The secret of Elon Musk, First Principles Thinking
First-principles thinking or reasoning from first principles is one of the best methods to reverse engineer and solve complicated problems and to do innovative things. First-principles are the fundamental building blocks of an idea or solution. They are the most indivisible elements that couldn’t be deduced. In this framework, break problems into fundamentals and reasoning up from there until solving the problem.
This is how physicists and scientists think when doing some inventions. This is the most consistent factor among great thinkers from Aristotle to Elon Musk. Its opposite action is “conventional thinking by analogy” which is the way of thinking by prior assumptions, practices of society, social beliefs. Even smart people fail in problem-solving when they think from analogy.
How Elon Musk using the first principles thinking for his work
In today’s world, there is no one embodies the first principles thinking more than Elon Musk. He is a man who has done crazy things that nobody believed. Elon never thought bounded with convention or analogy. He did most of the unbelievable things based on first principles analysis.
“Well, I do think there’s a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally, I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations.” Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk revealed his secret to success in a TED interview with Chris Anderson.
Yeah, it’s easy to reason by analogy rather than from first principles analysis. But it may not accurate as reasoning from first principles. This method takes a lot more mental energy also.
Musk explained how he used the analysis of the first principles on producing cheap battery packs in an interview with Kevin Rose in 2012.
Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt-hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future. With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”
It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost? It’s like $80 per kilowatt-hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”
The framework of first principles thinking
So, according to this thinking process, you should do the following steps to solve a problem.
1. Identify the problem or assumed target
2. Breakdown the problem or target into the fundamentals
3. Create a method of solving problem or plan for the target from scratch
4. An action plan
5. Implement the action plan until succeeding
Advantages of first principle thinking
Most of the time, we think that we know all the things, but the reality is we don’t know much as we think. So, in the decision-making process, we trick into that we know what’s possible and not. Then it affects us bitterly as we make decisions not based on reality. Sometimes we think of possible things as impossible because of our intuition. But this is not an issue when making the decision from the first principles and we would be able to discover possibilities and impossibilities correctly.
First-principles thinking is crucial when you doing something new for the very first time, dealing with complicated situations, and trying to do an innovative thing. First-principles thinking is one of the biggest sources of creative thinking.
“I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying” Musk saying the importance of this.
So this was the secret of legends like Aristotle, Richard Feynman, Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk to done extraordinary things among ordinary people. We hope you would be able to achieve the best version of your life after getting to know about this secret.
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