Strategy.

First Principles

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The question

What assumption in your most important current problem have you never actually questioned?

The idea

First principles thinking is the practice of breaking a problem down to its most fundamental truths — the things you know are true regardless of convention, history, or analogy — and building up from there. Aristotle called it the 'first basis from which a thing is known.' Elon Musk popularised it for a new generation: SpaceX broke the cost of a rocket launch from $65M to $6M by refusing to accept the market price and instead asking what a rocket was made of at commodity rates. The trap it avoids is 'reasoning by analogy': assuming the current configuration is correct because that's how it's always been done. First principles cuts through received wisdom, competitive imitation, and institutional inertia. It's the most powerful — and the most effortful — mode of thinking available.

The framework

01
Identify the load-bearing assumption.
Every problem contains at least one assumption that the entire solution architecture rests on: the cost floor, the required team size, the minimum viable margin, the necessary technology, the customer price tolerance. Find it. Write it down. Most professionals never articulate it explicitly because it feels like bedrock. It usually isn't.
02
Ask: what is actually true here?
Musk's rocket question: 'What are the raw materials? What do they cost at commodity rates?' The answer was 2% of the market price. The rest was convention and margin layered on convention. Apply the same question to your domain: what would this cost or look like if you built it from scratch, with no inherited architecture, no legacy system constraints, no 'that's not how it's done here'?
03
Build up from the bedrock.
Once you know what's actually true, you construct a solution constrained only by physics, economics, and genuine customer need — not by industry convention or the way the last company did it. This is how SpaceX beat Boeing, how Tesla bypassed dealerships, how Airbnb outmaneuvered hotel chains. Each stripped an assumption that every incumbent had accepted as fixed.
04
Distinguish it from contrarianism.
First principles thinking is not the same as disagreeing with everything. The discipline is to identify where convention is right (because it's genuinely optimal) and where it's merely inherited. Challenging everything is exhausting and often wrong. Challenging the load-bearing assumptions — the ones with the most leverage if they turn out to be wrong — is the practice.

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