How Much Do First Impressions Really Matter?

INDEX:

• INTRO

• A TALE OF TWO BROADCASTERS AND TWO FIRST IMPRESSIONS

• HOW NARRATIVES (AND IMPRESSIONS) CHANGE

• FINAL VERDICT: FIRST IMPRESSIONS, JUST HOW MUCH DO THEY MATTER?

first impression (collocation) the opinion you form when you meet someone or see something for the first time

This is a topic that I've thought deeply about for a long time. Speaking personally, for a good bulk of my life, I'd been poor in the art of "making a good first impression". During my worst bouts versus anxiety, I would routinely find myself too deep in my own head when meeting someone new or doing something for the first time, suffocating myself under the pressure of making a good initial impression. As they always say, "you never get a second chance to make a good first impression."

So when my first impressions were poor, I would feel down on myself. If it was my first day at a new job or in anything else where I knew I was going to be sticking around for a minute, even more so. Reason being: all I was ever taught growing up was how important making a good first impression was in terms of building a successful life.

Additionally, I know from being on the flip side of things how important first impressions are. I've always had the "gift" that many people that have worked in customer service share: the ability to "read" people within mere seconds.

Restaurant service workers and bartenders, for example, make immediate reads as soon as patrons walk through the door. If one walks into a spot wearing expensive clothing and a glowing demeanor overall, the server will quickly gravitate towards them, as there's a greater likelihood for a greater tip.

For much of my young adult life, I worked as a rideshare/cab driver. Upon picking someone up, I quickly made a read on the passenger's demeanor within the first three seconds of them hopping into the car.

After my greeting (Good morning/afternoon/evening, how are you?), their reaction following would determine how I would approach the remainder of the ride. If the passenger reacted back enthusiastically, they're probably cool with a talkative ride.

Adversely, if they reacted demurely with their headphones already in, they probably preferred a quiet and calm ride, so while I may have wanted to have a conversation, I wasn't going to force that against the passenger's wishes.

My first impression of the passenger would dictate my behavior toward the ride. That, my friend, is how you maintain a 5-star rating. Survival!

First impressions are tied to survival in much more serious forms as well. Good intuition formed from your first glance at someone can quite literally save your life in extreme cases.

Psychologists stress that our first impressions of someone will drive our behaviors and actions towards that person subconsciously moving forward. EBSCO Research expanded on this idea:

Findings from extensive research suggest that individuals can effectively judge traits such as sociability and competence based solely on brief interactions... However, first impressions are not infallible; cultural differences and physical appearance can distort perceptions, leading to biased judgments... while first impressions can provide valuable information, they also highlight the complexities and potential pitfalls of human social intuition. — Wylene Rholetter, PhD, EBSCO Research, First Impressions (psychology), 2019

Through nearly 29 years of life experience as I speak now, I can't deny that first impressions are important. They're a pivotal part of living a skillful life, yes. But I will push back on the idea that first impressions are the make-it-or-break-it, end-all-be-all that many people make them out to be.

A Tale of Two Broadcasters and Two First Impressions

Hey, look! We're now just about a month away from the return of football season; meaning the return of two of America's greatest pleasures: college football and the NFL.

While many get excited about the return of their favorite players, teams and fantasy football leagues, I am a nerd and get excited at what the major networks' broadcasting teams: CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, etc are looking like. Yeah, I care about former players hopping into the booth and their chemistry with their play-by-play guy and all that.

MORE TRB SPORTS HERE:

So within the context of first impressions, there's an interesting contrast of situations taking place in two of the aforementioned networks' booths. Two former players, two different "first impressions", and two very different progressions within their job and their craft.

Tony Romo retired from the NFL having played for only one team during his 14-year career: the Dallas Cowboys. He walked away owning several Cowboys' passing records as their long-term quarterback. When Romo retired in 2016, he made a quick career pivot in 2017: broadcasting. Former pro athletes hopping into the TV set is pretty common and has been practically forever.

Tony Romo went from quarterbacking the Cowboys for over a decade to immediately transitioning to the broadcast booth with CBS.

With that being said, though: No former athlete had ever made a greater and more significant first impression in the broadcast booth than Romo had. While you might consider that hyperbolic, I promise it isn't. Romo's VERY FIRST GAME in the broadcast booth was universally lauded; it was the manner in which Romo approached his broadcast that was something that football fans had never quite heard from a color commentator before.

