Knowing the Place for the First Time

This spring, I spent hours in the garden.
Unearthing what had grown.
Cutting back what had held on too long.
Clearing the weight of winter.

By the end of the first day, something had changed. The garden had shape again. The hard work showed. A kind of shift that felt satisfying, like clarity in physical form.

But the next morning, when I walked back out, I noticed what I’d missed.
A cluster of leaves still pressed into the soil.
A patch choked by weeds.
A corner I thought was fine but now felt off.
So I did another pass.

And then again the next day.
And again the day after that.

Not because I had failed.
Not because the previous effort was wasted.
But because each return let me see something new.

We don’t see everything at once.
We’re not supposed to.
Each pass reveals something that wasn’t visible before, or maybe was, but only now are we ready to recognize it.

This is how ideas work too.

When we brainstorm, the goal isn’t to get it right the first time. The goal is to get it all out. Research into creativity and cognition shows that idea generation works best when we suspend judgment early on, letting thoughts surface freely, without editing or clinging. The more we bring to light, the more we have to work with. Then, after that first pass, we go back. We look again. Not to criticize for the sake of it, but to see what we couldn’t before.

Across creative work, from advertising to entrepreneurship to design, there’s a shared principle: stay unattached. Ideas are just starting points. If we fall too in love with them, we stop seeing them clearly. We resist feedback. We avoid the necessary returns that make the work better. The real discipline is staying in love with the problem and being willing to return to the solution again and again until it truly fits.

I often look back at writing I once loved and feel surprise, sometimes even disbelief, that I let it go live. Or I bring an idea into a meeting, bold and full of conviction, only to realize in the moment, or in the hours after, how early it still was in its becoming.

And none of this is failure.
It’s the actual work.

We explore.
We arrive.
And if we’re paying attention, really paying attention, we start to know the place for the first time.
Again and again.