Your first idea is often not your “best” idea, but often gets defended as though it were.
👉 The word “Idea” could be changed out for “option” everywhere in this note. It's true both ways.
Good ideas are typically not your FIRST idea. Picking the first thing you think of and committing to it is almost always a mistake. Good ideas happen after the obvious ones have been exhausted, or when an unexpected primer is used to approach the situation with simmering entirely unrelated on your mind.
People will often spend way too many resources trying to make their first idea work, because they fell in love it with, even though it doesn’t work, for no other reason than it was their first idea. And some part of our brain wants us to stop thinking about alternatives and go forward with the first idea.
If you are stuck on trying to force an answer to a problem that just doesn’t want to work for you, you’re lugging around an anchor, holding you down from reframing the problem and finding alternative solutions.