How To Impress Your Boss: The 5 Step Process to Solve Problems with First Principles Thinking 🚀

Suitcases with wheels — a simple but powerful example of First Principles Thinking

Welcome to instalment #2 of the ‘How To Impress Your Boss’ series.

This week, we’ll be talking about using First Principles Thinking as a way of effectively solving complex problems.

But what actually is First Principles Thinking?

How does it help you solve problems (both in your work and personal life) more effectively?

Let’s get started….

WTF is First Principles Thinking?

In maths and physics, using ‘First Principles’ means starting from scratch and using algebra to find a general expression for something, instead of using maths-hacks like ‘move the index number to the front and then take away one’.

For example, let’s say you want to differentiate x².

The classic move is to move the 2 to the front, and then take away 1 from the index number, giving you 2x¹ (or just 2x).

That works.

But you don’t actually understand how differentiation works.

And when a harder and more interesting problem comes up, you might not be able to solve it that way.

Thinking from first principles would look something like this:

Ew.

Let’s not get into the maths here — this is definitely way more effort, but here we’re literally taking the fundaments of algebra and calculus and ‘reasoning up’ from there to get 2x.

Knowledge of how to do this will make you a master of calculus: you can tackle any calculus problem because you’ve broken down the assumptions of calculus to get your answer.

Ok… thanks for the maths lesson Mr Rutherford — WTF has this got to do with my life?

First principles thinking is a mental model: it’s a way of thinking that helps you break down complicated problems into little pieces — into their most fundamental truths — and come up with solutions that are typically original, creative and innovative.

It’s a way of thinking that’s in direct contrast to ‘thinking by analogy’, which is what most people do. Thinking by analogy looks something like this:

Thinking by analogy is thinking how other people think. It’s thinking ‘it’s been done that way in the past, so let’s keep on doing it that way’.

If everyone thought that way, we wouldn’t have planes, computer, the printing press, and so many other innovations that we take for granted today.

The classic example of First Principles thinking is how Elon Musk approached building Rockets for SpaceX

Elon Musk explaining his approach to First Principles thinking

In this video, Musk explains how he used First Principles thinking to make batteries ‘much much cheaper’.

He similarly used First Principles Thinking when thinking about how to build a rocket to fly to mars.

Buying a rocket costs around $65m. That’s expensive — even for Elon.

Most people at this point would say ‘well, it’s too expensive to build a rocket to fly to Mars, let’s just go to the Moon again or something?’

That’s thinking by analogy.

But Elon is different.

He broke the problem down to its core constituents.

What are the fundamentally necessary ingredients to build a rocket?

You need some aluminium alloys, carbon fiber, titanium and copper.

They’re actually pretty cheap; it’s the way of joining them together to make a rocket that’s expensive.

So if you buy all of the materials and come up with clever ways of mixing them up to build a rocket, you can build a rocket for way cheaper than $65m and maybe flying to the moon isn’t so impossible after all!

Using this form of reasoning, SpaceX have built rockets that are over 10x cheaper than traditional rockets.

Not bad, eh? 🤓

Another perhaps more simple example is the suitcase with wheels.

Believe it or not, until the 1970s, suitcases didn’t have wheels.

They all pretty much looked like this

Suitcases before 1970

Folks were trying to ‘innovate’ in the suitcase space: they were using new materials to try to make it 2–3% lighter, putting the handle bar in slightly different places so that it would be 2–3% more comfortable.

Until Bernard Sadow came along in 1970 and invented the ‘suitcase on wheels’.

Instead of thinking by analogy and trying to optimise and iterate on a pre-determined design, similar to Elon Musk, he thought about it differently.

We can break his method down into 5 fundamental steps.

The 5 step method to thinking in First Principles

1. What goal am I trying to achieve?

A suitcase is annoying and heavy to carry around. Imagine if we could make it easier and lighter to carry?

2. What obstacle are getting in the way?

It’s too heavy, despite having lighter materials, moving the position of the handle etc

3. What assumptions are behind these obstacles?

We’re assuming that it has to be carried. Why?

4. What is the actual problem here?

We need to find a way to make it easier to transport luggage — that might not have to entail ‘carrying’ them.

5. What’s a new solution?

Bags on wheels!

Boom

Ok, but I’m not thinking about inventing new rockets or suitcases — how can I apply this to my everyday life? 🤷‍♂️

Here’s how I recently used this 5-step method to overcome a financial hurdle in building a business.

Building a business

Thinking by Analogy:

I want to start a business and drive traffic to my website but I have to spend so much money on marketing and advertising, but it’s expensive 😭

Thinking by first principles:

1. What goal am I trying to achieve?

I want over 1,000 17–18 year old students thinking about applying to university to visit our website every day.

2. What obstacles are getting in the way?

Driving traffic is expensive. Ads cost a lot of $$$ and I can’t justify hiring fancy marketing consultants, who are also very expensive.

3. What assumptions are behind these obstacles?

• The only way of driving traffic to websites is through advertising/social media
• You have to pay a lot of money for those things

4. What’s the actual problem here (What do my students actually want)?

They’re 17–18 years old.

Universities are throwing marketing at them left right and centre trying to ‘sell’ them their degree at their university.

They can’t visit universities because of COVID and they’re not getting the most up-to-date info from their cousins/teachers, so they just don’t know what and where to study.

They want honest, unbiased information from students actually there. They want to know what it’s actually like studying X degree at Y university.

5. What’s a new solution?

Why don’t we build a free online encyclopaedia where they can search up (almost) any course at any major university in the UK and learn everything they need to know from actual students studying those degrees at those universities?

We’ll make it totally free, reach out to tonnes of students who are super keen to share their experiences to help and advise their youngers, and build a one-stop-shop so everything they ever need, including example timetables, application advice, personal statement examples, etc etc, is all there.

We’ll call it something catchy like The WTF Should I Study At Uni Guide, DM over 1000 teachers with the free resource and get them to share it with their students, and make sure they we have Call-To-Actions to our website on every page.

That’ll be the funnel to our website 🚀

Problem solved 💪

The next time you’re at work and there’s an issue, most people will think by analogy. It’s not their fault: despite all being excellent first principle thinkers as children (constantly asking ‘Why? Why? Why? all the time), we’ve been socialised out of it.

There’s probably a solution to the problem, and if you reason from first principles you’re likely to get everyone to that solution 😎

That’ll impress your boss, but more importantly, help you add value to your company 👌

On another note, my friend Andrew and I have started an Accountability Club.

It’s an exclusive members-only WhatsApp group, where we hold each other accountable to our goals and habits, with consequences attached if you break your promises 😬

There are big things we all want to do and achieve, but most of the time procrastination & laziness get in the way.

Accountability is the key to surmounting these obstacles.

We’re only taking on 10 people while we test it out, so if you’re interested, please complete this 3-Question Application Form 🚀

We’ll get back to you if we think you’re a good fit for the first Accountability Club cohort!