First Principles Thinking
By: Chris Nussbaum
Tags: First Principles Thinking, Essay, Podcast, Elon Musk

*Upbeat intro music*

Hey, Chris Nussbaum here. Real quick before we hop into this segment, I wanted to wish you all a wonderful holiday season and I hope you are spending it with the people you love.

If you are thinking of traveling and seeing family, please be cognizant of the environment we are in and do your part in protecting the people around you by doing your due diligence to wear a mask and follow social distancing guidelines provided by your state and the CDC.

Remember, We’re all in this together.

*Subtle music*

“Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.”

I’m sure many of you are familiar with this infamous quote from the movie Forest Gump, and if not, I encourage you to watch it. I assure you, it’s an instant classic.

Okay . . . remember the quote I just mentioned? Store it in the back of your mind for later.

Now, think about school. Ugh, not school. Well, worse. More specifically, when your professor assigns you an essay about a topic you could care less about. Upon receiving this assignment, you might be processing a few things simultaneously; One- you come to a consensus that doing this essay is a waste of time because the NBA is back and you have to watch Lonzo Ball score 4 points off of 21 field goal attempts, but he’ll go off next game. Two- that you have to do it. And three- How the fuck am I going to write this?

Alright. Take a few seconds to think about how you engage essay writing. . .

Think about the brainstorming that goes on in your head and then what happens the instant you put pen to paper.

Do you write on the fly and let ideas come to you with the general framework of an introduction, the body paragraphs, and a conclusion?

Or do you take into consideration this framework while also compartmentalizing your ideas and breaking them down to their fundamental roots?

For me, when I write an essay, I recognize that I need to have a thesis to summarize my paper.

I know that I need to introduce my topic, and that I need to find a way to keep my readers engaged.

Then with a transition sentence, I suggest what’s to come in the following paragraphs, and in each of my body paragraphs, I think of a topic sentence that will give some context to the given paragraph, and repeat that process until I’ve written enough jar-gin to trick my professor into thinking I know what I’m talking about. Just kidding.

To conclude, I summarize my ideas and try to connect them to my thesis. Lastly, I leave my reader with something more to think about, or a final takeaway. This is how I approach essay writing. You may have your own methods, and if you do, that’s fucking dope. Tell me about it.

Another person may create an outline to organize his or her thoughts and create bullet points about the topics they will discuss in their paper. They may take a topic and look at it from a broader perspective before breaking it down. They will take a mental note that their essay includes an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Then, their next move will be to map out what ideas, facts, sentences, quotes and other critical pieces go where in their essay. They will question whether one concept or snippet of information belongs in the third body paragraph or whether it belongs in the first body paragraph to use as an anchor for later down the line.

While creating this outline, they are being highly critical of the structure, verbage, and positioning of a sentence, while also looking for grammatical errors. They are asking why one sentence precedes another and why another follows it up.

In essence, this person understands the fundamentals of every component of an essay, and uses their experiences and knowledge to construct their essay.

This form of thinking is called First Principles Thinking: it is when an individual breaks down complicated problems into basic elements, or sub-categories, and then reassembles them from the ground up.

Someone who thinks in such a way is an unconventional thinker who questions everything to understand the first principles . . . in other words, the foundational roots of something.

A few people who think this way are Aristotle, Karl Marx and Johannes Gutenberg, and most recently, the modern day Iron Man of our generation- Elon fucking Musk.

Majority of the world, however, are conventional thinkers who reason by analogy and proceed from observation that two or more things are similar in some respects to the conclusion that they’re probably similar in some other respect as well.

So . . . for instance . . . when I described the manner in which I approached essay writing, I did so because I was taught in school from professors that that approach was the correct approach. Keep in mind that when I described my thought process, I was being a little vague.

However, an individual with a First Principles frame of mind would have repeatedly questioned every component within an essay until they arrived at the most fundamental elements before even attempting to write the essay.

That was a lot to take in. Take a minute to do 15 push-ups. 3 2 1 Go. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15. Okay, class is in session.

Maybe now you have some idea of how you process things when you come in contact with them. Here’s an analogy that may help you understand the idea of First Principles Thinking better.

Imagine a tree in your front lawn. If you live in Arizona, think of a cactus. Normally you would go outside and look at that tree and identify the kind of tree that it is. You would probably go on to say, “oh, that’s an apple tree”, or if you’re an Arizonian, you would imagine that your cactus is an apple tree and continue on with your day. Although this is completely accurate, it is also an extremely shallow way of thinking about a tree.

A First Principles Thinker would recognize the apple on the tree and question how this creation came to be. They would see that this apple was connected to a branch, and that every branch was a subset to a greater whole called a trunk, and they will conclude that the roots are the most fundamental part of the tree which give rise to the fruit.

What this thinker did was they gathered multiple pieces of information about the tree through experience and have organized the pieces of information in relation to each other.

To dig a little deeper, a conventional thinker would believe that if they were given apple seeds to plant a few trees, they could disburse them anywhere and those seeds would grow into healthy apple trees. However, an unconventional thinker would not come to that conclusion after examining the roots, and realize that a good apple tree needs good soil to prosper.

Now, I want to bring your attention back to the analogy of “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get”. Think about how a conventional thinker would approach this, and how a First Principles Thinker would approach this. Take a minute to look around and understand the objects near you, and try to apply these two perspectives of thinking as best you can. I try to attempt to think through First Principles, and then take a step back and realize I’m not Aristotle. I’m a simpleton. But maybe all hope isn’t lost for you.

Thank you for following along and please stay tuned for upcoming episodes. If you enjoyed this podcast and think there are others that would also fancy it, spread the word. Happy Holidays and Merry Fucking Quarantine Christmas. Duces.