First Principles Thinking

Good Thinking Series- Part 2

When Elon Musk (I love this guy, he is the real-world Tony Stark for me) chose his audacious goal of making Mars humanity’s next home he decided to go shopping for rockets. The first big hurdle he faced was the cost of these rockets- getting 2 rockets from NASA would have cost him 130 million dollars. He also thought to try his luck in Russia for intercontinental ballistic missiles for the same purpose but again the cost was prohibitive. Just before he was about to give up his quest he realized that his knowledge of how things worked (in this case getting rockets from space agencies like NASA) was actually proving the biggest roadblock, because of cost.

Everybody knows that building rockets is a serious business and organizations like NASA had spent decades on building cutting edge space technology. But even NASA had never tried to building cheaper rockets. Funded from Govt. they had little incentive to do it, unlike Musk who was about to take a mission of unimaginable scale as a single person.

What was not making sense to Elon Musk was why has been technology getting more expensive with each generation of rockets while the rest of the computing universe was getting cheaper, faster, and better at the same time. A room-sized computer of the 1970s was slower than the most common supercomputer of our times which we carry in pockets, yes, I’m talking about mobile phones.

This prompted Musk to solve the problem by using first principles.

For Musk, using first principles meant starting with the laws of physics and asking him what’s required to put a rocket in space. He stripped a rocket down to its smallest subcomponents — its fundamental raw materials. “What is a rocket made of?” he asked himself. “Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then he asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2 percent of the typical price — which is a crazy ratio.” On further research, he found that space agencies like NASA used services of contractors who in turn used sub-contractors for the different parts which skyrocketed (no pun intended) the cost.

Musk took the task on himself and literally taught himself about building rockets from scratch by reading and thinking from first principles. Finally, he even made the same rockets reusable which even NASA was never to pull off. Recently NASA used one of the SpaceX rockets to transfer its astronauts to International Space station.

So the question how does it help us?

We don’t have to build rockets. How can we use the concept of First principles? The short answer is thinking from first principles will enable you to solve any complicated problems.

It does this by separating the underlying facts from any assumptions based on them. The story of Elon Musk is to show how strong will and a discipline of First principles thinking is enough to create as complex as rockets. For the rest of us who have no immediate plans to relocate to Mars here is a very simple technique to uncover basic facts of a situation.

Ask Five Whys.

This behavior comes naturally to children who continuously are curious about things. The goal of the Five Whys is to land on a “what” or “how”. Like Elon Musk asked why rockets are so expensive to make.

Why can’t we make them in-house?

What do we need to have to make them in-house?

How can we get to use the same rocket multiple times? And so on and so forth.

See not very complicated after all. Isn’t it?

Asking ‘Why’ a couple of times may be the single most potent way to uncover the underlying principles of anything which we don’t understand. Try it sometime; look at the kids for inspiration.

Problem solvers, Product managers, content developers out there. Going back to basics is sometimes all you need for breakthroughs.