When a comp comes back with notes, you read it as a verdict on your judgment. You decided wrong. You should have seen it. So you start pulling apart choices that were sound when you made them.

Slow that reflex down, because you are about to learn the wrong lesson.

There is a name for what is happening here. You are judging the quality of your decision by how it turned out. That is called resulting, and it quietly wrecks how artists learn.

Watch how it works. Picture the same shot in two worlds. In the first, your read on the work is approved and moves to final. In the second, the same read comes back covered in notes. Your thinking did not change between those two worlds. Your integration approach, your grade, your judgment about what the shot needed were identical. The only thing that changed was the result. So when you call yourself wrong, you are really reacting to the outcome, not to the decision behind it.

The reason this trips up good artists is that outcomes are a mix of two things: the quality of your decision and luck. Some of what lands a shot is in your hands, and some of it is not. The supervisor's mood, how much time they had to review, a client who shifted direction after you started, the note that came down from above your supervisor's head. All of that rides along with your work whether you account for it or not.

Once you see that mix, the hard truth follows. A good decision can get a bad result, and a bad decision can get a good one. You can read a shot correctly, pick the right integration approach, balance your levels with care, and still get notes. You can also rush a shot, skip the reference, and have it approved because the supervisor was slammed that day. The pass and the kickback are loose signals, not clean ones.

Here is the cost of ignoring all this. If you grade your choices purely by how they land, you will learn the wrong lessons. You throw out good judgment because it got a bad result once. You keep a sloppy habit because it happened to slip through. And you punish yourself for luck you never controlled while rewarding luck you cannot repeat.

So ask a sharper question when a shot returns. Was my read sound given what I knew, or did I genuinely miss something I could have seen at the time? Sometimes you missed it, and that is where the real learning lives. Often your read was reasonable and the note reflects taste, timing, or a direction that changed after the fact.

Telling those two apart is the skill that moves an artist forward. I show this to my own students, because it is a call they make on their own work every day.