Hi Champ,
This letter happens to be the hundredth. It hasn't been a walk in the park! Thanks to all the amazing folks who have made this possible over the years: Ife Shoola, Praise Adeniran, Ayobami Adekunle, Dorcas Adeodun, Laughter Atanda, Ayooluniyi Zoe and Dashe Prince. And thanks to my wife, Temi, who has loved me without break till date!
Now, let's dive in!
Last week, we lingered on a simple but unsettling idea: that what many of us describe as a lack of money is often a failure to question assumptions. That beneath the statement "there is no money" sits a deeper habit of inherited thinking, conclusions absorbed long before they were ever examined.
I want to stay there a little longer because first-principles thinking is far more than a clever concept for engineers or an abstract philosophy reserved for boardrooms. It is a discipline of life. A way of slowing down long enough to separate what is true from what is merely familiar, what has been tested from what has simply been repeated.
Most people do not consciously decide how they think. And there is something else worth naming: many of us do not actually think as much as we believe we do. What often passes for thinking is worry; anxiety moving from one concern to another, mental noise that exhausts without producing solutions. Those who worry excessively rarely think well, and blind spots multiply in such conditions.
First-principles thinking pulls us out of that fog. It creates a vantage point where thinking is neither worry nor wishful imagination, but deliberate, grounded, and tied to specific objectives. From there, solutions begin to emerge, whether the problems are old or new, simple or complex. What matters is not the nature of the problem, but the quality of the thinking applied to it.
Interestingly, this way of thinking is not something we need to invent. We once practiced it naturally.
Children, in many ways, are first-principles thinkers by default. Their questions are not polite. Often inconvenient, but sincerely are deeply revealing.
Consider how a simple conversation with a child unfolds:
C: Why do people die?
P: Because they get old, or they get sick, or something bad happens to them.
C: Why do people get old?
P: Because they grow.
C: Why do they grow?
At this point, something interesting happens. A complex subject is being quietly dismantled, layer by layer. The child is not satisfied with surface explanations. Each question presses closer to the foundation.
Often, the adult response shifts.
"I don't know."
"Enough questions."
"Let's talk about something else."
Not because the question lacks value, but because it demands more thinking than we are prepared to give.
Here is another familiar sequence.
C: Why do people get sick?
P: Because they eat bad food or are exposed to germs.
C: Why do they eat bad food?
P: Because they are poor, or don't have access to good food, or don't know better.
C: Why are they poor?
P: ...
At this point, silence enters the room.
C: Why do I have to go to school?
P: So you can get an education.
C: Why do I need an education?
P: So you can be smart.
C: Why do I need to be smart?
P: So you can get a good job when you grow up.
C: Why do I need a job to earn well? Wait... do I have to go to school to get an education?
That final question often lands softly, but it shakes something loose. It exposes assumptions we rarely examine. It reveals how much of adult reasoning rests on inherited conclusions rather than examined truths.
Even a question as simple as "Why is the sky blue?" from a child can momentarily unsettle an adult who has not traced the explanation back to first principles. That discomfort is instructive. It shows us how quickly we stop asking once answers become socially acceptable.
At its core, first-principles reasoning asks a radical question: what is truly fundamental here?
Shane Parrish has this to say: Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible. When you really understand the principles at work, you can decide if the existing methods make sense. Often, they don't.
Many people hit a wall in problem-solving because they adopt methods without examining the principles behind them. They inherit solutions that were designed for different contexts, different constraints, and different goals, then wonder why those solutions fail to produce meaningful results.
Nowadays, when people encounter tasks that demand thinking, they simply Google solutions. At other times, they create a mash-up of these readily available answers.
What this leads to is this: We become a mass of copycats. We abandon the possibilities of originality. And we continue to live with the gross inefficiencies of inherited solutions, even when better ones await the consistent seeker.
People like Einstein, Adam Smith, and Clay Christensen opened up entirely new worlds of possibility because they were willing to step away from the readily available explanations that dominated their time.
The real principles governing nature are broadly captured within the natural sciences: biological, physical, geological, chemical, and cosmological.
When it comes down to it, everything that is not a law of nature, for instance, the boiling point of water being 100 degrees Celsius, is a shared belief. Money is a shared belief. So is a border. So are certifications.
While not everything we seek to uncover through first-principles thinking will lead us to immutable natural laws, we can be certain that such reasoning leads to deeper understanding of how things work and why they work the way they do.
Through this process, we break concepts, problems, and challenges down to their most basic elements and then rebuild them in more flexible ways that allow for breakthrough innovation.
Elon Musk: "Somebody could say, 'Battery packs are really expensive, and that's just the way they will always be. Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt-hour.' With first principles, you say, 'What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?' It's got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation, and a seal can. You'd break that down on a material basis and say, 'If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange, what would each of those things cost?' It's like $80 per kilowatt-hour. With the batteries, you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell. Then you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes."
By breaking the problem down to its most elementary components, Musk realized he could build a battery for about $80 per kilowatt-hour. That line of thinking is one of the reasons Tesla emerged as a market leader in electric vehicles.
You see, the ability to think well is a blessing. It buys time. It opens pathways. It produces breakthroughs across domains. And more importantly, it is not a gift reserved for a few, it can be learned, practiced, and built with intention.
In the next part of this letter, we will move from understanding first principles to practicing them, exploring how this way of thinking can be applied practically, grounded in real life, and immediately useful in your work, your decisions, and the problems you are called to solve.
Till next time, JD