How to Engage in "First-Principles Thinking"
And What to Avoid; The -ism of FPT vs. the rigor of the true way
Most people who use the phrase “first-principles thinking“ actually just mean "thinking," which is ironic, since the whole point of first principles is that you shouldn’t borrow language or method from others.
When those first principles are evoked, identifying them is usually an exercise left to the reader. Outside of Newton's laws and those of thermodynamics, I can think of very few. So what do people mean when they say "first-principles thinking"?
Failure Modes of FPT
One thing they mean, in practice, is that they disagree with your assumptions, and that you should question them. But questioning assumptions is an expensive and disruptive process that gets in the way of execution. That is, sincere engagement in FPT means you have to be ready to enter a phase of uncertainty that could result in a radical change of direction. Very few social groups, including businesses, are willing and able to do that. (I’m not saying you shouldn’t question your assumptions, just that it has costs both during and after the act. There’s no free lunch.)
The way FPT sometimes translates organizationally is that one or two people are assigned the role of "assumption questioners." In meetings, they suggest new ideas, sometimes out-dated or off-base, while line managers with skin in the game give updates, get interrogated and fend off potential disaster. That is, the people who say they want FPT don’t really want it. They want a team of operators who share common goals and habits in order to execute efficiently, and an occasional theater of thought put on by an executive who looks like a pet when regarded from above, and like a troll when seen from below. That’s not FPT, it’s a power dynamic.
Another thing managers mean when they invoke FPT is that they want everything on their bucket list without tradeoffs or ruthless prioritization.
For example, I know a first-principles CXO who thinks that everyone on his staff should be Elon Musk. He has identified Elon as the world's greatest businessman, and believes that his employees should be exclusively of that caliber. He will never realize his dream. The main reason why is because Elon Musk and his hypothetical clones don't want to work for anybody else. Their ambition matches their skill level, and entrepreneurship allows them to create and capture much more value than employment. Since Elon deferred grad school to start Zip2 in his mid-20s, he has worked solely for his customers and shareholders. So that is not FPT either, but wishful thinking.
Indeed, most revolutionary approaches to thought, feeling and social organization die by wishful thinking and power dynamics, which then wear them as a cloak in order to perpetuate delusion and entrenched hierarchies, humanity’s default modes. That is, you sometimes encounter leaders who parrot revolutionary phrases even as they engage in anti-phrase-parroting campaigns. It's confusing, but we should all learn what we can from them, and leave the rest.
Those same leaders frequently fail to question their own assumptions or to think through the feasibility of their own wishes. This disease most often afflicts the rich and powerful, since their friends and subordinates have decided it’s no longer a good idea to question or contradict them. Charlie Munger calls this "Persian messenger syndrome." And so these individuals fall out of the habit of self criticism, a condition once known as pride, and in doing so they lose touch with the market, which is not great for business. “First principles” without feedback from customers and macro trends are just cocoons of unreality.
Success Mode: Simple but Hard
FPT is a perfectly reasonable method to aspire to, and it’s actually very simple. The first thing you do is you ask yourself “What’s the goal here? What do I want to accomplish?”
And if it’s easy to see what you want to accomplish, then you ask yourself “Why do I want that?” (A good rule in life: if you know the what, ask the why. And if you know the why, ask the what.) After that, you might ask a few more whys until you get to the bottom of it. Then you go back to the what.
There's your first “first principle.”
Concrete examples are always useful to illustrate an abstraction: If you’re at war, you might want to win it. And winning that war can probably be precisely defined with some measurable goals: e.g. occupying some territory that you don’t currently occupy, but used to. That territory has a border that can be surveyed and marked. From there, you start thinking about the forces you command and how you can get more, as well as the forces of the enemy and how you can make sure they get less. Finally, you think about how to rally and orchestrate those forces to maximize your element of surprise.
Of course, startups are not at war, no matter how many Sun Tzu books you see founders reading in the cafes of San Francisco. Startups are a beauty contest. Their great adversary is indifference. You don't conquer indifference through violence, but through appeal, like Sheherazade telling stories each night so that the Sultan spares her life.
Startups are telling stories for dear life, too, weaving experiences out of words and bits, and the startups that survive are creating experiences with a keen understanding of their audience. They stay alive by creating recurrent value for the people who hold the purse strings and the sword. This is often measured in terms of "deals won" or "revenue generated", and it's one of life's great positive feedback loops. That measurable and falsifiable goal can also be used as a first principle to anchor your thought.
So you’re working backwards from a vision of where you want to be, and which you can validate in some measurable way upon arrival. And then you’re thinking of the necessary ingredients and steps to get you there.
There is nothing more to first principles thinking!
Painted with a broad brush, it’s simple but rigorous. In the process of such thinking, there are many hard questions to answer, both about yourself and about facts in the world. The first hurdle is simply extracting structure from the amorphous mess of reality.
FPT ends up being a fractal process, with many answers leading to further questions, some of which can't be fully answered except through your own actions on and empirical observations of the complex system you're testing. (On his blog Commoncog, Cedric Chin dives into one great example of a first-principles method, Amazon’s Working Backwards.)
The good news is that if you manage to follow FPT, you may well end up somewhere few have dared to tread, a true white space ripe for you to build something great, which many people want and few rivals know about, blinded as they are by their faux-PT.
2PT, 3PT and Other Work Cultures
Most folks are actually engaged in second-principles thinking. And by that I mean “the boss told us what she wants, didn’t explain why, and it’s no longer up for discussion.” Under the right leadership, that can work! But giving reasons for doing things is a great habit for managers to be in, and not giving them is a red flag.
Other folks are engaged in "third-principles thinking": that is, they're going after a goal that has not been explained to them, and the methods they use to pursue it are customary and habitual. Some flavor of "We've always done it that way." In other words, they can’t justify where they want to go, nor how they mean to get there.
Third-principles thinking, if you can call it thinking, is applied in many large organizations. Its phenotype is a boondoggle like the First World War, during which millions of young lives were lost executing strategies and tactics that made no sense, under the command of military officers whose only response in the face of powerful new technologies like machine guns, poison gas and air power was to sacrifice a generation of youth. In the civilian world, we are fortunate to merely waste time and money (although that, too, is a sacrifice of life measured by hours and energy).
Of course, no one wants to be second or third, so these places will no doubt have centers of excellence for first principles thinking somewhere on the org chart.
FPT is perilous in a very different way, because it is easy to make a misstep in your thinking (most so-called logic is a series of errors large and small!), or to misread the results of your real-life experiments. Very often the only way to reason about complex systems, such as a large, software-buying business or a sector of industry, is to perturb them. Jump in the water and see what happens! While parts of the black box will always will be black, by acting, you’ll have seen the inputs and outputs, and can then start to reason about something real.
Many people simply don't have the stomach for that, because there is no outside authority to shoulder the burden of freedom. FPT provides no shelter from owning your choices. But hey, that’s what founders sign up for, since the alternative is working in organizations that grant you little autonomy, and by the same token few opportunities to grow.
Apart from the founder’s path, there are a few sweet spots out there, organizations that have tapped into a stream of value and revenue without ossifying around it, organizations that are willing and able to grant employees autonomy amid uncertainty in order to build something new. I've led those teams, and there's nothing better in the world of work!