First Principles

Learning Objectives

Upon completing this book, you will be able to:

• Break down a problem to the truths that cannot be broken down further.
• Distinguish what is law (physics, cannot be otherwise) from what is habit (custom, could change).
• Pursue an assumption with “why?” until discovering if it is physics or just inertia.
• Build the law/habit table of a problem and attack only the habit column.
• Rebuild a solution from the foundation, ignoring how it is “normally done”.

“It's always been done this way”

There is a phrase that kills more innovation than any other, and it's almost always said with complete naturalness, as if it closes the discussion: “it's that it's always been done this way”. It sounds like reason. It's not. It's the absence of a reason, disguised as reason.

Let's do the experiment. Take a supposition from your work or your life, something you take for granted that “has to be this way”. The report you deliver every Friday. The weekly meeting. The document format. The way that procedure is done. Now pursue it with a single question, repeated: why?

“The report is delivered on Friday.” Why on Friday? “Because it's always been on Friday.” Why does it have to be on a fixed day? “Because… that's how we inherited it.” What would break if it were another day, or another format, or if it didn't exist? And many times, at the bottom of the “why?”, you don't find a law, you find a void. Nothing forces it to be that way. Only inertia.

What you just did is the heart of this technique: pursuing a supposition to the bottom to discover if it's physical, something that can't be any other way, or just habit. Most of the limits we assume are the latter. And the second type can be demolished.

“Most of the walls you assume are painted on the floor.”, Thesis of first principles

Breaking Down to What Cannot Be Broken Down

Reasoning by first principles means breaking down a problem to its most basic truths, which cannot be broken down further, and rebuilding from there, completely ignoring how it's normally done. This is the opposite of reasoning by analogy with what exists ("let's do it like everyone else"). Here, you dismantle to the foundation and rebuild without dragging the weight of habit.

The idea is ancient, Aristotle called "first principles" the basic truths from which everything else is deduced, and it has resurfaced with force in contemporary technological innovation. Its power lies in separating two things we often confuse: what is impossible and what simply hasn't been done.

Law vs. Habit

The entire technique boils down to classification. Before each scenario of your problem, ask: is this a law or a habit?

• Law: what cannot be otherwise. Gravity, material resistance, energy conservation, the speed of light. It cannot be negotiated. If you challenge a law, you lose.
• Habit: what is done this way due to inertia, convention, or history. “It's delivered on Fridays”, “the vehicle is full”, “the form has these fields”. It appears fixed, but nothing physical obliges it. If you challenge a habit, you can win.

The operational rule is brutal in its simplicity: attack only the column of habits. Don't waste energy fighting physics; identify it, respect it, and concentrate all your creativity on the habits that everyone accepted without examining them. That's where innovation is usually found.

“For years, it was assumed that a watch “had to” have hands and gears. The hands are a habit; measuring time is the law. By separating one from the other, what obliges the hands? nothing, and the digital watch appeared. The function (measuring time) was untouchable; the form (gears and hands) was pure convention.”

Rebuilding from the foundation

The cost of a rocket, broken down. As Elon Musk himself has described, when he set out to manufacture rockets, he encountered an industry assumption: rockets are extremely expensive, and that's that, “they've always cost that much”. Instead of accepting it, he broke it down by first principles: what is a rocket physically made of? Aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. How much do these materials cost in the market? A minimal fraction of the price of a finished rocket. The rest of the cost was not physical, it was “that's how it's done”: processes, suppliers, inherited margins. Separating the material (law) from the process (habit) changed the sector's economy.

(We tell it as his account, not as an audit: what matters here is the movement, breaking it down to the material and asking what part of the price is physical and what is habit.)

The Friday report. You don't need a rocket. Any inherited work process will do. “The report is done every Friday.” Subjected to “what truth forces this?”, it almost always reveals that nothing forces it: it could be done when there's something to report, or automated, or eliminated. The law was “the team needs information to decide”; Friday was habit. Most of your processes have a hidden Friday.

