First Principles: How To Break Conventional Thinking

First principles are propositions that cannot be deduced by any other proposition. Thus thinking in first principles means decomposing things down to their fundamentals. A first principle is the boiled down version of anything. It’s one of the best approaches to enhance your thinking. The idea is very simple: break down complicated problems into basic elements, then reassemble them from the ground up. Aristotle connected first principles to knowledge, stating them as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” Translated, that means they form basic understanding.

All great thinkers use reasoning by first principles. It distills your arguments from assumptions and conventions. What remains are the essentials. This is what differentiates a real coach and a play stealer, according to former NFL executive Mike Lombardi. Coaches assess what’s physically possible, taking into account the weaknesses of the opposing team and the capabilities of their players. The coach reasons from first principles: the rules of the game. The play stealer works off what previous coaches have laid out for him. Mostly, he is just copying plays that someone else created.

Play stealers and coaches might have an identical outwardly appearance. They both look the same to most people on the sidelines and those watching sports matches on TV. The knowledge of first principles comes in stark contrast when something goes wrong. Both coaches and play stealers make bad plays. But only the coach knows where a play went wrong and how to adjust it. He understands what the play was designed to accomplish, so he can easily course-correct. The play stealer, on the other hand, has absolutely no idea what to do. Another way to see it is the difference between a cook and a chef. A chef is the trailblazer who invents the recipe. A master of raw ingredients and their combinations. The cook uses a recipe. He creates something that has already been created.

If you never learn to take something apart and reconstruct it, you won’t really understand it. At the core, first principles is there to help you bypass conventional wisdom. Instead of accepting that rockets are expensive, analyze why that is — materials, design, manufacturing process. By understanding the raw materials and fundamental physics, companies have redesigned rockets to be more cost-effective. That’s the entire business model of SpaceX. First principles basically encourage you to discard inherited assumptions — or what seems “obvious” because of convention. In business, asking why a market works a certain way can result in disruptive ideas that defy the way business operates. A writer might deconstruct storytelling to its essential components, then experiment with unconventional structures to create a unique reader experience.

Real-life examples of first principles:

• SpaceX and Rocketry: traditional rockets were extraordinarily expensive. This was because they were designed based on legacy practices. Elon Musk applied first principles. He broke down the cost of raw materials — aluminum, titanium, and carbon fiber. He rethought the rocket design from the ground up. This led to innovations that dramatically lowered the cost and improved reusability of rockets, revolutionizing the aerospace industry.

• Business Strategy: a small business in a saturated market faces still competition. They follow old marketing tactics. The founders read this and use first principles thinking: they strip down their business model to fundamental customer needs and question conventional strategies. The result is a unique value proposition that differentiates their brand and taps into an overlooked blue ocean.

• Personal Development: you feel stuck in your career because you traversed the traditional path without much success. By questioning your assumptions about what success looks like and breaking down your skills and interests to their basic components, you can reconstruct a career path that aligns with your innate talents and passions. This results in a more fulfilling life.

• Product: a tech company struggles with outdated product design. It no longer meets customer needs. The team employs first principles thinking. They analyze what the product fundamentally needs to achieve for the customer and discard legacy features that add cost but not value. They re-engineer the product from scratch, resulting in a more user-friendly and competitive offering.

How you might employ first principles as a mental model: (1) solve for — start by articulating the problem with no preconceived notion, writing down all your assumptions to challenge them head on (e.g. too expensive, inaccessible); (2) deconstruct the problem — break your issue down into its most basic components by asking “Okay, but why?” repeatedly until you reach principles that cannot be reduced; (3) find unchangeable truths — determine the fundamental laws that govern the problem space (e.g. scientific laws in physics, market needs or human behaviors in business); (4) reassemble your puzzle — use the basic elements you identified to construct solutions from the ground up, combining them in innovative, unheard-of ways; (5) put it out there — test your solution in the real world; (6) do this more often — regularly revisit and question existing methods everywhere, cultivating a mindset of curious skepticism about what is “accepted” or “normal”.