The first principle is a basic assumption of any field/problem/product or service that can not be deduced any further. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined the first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”
The first principles is simply the act of thinking like a scientist. What scientists do while solving a problem is figuring out the basic constituents of the problem. The first principle thinking is all about taking the fundamental elements in count.
In theory, first principles thinking makes you go deeper and deeper until you get hands on the ground level elements of a situation. This approach has been used by great thinkers & inventors like Johannes Gutenberg, military strategist John Boyd, and great philosopher Aristotle.
But in 21st century, it is Elon Musk, who employs the First Principles Thinking in innovation, engineering, science and entrepreneurship the best. Musk is considered a visionary who, in 2002, dreamed of sending the first rocket to Mars—the base of starting the private aerospace venture SpaceX.
“I tend to approach things from a physics framework,” Musk shared in an interview. “Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminium alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked what is the value of those materials in the commodity market? It turned out that the material cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”
Therefore, buying all the raw materials at cheap cost and building a space rocket in house seemed more cost efficient than buying a finished rocket. And now, this has resulted into reducing the rocket launching cost by 10 times, and that too while making a profit. All this was made possible by Musk’s First Principle Thinking capability.
When you boil down a problem to its ground level, you have the opportunity to rebuild it as per your convenience and resources.
When we come to Musk’s other revolutionary Venture, “TESLA”, you may think of costly luxury electric cars. But when you go through first principle thinking, Tesla provides cars which humanity should have thought about at the very beginning of the automobile revolution.
When we talk about automobile, we think of energy. And when we use energy, it should always be of renewable type so that it lasts forever. We were going in the right direction and we introduced the electric trams on the roads. But, the discovery of internal combustion engine diverted our mind and we heavily considered using and developing them. However, coming back to TESLA, what we need in a car is renewable energy, safety measures and quality comfort. So, Musk broke the basic essentials of a car, and rebuilt the car concept taking electric motors, that were discovered way before than IC engines, as the base.
And now, the major problem that is being faced by the electric automobile industry is ‘Cost efficient Battery packs’. Battery packs cost $600 per kilowatt-hour and is believed that it is not going to be much better than that in the future. “But what are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the spot market value of the material constituents? It has carbon, nickel, aluminium, and some polymers for separation, and a steel can. Break that down on a material basis, if we bought that on a London Metal Exchange, what would each of these things cost? Jeez, it's $80 per kilowatt-hour. Clearly, you need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell, and you can have batteries that are much cheaper than anyone realizes.”- Said Musk.
It is not required to break down every problem into its atomic level to get benefited by first principle thinking. Differentiating all the basic elements by two or three steps or layers is enough to find a solution.
One of the primary obstacles to first principles thinking is our tendency to optimize form rather than function.
For some basic example, we all want flying cars in near future. But, we may not observe that we already have flying cars called airplanes. We ask this question because we are so focused on form (a flying object that looks like a car) that we overlook the function (transportation by flight).
This is why instead of rebuilding flying cars to solve future transportation problems, Elon Musk is digging holes in the ground to form a network of tunnels to make underground transportation a fast and efficient form of transportation.
First Principles thinking requires you to break down the problem to its ground level instead of thinking of a solution in the 1st place. Irrespective of building an innovative idea, understanding the first principles is an efficient use of time and resources.
It is the art of mastering the basic information that makes the difference in building an effective solution rather than an innovative one.