"Never go with your first instincts."
Google "Always go with your first instincts" = About 50,800 results.
Google "Never go with your first instincts" = About 7 results.
Both of those are clearly stupid advice to give. But if I had to choose one, I'd go with "Always go with your first instincts" based on my own anecdotal evidence.It's just 37signals being contrarian, pretty much their MO.
The context was that our first instinct in a specific situation was to solve a much bigger problem than we needed to. Had we followed that instinct we'd have gone down the wrong road. What was better was to challenge that initial instinct and ask "What's the real problem here? How can we solve the most important part of that real problem as quickly and simply as possible? Maybe that'll be all we need to do." It turned out that was exactly what we needed to do.
First instincts often see big huge pictures. We've found that challenging that initial instinct helps us find the little piece of the big pie that is really in need of a solution.