← Glossary/Mindset
First Principles Thinking
Break a problem down to facts you can verify, then build your plan back up from those facts.
Example
You want to start a phone repair side hustle. Instead of copying what other shops do, you list the verifiable facts: parts cost X, your time costs Y, customers will pay Z. The plan you build from there can look very different from the standard one.
How it fits in
Most plans inherit assumptions from how things have been done before. First-principles thinking strips the problem back to what is provably true and builds again from there. The cost is more thinking up front. The gain is solutions the conventional path would never produce. Musk's rocket cost analysis and Buffett's investment screens both use this same move.
Practise it on the platform
Related terms
The way you tend to react first when something surprising or stressful happens.
Four common ways people handle a surprising moment. None of them is always the right one.
The energy you get from doing the thing itself is different from the energy you get from people clapping for it.