First Principles Thinkers

Contextual Quote

"In essence, to be a “first-principles” thinker is to renounce all received wisdom and act upon life like a disinterested engineer. Gather the raw materials you have to work with, assess the relevant natural laws, and identify a metric or two that you need to optimize for. Break whatever rules you can, written or unwritten, to find the most economical path to an optimum. The more rules you break, the less likely others will follow, or beat you to the goal.

There is no more able practitioner—or vocal evangelist—of this philosophy than Thiel’s competitor-turned-business-partner Elon Musk, who told an interviewer in 2012: “Particularly as you’re trying to figure out new things, reasoning from first principles is a good way to go, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.” Analogy, to Musk, is following what your predecessors have done instead of starting from scratch every time."

- Nathan Schneider [1]