Romo brought unbridled enthusiasm and flair to a chair that was lacking in those areas next to CBS' famed play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz. Far past just that, Romo did something with routine that no one in his position had really done before: he repeatedly and accurately predicted plays before they happened.

As the teams broke the huddle, Romo would take a look at the formations, read the game situation, and then tell the world what was going to happen before it happened. Romo would say "this has gotta be a run to the left" and voila. A run to the left it would be. For the first three years or so of Romo's broadcasting tenure, this was a consistent and impressive trend.

When it came time for Romo to renegotiate his contract with CBS, he capitalized on his positive acclaim and squeezed every single penny he could out of his leverage. signing a historic 10 year, $180 million deal to continue with the network. Upon signing it, Romo became the highest-paid sports television analyst in history, shattering the previous record.

This opened up quite the opportunity for the greatest quarterback to ever play when it became his time to walk away from the field and into the broadcast booth.

Tom Brady played longer than any NFL quarterback ever and reached heights that almost no other quarterbacks reached: both in the win column (Brady owns a record 7 Super Bowl rings) and on the stat sheet (he also owns countless passing records).

When he retired (for good) in 2023, Brady already had his next career waiting for him at FOX Sports. When the final details of Brady's contract became public knowledge, it was clear that Brady took FULL advantage of the negotiating precedent that Romo and CBS Sports had set years prior. Brady shattered the mark that Romo shattered with his contract, signing a 10 year deal worth $375 million in total... before even broadcasting a single game. Damn! Amazing the privilege that 7 Super Bowl titles can bring you.

Tom Brady worked his way into becoming the NFL's ultimate champion on the field; it quickly became clear that the same dedication to craft was required in the booth.

Contrary to Romo, Brady's first impressions as a broadcaster were not received with praise. Brady actually caught a lot of criticism for his performance in his first season as a whole, but specifically in his first couple of weeks on the job. It turns that being the greatest quarterback to ever grace the NFL doesn't automatically translate to success in breaking down the game on live television.

Brady’s move to the booth has been a dud. Even for a newbie on the mic, his lack of polish is startling. Brady’s broadcast debut back in September was an inoffensive mess. He was overprepared and overly eager, struggling to form coherent sentences and drenching the audience with banal cliches. Really, you were left wondering, these are the insights of the greatest to ever do it?

“It was too much, too quickly, too soon, to process into clear, effortless, fluid language,” Brady wrote in his 199 newsletter. “The god’s honest truth is that, like with anything complicated, the key to comfort and competence is just more reps.” — The Guardian, February 2025

I had watched the near-entirety of Brady's career, and save for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, there isn't an athlete with a more competitive mindset than Brady. I mean fiercely and obsessively, competitive.

After his broadcasting debut, the sports world was taking a big ole' dump on Brady for bombing as a broadcaster and not living up to his massive contract. But from what I've come to understand about competitiveness, growth mindset and how that all translates into work ethic, as well as what I already understood about Brady and his psyche: I figured that people weren't going to be able to laugh for long.

How Narratives (And Impressions) Change

Predictably, Brady worked at it relentlessly for weeks, months and years and reached a point over time where the public opinion on his broadcasting chops drastically changed.

Tom Brady did not walk into the broadcast booth as a finished product... [He] arrived on Fox with unmatched football credentials, but television asked for a different kind of command. Millions tuned in expecting instant brilliance, yet his early broadcasts felt cautious and tightly wound. The knowledge was there, but the delivery lacked the freedom fans associate with the greatest quarterback the NFL has ever seen. Behind the scenes, Brady was relearning how to trust himself in public. He overprepared, filtered his instincts, and tried to sound like a polished analyst instead of the player who once controlled every huddle. That internal tug of war shaped his first season. What followed... was not a reinvention, but a return.

The breakthrough came when Brady stopped thinking like a broadcaster and returned to his roots as a quarterback. He explained that the shift was simple but powerful. “I started to transition this year into, ‘Let me do more of how I did it as a quarterback,’ because that’s really where my comfort is,” Brady told Andrew Marchand [of Awful Announcing]. — The Times of India, January 2026

Generally speaking, people love to be educated and imformed about things they don't understand, especially when it comes to a subject they have immense interest in. This is certainly true for the sports fan. Yes, we want to be entertained, and above all else, we want our teams to win. But it's also "cool" to learn how our team was able to win.

What adjustments and chess moves did the coach make to put their players in the best positions possible? What were the tweaks that the star player made in his approach to come up clutch down the stretch?

