Humans are lazy by design. We tend to follow the path of least resistance. When we do this, we fall into bad habits of letting other people think for us rather than using the most important tool that’s just a thought away.
- Don’t know how to do a home improvement project? You watch a tutorial on YouTube.
- Don’t know how to make your program work how you want? You find an answer on Stack Overflow.
- Don’t know what to learn next to get your dream job? You enroll in college.
What each of these types of questions have is that you get an answer. What you do not get however is a path of what questions were asked in order to get to that answer. That’s where first principles thinking comes into play.
If you’re not sure what first principles thinking is, it’s the idea that you start from the first basic truth from which a thing is known.
One of the best examples of this is imagining you’re talking to a child who is asking you why something is the way it is. They might ask “why?”. So the first time you answer, the child asks again “why?” and so on until you get to the point of the first basic truth. This is no different in many engineering disciplines, it just has a fancy name like “Root Cause Analysis” or “Systems Design”.
How you can apply this to your life is that you have the unique opportunity to get to the first principle of what you know is true. Next, you can ask yourself “if this is true, then what else is true?” and work your way forward. But before you get to the first principle, ask yourself the following:
- What are my current assumptions?
- What are the fundamental principles based on these assumptions?
- What are some solutions based on these principles?
Let’s try to go through an example using both of these ideas in place.
- What are my current assumptions?
I do not have enough time to workout in the mornings. - What are the fundamental principles based on these assumptions?
What is needed to have more time in the morning to workout? You might want to get more sleep. You might want to change your nightly routine to reduce the tasks in the morning. You might want to prepare your environment to get out the door faster. You might want to limit your distractions at night and in the morning. And much more. - What are some solutions based on these principles?
– Go to bed earlier.
– Frontload morning tasks the night prior.
– Prepare your workout clothes & supplements.
– Turn your phone off before going to bed.
Now that you have a solution to the assumption, you can start to ask yourself the question if this is true, then what else is true? This takes a little bit of work to get the ordering right, but let’s go through some examples now.
- If I frontload my morning routine at night, I can get into bed earlier.
- If I get into bed earlier, I can turn off my phone after reading a book before 10pm.
- If I go to bed by 10pm, I can get 8 hours of sleep and wake up at 6am.
- If I wake up at 6am, I can get dressed in my workout clothes & take pre-workout.
- If I get dressed in my workout clothes & take pre-workout, I can do my 30-60 minute workout.
- If I wake up at 6am, I can get dressed in my workout clothes & take pre-workout.
- If I go to bed by 10pm, I can get 8 hours of sleep and wake up at 6am.
- If I get into bed earlier, I can turn off my phone after reading a book before 10pm.
Although this takes time to understand & get used to, starting with the most basic truths in your world and creating solutions from scratch can help you find diamonds in your ordinary life. Your everyday problems now become fun experiments where you try zany concoctions of the fundamental things you know will work.
Using this type of thinking will challenge yourself and others to think outside the realm of limitations. Rather, you’re thinking within what you know is true & coming up with solutions that are simpler & resonate with your original assumptions.