In 2002, Elon Musk began his quest to send the first rocket to Mars. He ran into a major challenge right off the bat. After visiting a number of aerospace manufacturers around the world, Musk discovered the cost of purchasing a rocket was astronomical—up to $65 million. Given the high price, he began to rethink the problem.
So, he asked himself, what is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then he asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the price he was quoted.
Instead of buying a readymade rocket for tens of millions, Musk decided to purchase the raw material at a fraction of the cost and build his own rockets and SpaceX was born. Within a few years, SpaceX cut the price of launching a rocket by nearly 10x while still making a profit.
Musk used first principles thinking to break the situation down to the fundamentals, bypass the high prices of the aerospace industry, and create a more effective solution.
First principles thinking is about acquiring knowledge about a problem or a thing by knowing its first causes by decomposing it into its most basic elements. They are the first causes. The final cause is about the purpose that the things serve.
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk said in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of?
The normal way we conduct our lives is to reason by analogy. We try to find out what other people are doing or by asking if has it been done before. With first principles, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there.
How can we utilize first principles thinking in our life and work?
Let’s look at cooking. There’s a big difference between knowing how to follow a recipe and knowing how to cook. People who know how to cook understand the basic principles that make food taste, look, and smell good. They have confidence in troubleshooting and solving problems as they go—or adjusting to unexpected outcomes.
That’s what Julia Child, the renowned Frech Chef, did all her life. Rather than just following the recipes, she understood how every element of French cuisine worked.
If you can master the first principles within any domain, you can go much further than those who are just following recipes.
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” It is a basic assumption that cannot be deduced any further.
It is a fancy way of saying “Think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like, What are we absolutely sure is true? What has been proven?
The first principle thinking requires you to dig deeper and deeper until you are left with only the foundational truths of a situation. It is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibilities.
Break down things into smaller levels and then make something completely different from it. That’s what Bernard D. Sadow did. For centuries humans have been carrying their stuff in bags. We have had trunks, leather bags, and suitcases. They are heavy to lift and carry. Then in 1970, Bernard D. Sadow used the first principle thinking and came up with the idea of adding wheels to them. Now nobody carries their suitcases at airports anymore, they wheel them.
Rather than the ‘monkey see, monkey do,’ approach, apply the first principle thinking to solve your problem:
- Identify your problem.
- Dig deeper and deeper into the problem, breaking it down into its most essential concepts (the first causes).
- Reassemble them from the ground up, thinking of all possible ways they can be reassembled (the final cause or the purpose they serve).
- Choose the best solution.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!” — Richard Feynman
