If strategy is made of questions, mine started before I even knew it
Before I learned how to argue, I learned how to ask why. In criminal law, I started out as an intern. Years later, I was working on cases the whole country was following on the news. But what drove me was never just building the right defense. It was understanding the real reason behind every fact: what had brought a person to that point, the question no one had asked yet.
Five years without a vacation later, I arrived at a question no case file could answer:
Why was I even there.
A good question fits anywhere, even in a pastry shop.
I never knew how to sit still, and I loved sweets, not just any sweets, the best ones out there.
I opened my own pastry shop, Mini Goma, and discovered a smaller question there, but just as much mine: why do people keep coming back to a flavor, a kind of care, a memory?
Between the counter and production, I learned that a good result is always the consequence of truly understanding someone: the customer, the taste, the moment.
It was there, without looking for it, that I crossed paths with a Nike film crew. I started in production. I left as art direction. A few months later, I was in 38 Olympic events.
I was still asking why, now about brands and people, not cases and defendants.
Not every quick win is a real win
Coming from law, I was used to a world of clear rules. In Brazilian communications, I found the opposite: little regulation, constant competition, decisions made in a rush. It took me time to understand that, there, winning fast didn’t always mean winning right.
That strangeness pulled me closer to the client: I wanted more depth, to understand the real problem before proposing any solution. That’s where I learned something I still use today: the best strategy is never the fastest one, it’s the one that solves the cause, not the symptom. Because a strategy only makes sense when it answers the right why, not the shortest deadline, and that’s what separates a pretty campaign from a real business result.
But at the same time, I understood that sometimes that's just part of the game.
The closer I got to the client, the more that pull grew: the wish to be inside, not just alongside, understanding not just the brief, but the whole business behind it.
Maybe that's where, without me even noticing yet, a whole new area of interest was being born.
Curiosity was never an adjective. It was always a method
I moved through BTL, ATL, branding, digital, influencers, media.
I still work on content and performance projects today, because each field answered a different why: why a team performs better when it’s heard, why a good idea fails if no one knows how to pitch it, why different people need different kinds of motivation to get to the same place.
Looking at every angle had a good side effect: sometimes, in one project, I’d see a solution that only made sense because it came from somewhere else, a media idea solving a branding problem, an event logic solving a content deadlock.
That’s how I learned that real strategy doesn’t live inside a single specialty. It lives in the stitching between them, at the point where creative, media, and business stop being separate departments and become a single decision.
But every point I connected also brought a new question. The more I understood, the more questions surfaced.
Not everything came easy. Understanding English was never the problem. The lack of practice speaking it was. Years of freezing up, embarrassed to make mistakes, already cost me more than one job opportunity. This past year, I decided to understand the why behind that block and finally deal with it: I went back to studying English seriously, and a bit of Spanish too.
Sometimes the biggest barrier isn't technical. It's the shame of trying.
Not every answer gets written. Some get painted, and others get danced.
I’ve danced ballet for as long as I can remember. It’s one of the places where I find myself the most: the same discipline and precision I once used in law, now translated into movement.
In the middle of agency chaos, I realized something simple and hard to admit: I had spent too much time only on work, and almost none on understanding myself. I started painting, not to get an answer, but to keep asking the question in a different way.
I created a heart, first as a tag on the streets of São Paulo, then recreated on a mirror, made with spray paint and street art materials: the idea was to be able to see myself inside it. I even exhibited the piece in a gallery for emerging artists. And that’s how I started realizing that there are actually always many possible paths to an answer.
It was while trying to understand that restless place that I decided to open my own agency, CandyCandy, partly to test whether there was a different way to run an agency, one closer to people, truer to what I was looking for.
I learned, in the hardest way possible, that no challenge gets solved alone.
With every new moment, the same question, and new discoveries
Miami Ad School. Sandbox.
A second degree in Art and Culture, at Belas Artes, to understand why different cultures see the same problem in such different ways.
A postgraduate program in Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, because understanding the whys a little better sharpens every choice.
Investing in the stock market since I was young, just to keep asking why companies and markets move the way they do, and to understand, in practice, how a business decision translates into a number, a risk, a result.
Traveling was always part of that same search. Right now, it’s Mexico City that’s on my mind: a recent, almost sudden passion that has already turned into a plan. It’s where I found a business course that hasn’t left my list of priorities.
Not to complete a résumé, but to keep understanding the why behind the big decisions, and how to turn that understanding into strategies that deliver results.
At the end of every chapter, a new beginning of the next question
If there's one thing I've learned, from law to canvas, from agency to entrepreneurship, it's that every good result starts with a well-asked question. I change places, languages, tools, but I always carry the same essence: understanding the questions, so that what I create actually makes sense, for me, and for whoever receives it. And the most incredible part of all this is that there's never just one path.
For a long time, I resisted this kind of exposure: the portfolio, the polished bio, the LinkedIn post. I always believed the real work happens when you sit down with someone and look at them as singular, not as content: that's where you find what's best in them, and go further. But I came to understand that reaching the places I still don't know means being more present in the ones I do. That's part of why this site exists, including a space for the things I think but haven't posted anywhere yet. Not to perform. Just to keep showing up.
What comes next is turning that depth into a result, into one of the paths toward wherever we need to go.
Sometimes I don't even know what the next place will be. It's a real doubt, and maybe that's exactly what keeps me curious: the certainty that there will always be a new why to explore, and a new way to get there.
CREATE TO CHANGE.