I once spent like 45 minutes trying to get a "cool moon shot" and all I got was a blurry white blob that looked like a smudged thumbprint. My brother finally walked by and asked why I was zooming in so much when the moon is already huge and bright. That one dumb question saved me from another hour of garbage photos. Sometimes you just need a second set of eyes, even if they belong to someone who has never touched a camera in their life. That RV guy sounds like he handed you gold with one sentence.

Spent three years treating a client's Pinterest board like a sacred text when the whole time she had a real brand guide sitting in her drive collecting dust. I built her a whole new homepage around colors I guessed at from screenshots, then found the locked hex codes and realized I was off by a shade on almost everything. That one PDF would have saved me probably forty hours of rework and at least two awkward calls where she said it felt close but not quite right. So yeah, I've been there, and now I ask every new client if they have an old brand doc before I touch anything. Mine was from 2017 and I never opened it either, so I have no room to judge her. The real lesson is that the answer is usually already in a file nobody bothered to look at.