Challenge Your First Idea. Don't Kill It.

What if your best idea is the one you almost threw away because it came too easily?

We often assume that a good creative idea needs to be hard-won. We associate time, effort, and struggle with good thinking. But how quickly an idea comes to you doesn't tell you how good it is.

While working on a university assignment about encouraging sunscreen use in Ireland, I chose Cien Sun as the brand and young men as the target audience for my campaign concept.

An idea came to me almost immediately. I wanted to communicate the importance of sun protection through a metaphor that my target audience would already be familiar with. The idea was simple: protection as a condom. It connected two familiar meanings of “protection” — sexual protection and protection from the sun.

I liked the idea at first. Then I started questioning it. It had come too easily.

In both my Art Direction and Creative Thinking classes, I learned to use divergence to move beyond my first response. We were encouraged to explore different directions rather than settle on the first idea that came to mind.

Giovanni Corazza describes a similar approach in his TED Talk Creative Thinking – How to Get Out of the Box and Generate Ideas, where he talks about “long thinking” — allowing an idea to travel further before judging it. 

I understood this idea as: “Don’t decide too quickly.” But somewhere along the way, I translated it into: “Don’t trust the first idea.”

So I moved away from the condom idea and continued generating alternatives. I thought that if I could find something after more thinking, it might be a more “creative” or better-developed idea. But after exploring different directions, I eventually returned to the original one.

And I realised something important: Divergence means delaying commitment, not rejecting intuition. The purpose of divergence is not to prove that your first idea is wrong. 

The First Idea in a Group

However, the opposite happened when I was working in a group.

For a school showcase project, I worked as part of a nine-person, agency-style team on a Heineken brief about creating meaningful connections with younger generations in Ireland. We moved into discussion before spending enough time exploring ideas individually. As a result, our first direction was never properly challenged. We did not question it deeply enough, and because everyone started building on the same starting point, the direction quickly became fixed. 

It was a workable idea — a collaboration with fashion or cultural partners to create an event. But it was also a predictable one.

After receiving feedback from our lecturers, we changed the way we worked. They encouraged us to spend more time exploring the brief individually before coming together, rather than trying to generate and develop ideas collectively from the beginning. The point was not simply to produce more ideas, but to give each of us the opportunity to explore different directions before bringing them into the discussion.

So instead of discussing ideas together from the beginning, we first explored the brief individually and then brought our ideas into the group in a pitch-style discussion.

The difference was significant. We no longer had one shared starting point. We had multiple, distinct starting points that we could question, compare, combine, and develop. This gave us more space to recognise ideas that were more distinctive and unexpected, and eventually this led to the big idea “Local Stars” — a platform inspired by the idea that overlooking hidden gems in everyday life is like missing a constellation above us.

Two Ways to Lose the First Idea

What this revealed was almost the opposite of what I had experienced with Cien. When working alone, I had been too quick to move away from my first idea simply because it came easily. In the Heineken project, we had been too quick to move towards our first shared idea because we had not explored enough alternatives.

In both cases, the problem was not the first idea itself. It was how we treated it.

I had mistaken divergence for a reason to distrust my intuition. In the group, we had skipped divergence and accepted our first direction without giving it enough space to be challenged.

Perhaps this is where the real value of divergence lies. It gives us enough distance to challenge the first idea and explore what else might be possible — without assuming that what comes next is necessarily better.

Fast and Slow Thinking

These two experiences led me to take a closer look at my own creative thinking process. If the first idea itself is not the problem, but how we treat it is, then what actually happens between the moment an idea appears and the moment we decide what to do with it?

Daniel Kahneman describes two modes of thinking in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: System 1, which is fast and intuitive, and System 2, which is slower and more deliberate. Although his framework is about human thinking more broadly rather than creativity specifically, I began to recognise both modes in my own creative process.

I tend to use Fast Thinking at the beginning of ideation. I quickly write down associations, related words, images, and possibilities without judging them too much. This helps me generate a wider range of directions.

After divergence, however, I usually move into Slow Thinking. I start developing my ideas, questioning them, and thinking more deeply about where they could go. But this is also where I notice a different risk: thinking too much.

Slow Thinking can help me discover things I could not see at first. But it can also make me overthink an idea that initially felt promising. I can become so focused on improving it that I start to lose what made it interesting in the first place.

This is where John Hegarty’s view of creativity resonates with my experience. In Hegarty on Creativity: There Are No Rules, he argues that too much thinking can jeopardise the creative process by slowing down, or even stopping, the imagination and emotions from exploring possibilities. 

I have seen this happen in my own work. An idea can start with something simple and interesting, only to become complicated after too much analysis. Sometimes I end up in a dead end. Other times, I make the idea safer and more predictable.

This made me realise that Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking do not need to compete with each other. Fast Thinking can help us generate possibilities and give them room to develop. Slow Thinking can then help us challenge, develop, and refine those possibilities.

But there is another step in my process that I had not previously considered important: I return.

Return

After going through Slow Thinking, I often look back at the ideas that appeared through Fast Thinking and compare them with what I have discovered. Sometimes the initial idea is no longer the strongest. Sometimes it has become stronger because I now understand why it works. And sometimes, as with Cien, I realise that the idea I initially doubted was actually the one with the most impact and clarity.

As I went through this process, I began to notice another problem: thinking more does not always mean moving the ideation process forward.

We can become so focused on moving beyond the first idea that we forget to return to it and reconsider its value. The idea we arrive at last is not necessarily the strongest simply because we spent more time getting there.

In doing so, we may overlook the potential of the First Idea that started everything.

The danger is not simply thinking too much. It is assuming that the idea we arrive at last must be better because we spent more time getting there. In doing so, we may overlook the potential of the first idea that started everything.

We may also forget the fresh perspective and intuition we had at the beginning — the very things that might have allowed us to develop that idea further when we returned to it.

That is why I now see creative thinking less as a linear process and more as a cycle between intuition, exploration, and deliberation.

A Creative Thinking Cycle

Instead of treating divergence as a one-way movement away from the first idea, I now think of it as a cycle:

1. Capture: When an idea appears, record it before judging it. A quick idea is still information.

2. Diverge: Use Fast Thinking to generate associations, alternatives, and possibilities without immediately deciding which one is best. The purpose is to delay commitment, not to reject the first idea.

3. Challenge: Use Slow Thinking to question and develop the ideas. Ask: Why does this work? What does it communicate? Is there a stronger way to express it?

4. Return: Go back to the original ideas and compare them with what you discovered through deliberation. Do not assume that the ideas that survived the most thinking are automatically the strongest.

5. Decide: Only now decide whether to keep, change, combine, or discard an idea.

I used to think that if an idea came quickly, I probably had not thought about it enough. Now I see that the speed of an idea and the quality of an idea are two different things.

A creative idea does not become valuable simply because it took a long time to arrive. And an idea does not become weak simply because it appeared in seconds.

Don't kill your first idea because it came too early. 

Challenge it. Develop it. And then return to it.