When Brady says that the change that sparked his improvement as a broadcaster was "doing it more as a quarterback", he's describing what I just discussed. Brady, like Romo did at the outset of his broadcasting career, turned to providing the fans with information as his personal key to success.

One of the best NFL games last season was the NFC Championship between the visiting Los Angeles Rams and the eventual Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks back in January. While the game alone was thrilling, it was Brady and his booth-mate Kevin Burkhardt that added so many positives to the viewing experience.

In a game that featured big play after big play, Brady showed you through his natural excitement how in love he is with the sport, and why you're right to fall in love with the sport as well. That is the most important task of any type of broadcaster. If the audience doesn't trust that you love and have excitement for whatever it is that you're talking about, very little else is going to matter from that point forward.

So as Brady's broadcasting career is now headed in the right direction, Tony Romo's career... well...

As beloved as Romo was at his broadcasting beginning due to his great first impression, we've seen a major shift in that regard over the past couple of years (spoiler alert: it hasn't been a good shift).

Over the last few years, Tony Romo's game in the booth has suffered some slippage, and now legal troubles may begin to haunt him as well.

For one, Romo all of a sudden stopped the predicting of plays during games that so many fans loved. That actually led some to speculate on whether CBS asked him to stop doing so.

This was the start of an overall re-evaluation of Romo's broadcast performance as the years went on. Fans and the media slowly started to notice a deterioration in Romo's work. It wasn't just the lack of predictions, even the insight that Romo would provide into the teams began being replaced by... dumb jokes and weird noises. It hasn't been a good look for Romo, as many now suspect that he stopped putting in as much effort into his preparation since he locked down his big-money contract. In other words: he got the money and switched up,

If that wasn't enough, Romo was arrested in Wisconsin on July 23 on suspicion of operating a vehicle while intoxicated. He was pulled over for illegally passing cars on the interstate, performed poorly on police's field sobriety tests (that were later shown to the public when TMZ obtained the bodycam footage) and an open bottle of an alcoholic beverage was found in Romo's vehicle upon it being towed. In the days following the arrest, CBS Sports announced that Romo would be placed on indefinite leave, with his #1 color commentary slot on Sundays going to former NFL star and future Pro Football Hall of Famer JJ Watt.

Quite the reversals of fortune for these two former quarterbacks. While Romo and Brady's first impressions in their current professions couldn't have been more different, their present standings in the view of the public couldn't be more different as well; it's just been flipped!

The lesson here is that while first impressions matter very much, those impressions can be changed over time. In Brady's case, that impression had to be corrected. Through enough work and commitment, that correction can happen. It takes time and patience (it doesn't just happen magically or overnight) but it's undoubtedly possible. In Romo's case, his LACK of work and commitment changed what was a positive first impression into a unsatisfactory current impression.

Romo's case is similar to the employee who wows at the job interview and turns in an incredible first couple of weeks of work, only to "take the mask off" and become a nuisance to the company after that. We've all seen an example of that in our lives. Hey, maybe you've even been that person. I'm not judging.

Final Verdict: First Impressions, Just How Much Do They Matter?

To close by speaking personally again: I've made a good amount of poor first impressions in my life: in my career, at community events, creative events, even on first dates. I remember one particular first date where I felt like I completely bombed. Even our waitress was in on it. I got home and immediately started to "bedrot", until she texted me minutes later saying that while she could tell I was nervous, she thought it was cute, thought I was funny, liked my personality and wanted to go out again. We went on two more dates and eventually went together.

I say that to say: it's natural (and human!) to beat ourselves up after making a poor first impression in something that really matters a lot to us. On the mentality section of the website, I've discussed the idea of the growth mindset multiple times; I even mentioned it again earlier in this piece. That is the mindset that dictates to us that whatever we struggle with or perform poorly in initially doesn't dictate how we'll perform moving forward.

If we dedicate ourselves to learning from our mistakes and figuring out within ourselves the different way we need to think within a situation to improve, we'll improve. Through that way of thinking, a poor first impression can become a stepping stone to better things. And as we've discussed in Tony Romo's case: even if our first impressions are pristine, it doesn't matter over the long haul if they were insincere at their core.

It's true that first impressions set the tone how others will perceive us. While other people's perceptions of us are far from the alpha and omega of everything, it's not like they don't matter at all, either. A poor first impression just takes a lot of consistent work to overcome, but they CAN be overcome!

Remember that growth mindset. With enough work at something, many things that we once considered impossible can become possible over time.