💡 Weekly Thought Exercise: First Principles Thinking

The First Principles prompt draws from reading through 98 Mental Models to find the most useful, relevant model for the majority of our challenges.

Author

Eva Gutierrez
May 23, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

This prompt uses a mental model to help you see a new perspective.

Hilariously, this perspective has always been available.

But, you've purposely blinded yourself to it.

Your mind chose to filter reality through its filter of choice and that left you with blind spots.

Hence, first principles.

Here's a one-minute and 50-second video of Elon Musk talking about the importance of thinking using first principles based only your prior experiences:

And a quick rundown on First Principles Thinking:

  • First principles thinking means breaking down a complicated problem into the smallest, most basic pieces first.

  • It's like looking at the individual blocks before putting them together, instead of just stacking them up.

  • Instead of following the same old instructions, you start fresh by taking something apart all the way to the beginning and rebuilding from there.

Give yourself 15-20 minutes to go through this.

Copy and paste this thought exercise into your AI of choice (I prefer Claude for these types of conversations):

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