You Had It Right The First Time
Creative Highlight - Photo By Oksana Demenko
There's a good chance you had it right the first time…
When I started Creative Access by BMA, I had so many ideas flying at me all at once. It was like a literal tsunami of information and inspiration all at once and I couldn’t keep up with it most of the time… LITERALLY. I had to speak text most things as quickly as they would come. It was absolute INSANITY.
The ideas that come to us the first time — kind of like what you might call a "gut feeling" — always seem to find a way back to us. Whispering to choose that route. Pick that color. Post that image.
When thoughts and feelings come naturally to us, without "pushing"... I'm bringing that back around again, yes ;) We always find ourselves led right back to where we started, somehow. With a few, “dammits” sprinkled in between as we realize we had it right the first time. My point is: it becomes the foundation of the inspiration that lead us to where we were going initially. My lesson — better to just listen the first time.
Trust the first instinct. Trust the first thought and feeling. Whether creative or "life" related. There's a VERY good possibility you had it right the first time.
I think about this every time I catch myself overthinking or overanalyzing a decision. Which happens often.
Ten years as an agent taught me something about instinct that I didn't fully understand until I stepped away from it. When you're pairing a photographer with a brand, or building a team for a shoot, there's a moment — right at the start — where you just know. You know who's right for it. You know the shot before it's styled. And then the second-guessing creeps in. More options. More opinions. More "let's just make sure." And nine times out of ten, you land back where you started, except it might have included a dozen more emails to get there. Not literally, but sometimes it feels that way.
The first instinct wasn't wrong. It just wasn't trusted yet.
I know creatives especially run into this, not only because I’ve agented them but because I am one.
Creative work doesn't come with a rubric. There's no formula that tells you the flower you drew in third grade was the "correct" flower. So instead, we look for outside confirmation. We ask five people what they think before we ask ourselves what we already know. We revise the caption six times when the first one said exactly what we meant.
This isn’t a flaw. It's just what happens when there's no one right answer — we go looking for reassurance instead of trusting the compass we already had.
Here's the thing about instinct: it's not a guess. It's not random. It's everything you've already lived, learned, seen, and felt, distilled down into a single, fast, quiet signal!! It's not the opposite of knowledge — it is knowledge. Just the kind that doesn't announce itself with footnotes.
So the next time you're standing at the start of something — a new project, a new direction, a hard decision — and a thought arrives before you've had time to talk yourself out of it... take 10 seconds.
Not because it's always the easy answer. But because it's usually the honest one! And… There's a good chance you had it right the first time. ;)
