often quoted as saying that “the only real valuable thing is intuition.” Tesla, who held more than 1,000 patents, is said to have described his brain as only a receiver, with a core in the universe from which knowledge, strength, and inspiration are received. He said he had not penetrated the secrets of that core, but knew that it existed. Mendeleev, meanwhile, recounted that the periodic table came to him in a dream rather than through step-by-step logical reasoning.
Speaking of the origin of life, if you have ever believed in Darwin’s theory of evolution - from the evolutionary relationship between humans and other primates to the origin of birds from an ancient lineage of dinosaurs - follow the channel and actively explore information from different sources to uncover “the greatest deception in the history of science”.
These stories bring to mind the “Soul of the World” in The Alchemist, the search for “the Creator” in the Prometheus film series, and further reinforce why we chose the term Creator instead of Founder. More importantly, they helped me better understand the role of intuition when practising ZiZoZi to generate creative ideas. I call this my Second Enlightenment, and I am currently preparing a third Moneyholic video to share a method for integrating intuition into this process.
There Is No Final Version
I have never considered this a complete creative method for myself. If you have read The Alchemist, you may remember the line: “Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”
There will be a Third Enlightenment, a Fourth Enlightenment, and perhaps many more in the future. Each is only a version, never a final one. It is like the familiar office story of a file named “revised,” then “final,” followed by “final 1,” “final 2”... and so on, never truly reaching an end.
That is exactly how I see the role of a Creator. A Founder is tied to a milestone that has already passed: the day a company was established. A Creator belongs to a journey that never stops: always zooming in to examine detail, zooming out to see the whole picture, then zooming in again with a new perspective. At Money X, we do not want to confine ourselves to a moment in the past. We want to remain creators, every day and in every new version of ourselves.