The Tool: the Law/Habit Table

The technique is executed with a two-column table. It is simple to draw and difficult to fill in honestly, because it requires admitting that many things you thought were fixed are not.

• List all the assumptions of your problem. Everything you take for granted about how it “should” be.
• Classify each one: law or habit. For each assumption, ask: “what physical truth forces this?”. If there is one, it is a law. If you don't find one, it is a habit.
• Attack only the habits. Take each habit and rebuild the problem as if that habit did not exist. That's where the solutions that habit was covering up appear.

The Pan-Atlantic Law/Habit Table

This is where our case shines more than in any other technique. Let's list the assumptions of transportation in 1955 and classify them mercilessly.

LAW (physics, don't touch it):

• The cargo must physically cross the water.
• The ship must maintain its stability.
• There is a weight limit that can float.
• Saltwater corrodes exposed metal.

HABIT (custom, attack it):

• Cargo travels in loose pieces.
• The truck is an indivisible unit.
• Cargo is handled piece by piece at the port.
• What goes up on the ship is the truck or the boxes.

Look at the right-hand column, because that's where it all is. For decades, the industry treated those four habits as if they were laws. "The truck is an indivisible unit" felt as obvious as gravity, and it wasn't. Nothing physical requires the wheels, chassis, and box to always travel together.

Case thread, Pan-Atlantic. The piece that unlocks everything

Let's attack the most obvious and least questioned habit: "the truck is indivisible". If we demolish it, the question that nobody asked appears: what part of the truck really needs to cross the water? The wheels, no: they're for rolling on land. The chassis, no: it's for towing. The only thing that has to cross is the box that contains the merchandise. Separating the box from what rolls, keeping only what needs to cross, is the piece that the other techniques surrounded without naming.

Now put it all together, because your dossier has just closed. The analogy said "encapsulate the cargo in a sealed and standard unit". The inversion said "minimize touches and time in port". The constraints said "make it modular, interoperable, and mount it on what exists". And the first principles have just said what that unit is: the truck box, separated from the wheels and chassis, sealed at the origin and moved whole. Five faces of the same object, and suddenly the complete figure is visible.

Guided Practice

Now it's your turn to classify. The deliverable is your Pan-Atlantic habit/ law table. Don't copy the one from section 6: write your own assumptions, and be ruthless when classifying. Every time you doubt whether something is a law, ask yourself, "What physical truth forces it?" If you can't find it, it goes in the habits column.

Glossary of Key Terms

• First principles: Framework of reasoning that breaks down a problem into indivisible truths and rebuilds from there, ignoring how it is normally done.
• Law: Assumption that cannot be otherwise: the physics of the problem. It is not attacked; it is respected.
• Habit: Assumption that is done this way due to inertia or convention, without any law forcing it. It is what is attacked.
• Law/habit table: Two-column tool that classifies the problem's assumptions to focus the attack on habits.
• Invisible assumption: Habit so accepted that it is confused with a law and is not even debated; it is usually the one that most limits.

Final Reflection and Self-Assessment

Bibliography and Recommended Readings

• Aristotle. Metaphysics / Posterior Analytics. [The Origin of Reasoning by First Principles.]
• Vance, A. (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. [The Story of the Cost of Rockets by First Principles.]

• Levinson, M. (2006). The Box. Princeton University Press. [The Supposed Invisible of 1955 Transportation.]

Next Topic

This was the decisive turn. You separated law from habit, attacked the invisible assumption, "the truck is indivisible", and with that your Pan-Atlantic dossier was, in essence, assembled: a sealed and standard unit, which is the box separated from the wheels, modular and interoperable, designed to minimize touches and time in port.

The next book, Topic 9: Recombination (SCAMPER), closes the workshop. It will not give you a new face for the object: it will give you a systematic way to squeeze everything you already have, generating variants of your solution with seven verbs, substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to other uses, eliminate, rearrange. And you will see that almost nothing of what we call "new" is new: almost everything is recombination. With it, you will complete Module III and be ready for Module IV, where you will finally assemble your proposal and compare it with what really happened in 1956.

Most of the walls you assume are painted on the floor.