“For innovation to flourish, organizations must create an environment that fosters creativity.” — Linda Naiman
That is the line Linda Naiman opens Tip 3 of my book 42 Ways To Be More Creative & Brilliant with, and it names something most of us feel before we can explain it. Walk into a room that has not changed in two years, and your thinking rarely changes either. Walk into a room that surprises you, even a little, and your mind starts to look around as well.
The tip is called “Spruce Up Your Creative Environment.” Spruce up is exactly right. This is not a renovation, a new office, or a shopping trip disguised as productivity. It is a deliberate freshening of the place where your eyes already rest — because that place shapes what you notice, and what you notice shapes what you make.
The Idea, in Its Own Words
See the same stuff at home and at work, day after day, and you become habituated to your environment — it stops registering at all. That is the book’s starting point, and it is worth sitting with. Habituation is useful when it saves us from distraction. It is costly when it saves us from noticing.
The chapter’s suggestion is disarmingly simple: spice things up. Add a painting, a plant, a strange object on your desk — anything that stimulates creative thinking. The strangeness matters. A new object that blends in perfectly will disappear by Friday. An object that makes you pause, smile, or ask a question keeps doing its work a little longer.
If you doubt environment matters, the book adds, ask the creative folks at Pixar or Google. That is not a throwaway line. Some of the most creative companies in the world treat their buildings not as containers for work, but as part of the work itself. The real-life example below shows just how seriously one of them took it.
In Real Life: Pixar Built Encounters Into the Building
When Pixar planned its Emeryville headquarters, the early idea was familiar: separate buildings for separate kinds of people — one for computer scientists, another for animators, a third for everybody else. Efficient, tidy, and, in Steve Jobs’s view, exactly wrong for creativity.
As Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography Steve Jobs, Jobs had the building redesigned around a great central atrium that promoted encounters and unplanned collaborations. The front doors, stairs, and corridors led to the atrium. The cafe and the mailboxes were there. The screening rooms spilled into it. People who would otherwise stay in their offices had reasons, many times a day, to get up, mingle, and run into people they might not otherwise see.
Jobs put the reasoning plainly, in Isaacson’s account: “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.”
Did it work? John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer at the time, said: “Steve’s theory worked from day one. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.” Director Brad Bird added a line that belongs in every discussion of workspace: “The atrium initially might seem like a waste of space… But Steve realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen.”
You do not need an atrium. The lesson is the principle at domestic scale: environment is not neutral. Pixar spent a building’s budget on the insight that where people are changes what they think of. You can honour it this afternoon, at the scale of one desk, one shelf, and one wall.
Going Deeper: A Silent Instruction
The chapter’s Go Deeper section offers the sentence this whole tip turns on: “Your surroundings are a silent instruction to your brain.”
Read that slowly. Your surroundings are instructing you right now, whether you chose the instruction or not. A desk buried in old papers instructs: catch up, you are behind. A bare, joyless corner instructs: endure this, then leave. A desk with one living plant, one image you love, and clear space to work instructs something entirely different: begin, and begin fresh.
Novel objects break habituation and signal that today is not business as usual, the book continues, while colour, light and living things measurably lift mood and energy. You do not need a redesign — you need a few deliberate surprises in the places your eyes rest most.
That last clause is the practical key: the places your eyes rest most. Not the whole room. Not the storage closet. The square of wall above your screen. The corner of the desk your hand reaches for. The shelf behind you on a video call, which is also, quietly, the backdrop of how you see yourself working. Change what lives in those few places, and you have changed the instruction your brain receives a hundred times a day.
If Tip 3 is the one your workspace has been waiting for, it is one of 42 tips in the book — each with The Idea, a Go Deeper, and a Try This Today: 42 Ways To Be More Creative & Brilliant.
A Small Practice: The Three-Change Reset
Here is a short practice drawn directly from the chapter, small enough to finish before your next cup of tea cools.
First, add one inspiring object. Something with a pulse of story in it: a small plant, a photograph that still moves you, an odd stone from a walk, a painting — yours or someone else’s. Inspiring is personal. If it would look good in a catalogue but says nothing to you, it is decoration, not fuel.
Second, move one familiar thing to a new spot. The book you always stack on the left goes on the right. The lamp crosses the desk. Habituation breaks not only for new things, but for old things seen from a new angle. Moving is free, and it works today.
Third, remove one thing that drains you. The broken thing you keep apologising to. The pile that accuses you. The souvenir of a project you have already decided not to finish. Removing is the change we resist most, and often the one that changes the feeling of the room fastest — because space itself is an instruction, and empty space says: there is room for something new.
Then, in the book’s words, sit down and notice how the room feels different — that feeling is the point. Sit in the changed room for two full minutes before you open anything. Let the new instruction land.
Try This Today
From the book, exactly as written there:
“Change three things today: add one inspiring object, move one familiar thing to a new spot, and remove one thing that drains you. Then sit down and notice how the room feels different — that feeling is the point.”
Do it today, not this weekend. Tip 3 is deliberately third in the book — after a realistic deadline and a short break — because a deadline gives your work a date, a break gives your mind air, and a spruced-up environment gives both of them a place worth returning to. Linda Naiman was right: innovation needs an environment that fosters it. Yours can start fostering it in the next ten minutes, with three small changes and one honest pause to notice.
Get the Book
42 Ways To Be More Creative & Brilliant collects 42 tips like this one — each with The Idea, a Go Deeper, and a Try This Today you can do the same day. It is available as an instant-download ebook at its launch price of $4.00 (reg. $8.00):
👉 Get 42 Ways To Be More Creative & Brilliant on Etsy
New to Launch Your Genius? Start with my free book, 12 Amazing Life Lessons From Rumi — twelve timeless quotes and the lessons I found inside them, free to download at launchyourgenius.com. 🌿
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