The Havaianas Theory of Creativity

For most of my career, the word “creative” has felt less like a compliment and more like a jinx.

People describe me that way in meetings, on LinkedIn recs, at dinners with my mother’s friends. Always in the soft, slightly awed tone reserved for florists and yoga teachers, and every time, I feel a small internal collapse. Because “creative” implies an endless supply of shinny ideas. And I know something they don’t: every project I’ve ever worked on begins in the same silence. The silence at the start of a horror movie, right before something jumps out from behind the door. The Keynote is blank. The brief has the word “disruptive” in it. The leadership team is waiting for the version of me they think they hired. And there’s always a small part of me that thinks: what if there’s nothing behind the door this time.

Something does always jump out. That’s the part I’ve spent years learning to trust. But whatever jumps out is never conjured from nothing. It comes from a room I’ve been quietly furnishing since I was three or four.

The workshop, the coffee capsule, and the book

A while ago I sat through one of those corporate leadership workshops where you’re supposed to discover your extraordinary self before lunch. The facilitator gave us homework: bring an object to introduce yourself with.

The ops and finance guys mostly forgot until the morning of, so they grabbed things off the desks around them. One stood up, held out a Nespresso capsule with the unbothered confidence of a man who has never once doubted himself, and said, “I like coffee.” That was the whole presentation.

I was internally screaming. Sir. A capsule. A tiny sealed vessel of concentrated energy that gets used up in ninety seconds and thrown in the bin. Sir. That is a poem. But no. He just liked coffee.

I had spent the entire week overthinking mine. I showed up with two things. First, a pair of Havaianas, Brazilian, colorful, ridiculously accessible, worn by everyone from my grandmother to the Copenhagen Fashion Week front row, and specifically designed to keep you close to the ground. That’s the version of myself I try to bring into a room. Second, my copy of The Artist’s Way.

I couldn’t figure out how to explain the book without sounding like I was launching a wellness brand, so I kept it short. I told the room: this isn’t a book that changed my life. This is a book I open when I want to change my life.

The permission problem

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way has been quietly rewiring creative people since 1992. Lately it’s had a full online renaissance, half my group friends have attempted it, and every millennial designer I met only made it to week four.

The whole method is built on a humbling idea: most creative blocks are permission problems wearing a talent-shaped costume. Cameron’s tools are famously unsexy: writing three pages every morning before your brain gets busy, a weekly “artist date”, a slow un-shaming of your own instincts. The promise underneath is access. To material that was already there, buried under decades of self-editing.

Two strategists can look at the same brief and produce completely different ideas, and the difference between them has almost nothing to do with talent and almost everything to do with what each of them has been quietly carrying around for years. Every strange documentary. Every family fight in a kitchen. Every design magazine picked up in an airport in a city you were only in for eleven hours. Every song from a car you don’t own anymore.

Creativity, as I’ve come to understand it, is a repertoire. You spend years, mostly by accident, filling a room. Then the brief lands, and you see what’s in there.

The week everyone misreads

Around week four, Cameron asks you to spend a full week in “reading deprivation.” No books, no magazines, no background input. If she were writing today, that chapter would be about phones.

Every few months some version of the exercise gets extracted from context on TikTok and repackaged as a personality trait. “I quit input for thirty days.” “I did a dopamine cleanse” “I’m on a media fast.”

What everyone leaves out is that the silence only works if you’ve already filled the room. Week four is not week one for a reason. Cameron is talking to someone whose voice is buried under decades of absorbed books, films, arguments, other people’s lives. For someone whose repertoire is mostly thirty minutes of TikTok before bed for three years, a week without input yields… a week without input. There is nothing underneath to surface.

The exercise is a palate cleanse. It only makes sense if you’ve been eating.

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Also, hi. Yes, this is a piece about creativity in 2026 that hasn’t mentioned AI yet. I’d like to keep it that way. But the strange thing about the last year of tech discourse has been watching Silicon Valley slowly arrive at its own version of Cameron’s thesis, dressed in a hoodie. Paul Graham revived his old essay about “taste” OpenAI’s president posted, with the casual confidence of a man who has never sat through a design critique, that “taste is a new core skill.” They are all circling the same conclusion: when anyone (or anything) can produce something competent, the specificity of what shaped you starts to matter more. An expensive way of saying: repertoire.

Repertoire feeds your visual literacy: what sits on your shelves, in your saved folders, on your walls, in your camera roll, is teaching you a private language every day whether you’re paying attention or not. The job, mine and probably yours, is to pay attention on purpose. Collect strangely. Let a Brazilian rubber sandal and a 1992 self-help book coexist in your head without demanding they explain themselves to each other. Trust that the connection between an obscure reference and the actual business problem in front of you will surface eventually, usually in the shower, or on a walk, or ten minutes into a meeting about something else.

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The library isn’t enough by itself, though.

You also need courage. The willingness to say the specific, slightly weird thing out loud, to a stakeholder who was probably hoping for a safe solution. A beautifully stocked room that nobody ever walks into is a very expensive storage unit.

And you need an environment. A team, a manager, a version of yourself that doesn’t punish the first draft for being strange. Cameron’s morning pages work partly because nobody will ever read them; that is the whole mechanism. Ideas need somewhere ungraded to be bad in before they can be good.

So the next time someone calls me creative and the horror-movie silence starts up in my chest, I try to remember: whatever jumps out from behind the door is only going to be what I’ve been putting in the room for years. The Havaianas. The book. The strange documentary at 2am. The song from a car in a city I don’t live in anymore.

The room is the work. Everything else is just showing up in it.