Success Quote by Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Fitz-Gibbon’s line flatters creativity while quietly demoting the myth of the lone genius. “Turning up what is already there” is ad-speak realism: the world is already crowded with raw material, consumer habits, and half-finished ideas; the “creative” act is noticing the overlooked friction point and making it impossible to ignore. That’s not romantic, but it’s how products, campaigns, and cultural shifts actually land.

The shoe example is a shrewd piece of rhetorical jujitsu. Right and left shoes feel like a law of nature, so learning they’re relatively recent makes the reader briefly distrust their own sense of inevitability. That little cognitive wobble is the point. If something so intimate and everyday was once optional, then the current “that’s just how it is” in any industry is suddenly suspect. Fitz-Gibbon isn’t praising novelty; she’s weaponizing history to show how late “common sense” often arrives.

As a business figure, her intent is also corrective: creativity isn’t only for artists, it’s a practical discipline for commerce. The subtext is that innovation can be incremental, even humble, and still transform behavior at scale. In an economy that rewards spectacle, she argues for attention as the scarce resource: the creative advantage is the ability to surface the obvious before anyone else packages it, names it, and sells it back to us as destiny.