I've just returned from Cannes Lions 2026 and it has been the best conference I've ever attended. Period. Top one.
I've now spent serious time at the three conferences most people in business and culture treat as the top: WEF's Annual Meeting in Davos, the Cannes Film Festival, and Cannes Lions. Lions is my favorite, by a wide margin. The reason is multidimensionality.
It's the only one of the three that let me show up as everything I am at once, instead of negotiating which parts of myself I'm allowed to show.
To explain why that matters, I have to back up and explain what these places are actually doing to you, because some of you get it wrong. They think it's about the network you build. And I think that's a small piece of something much bigger, a mechanism I call neuro mirroring.
Neuro mirroring
You've heard the idea that we're the sum of the top five people around us. Neuro mirroring is that principle running on proximity. It borrows from something neuroscience already knows: mirror neurons fire almost identically whether you're performing an action or simply watching someone else perform it.
Proximity alone changes what's happening in your brain.
Surround yourself with people operating at the top of their game, breathe the same air they do for long enough, and your subconscious rewires a belief: I earned my seat here. I deserve to be here. Once that belief sets, your ambition runs with it. You'll go for bigger ideas, bigger partnerships, better strategies, and, overall, a bigger version of whatever you're building. It works! I promise, it works!
People ask me all the time whether I actually get any work done from Soho House. Of course I do. Everyone around me is already sitting down and working, so I sit down and match the room. That's neuro mirroring in its smallest, most everyday form.
Davos runs the same mechanism: spend enough time around people who are used to getting hundreds of millions in funding, and you start believing you can too. And you actually go for it. It's also why a place like Harvard works on people the way it does, network or no network.
Where the three split
Where these three places split is actually what they convince you to believe.
Davos convinces you that you belong where decisions about the world get made. I went many years in a row, through relationships with senior WEF leadership built over years, and I love it for exactly what it is. But every house on the Promenade represents a country, a state, or a company standing in for one. The conversations run business and geopolitical before anything else, and creativity rarely gets a seat at that table.
Davos asks you to be serious. It has no real use for multidimensional.
The Cannes Film Festival convinces you that you belong among the people who make culture, right up until someone learns you're not at Netflix, Prime or Hulu, not a buyer, not a distributor, not a film investor. I watched it happen every time I mentioned I'm an entrepreneur: people checked out, sometimes very visibly running towards the next person they could meet.
The Film Festival has creativity in abundance and very little patience for the business side of things, despite films acting very much like start-ups.
Cannes Lions let me keep every part of myself in play at the same time. Media, technology, brands, creativity, and content ran through the same conversations, sometimes the same sentence, instead of competing for which one got to represent me that day.
What that looked like on the ground
Walking the Croisette, you'd pass Oprah one moment and Tina Knowles the next, then end up in the same club as Ciara and Fat Joe on a Wednesday night (and what a party that was, raise your hand if you were at the Afties!). Raye, Elmiene, Anderson .Paak, Wyclef Jean, will.i.am, Ja Rule, Jay Shetty, Steven Bartlett, and Keke Palmer, performing or speaking, sometimes all of them in the same night.
TikTok, Meta, Pinterest, Google, Netflix, Salesforce, YouTube, and Reddit running activations within blocks of each other. I had FOMO the entire time I was there, the kind you get while standing right on the strip, not the kind you get scrolling from home, because 127,647 extraordinary things are happening at once and you are, structurally, one person. Having FOMO while physically present tells you everything about how dense that week actually is.
Myself as the test case
I'll use myself as the test case, because it's the clearest way to show what multidimensionality means in practice. I have ADHD. I run a private office sourcing deal flow across rare acquisitions, critical raw materials, technology, and AI. I built and run STELLR, a reputation architecture and strategic advisory firm for CEOs and solid founders, plus I'm building mystellr.com and Envelope (stay tuuuuuned) alongside it.
But I also write and perform soul R&B music (have 2 albums coming out soon), spoken word, play underground house DJ sets, sometimes do stand-up comedy, write a book called Multitudes, and research creativity because I learned that suppressing it makes me physically sick.
Yes, I don't suppress that side of myself anymore. Brené Brown has a line that stuck with me: unused creativity isn't benign, it metastasizes into resentment, grief, heartbreak, and, I'd argue, eventually into your body.
I'd rather make the work than carry what not making it costs.
Most rooms want one of those people and ask the rest to wait in the car. Davos wants the operator. The Film Festival wants the artist, provided she leaves the operator at home. Cannes Lions assumed all of it belonged at the same table, because on the Croisette, it does.
So if you're multidimensional
If you're multidimensional and thinking where to spend your limited travel and energy this year, think of which belief you're trying to install, and how much of yourself you're willing to leave outside while you install it.
I left Cannes Lions having installed the belief that I get to build all of this at once.
Key takeaways
1. Proximity rewires belief.
2. Spend enough time around people operating at a top level, and your subconscious rewires and runs with the idea that you are allowed to do that very thing as well. That's neuro mirroring, and it works.
3. Multidimensional people get filtered out of most rooms, because most rooms are built to hold one identity at a time.
Let me know your thoughts. Which of the three have you been to, and which one is your favorite?
And yes, I'll go back next year. And the following. And the following.
— Claudia
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