To Be the Elon Musk of Your Own Life, Learn to Distinguish Essence From Form
Apply first-principles thinking to these five areas of your life
Physics is handy for navigating life.
Elon Musk used a Physics way of reasoning to build cheaper rockets. He asked the question, what is a rocket made of? and found that alloys, titanium, copper, and carbon fiber are the answer.
Then, he asked, how much did these materials cost in the market? and soon found out that the cost was only two percent of the typical price. That set him off on a quest to make space travel accessible.
SpaceX was made possible by a simple thinking exercise. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t wired to think this way. We grew up conditioned to follow the ‘scripts’ handed to us by family, culture, and society that we rarely question why things are the way they are.
Thus, at some point, we give up independent thinking and begin to reason by analogy, outsourcing thinking to others.
Thankfully, there’s a cure for that.
It’s called first-principles thinking, the Physics way of thinking.
What is first-principles thinking?
First-principles is a foundational proposition that stands alone. We cannot deduce it from another proposition.
In other words, you break a thing down to its fundamental truths or parts, then reason or build up from there.
Applied to Elon’s rockets, you break a ship down to its raw materials and build them up from there, instead of buying costly pre-built parts. By doing that, rockets are made cheaper.
Think of the difference between a cook and a chef. A cook only follows recipes, but a chef can make recipes on the fly with the ingredients available. That’s because she understands the chemistry and flavor profiles (first principles) of the ingredients.
First-principles applied
Since I discovered this mental model, I realized just how useful it is across many areas of my life.
The more I applied it, the more natural this way of thinking became, and the less I blindly accepted norms.
I was able to distinguish form from essence, and that enabled me to:
- Learn for understanding and wisdom
- Tell whether a so-called expert is a cook or a chef
- Carry my own convictions about contentious topics
- Solve problems creatively
Here’s how it made a difference in five major areas of my life.
1 — Health and Nutrition
Google has become our default health adviser.
We consult it more than we consult our doctor. Yet what we often find on the first page is headlines from Healthline or WebMD, in which articles are optimized for search results, not for serving the most reliable information.
Most of these articles show no specificity: “most”, “might”, “enough amount of”, “some studies show”. They rarely cite their sources. I wouldn’t be surprised if they copied information from one another without consulting experts or stringent research.
I don’t blame them. Their goal is to be on the first page in search, but the burden falls on us to be careful with what we read.
Technology is a double-edged sword. It’s great that we can now direct our own health and nutrition, but we’re also more prone to reasoning by analogy. Search engines optimize on our bias. And when we’re misinformed about our health, that may lead to bad routines and disastrous long-term effects.
To prevent that, we need to understand the underlying science.
Books and scientific journals are a good place to start, but if you don’t have time, audio or video lectures are options, too.
Let me point you to Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology at Stanford. He started a podcast to bring zero-cost information about our physiology to help us optimize sleep, exercise, nutrition, and more.
Before giving practical takeaways, he would always explain the theory (principles) first. Understanding how the body works is key before applying any protocols.
Thanks to him, I built my own daily routine, which I can easily adjust based on my life’s changing conditions.
2 — Buying Things and Services
Let’s follow the rocket logic.
When buying a costly thing, ask yourself, what are its component parts? What are they made of?
Of course, we don’t have the mental capacity to ask those questions for everything we buy. But it helps for large or frequent purchases.
- What’s the point of buying a Kleenex over a generic brand if they’re both 2-ply and made with the same material?
- Do I really need an iMac? Or could I just buy a keyboard, monitor, and mouse and connect them to my Macbook Air?
- Is it worth buying this designer shirt?
Before you criticize the Asian in me, let me show you how this is powerful for negotiations, too:
- Since we’re in the construction business, we estimate labor and material costs and see how close the quoted prices are to our standard costs.
- As software has close to zero marginal cost per new user, there’s more room for us to negotiate with suppliers.
- When consultants offer their services, we estimate how much time an engagement will take them. From there, we know whether a proposal is reasonable or not.
Of course, we consider other things such as expertise and service quality, but knowing the standard cost of a thing gives us an objective measure to help with decisions.
Start with the cost drivers and reason up from there.
3 — Learning For Understanding
Knowing a lot isn’t understanding.
Without understanding, knowledge is just stocked-up information that’s good for nothing.
Nowadays, we absorb exponentially more knowledge than our brains have the capacity to store long-term. As a result, we end up dumping most of that knowledge after hours spent ‘learning’.
What a waste of mental energy.
“…it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”— Elon Musk
This illustration sums it up well:
To apply first principles to learning, know the building blocks of what you’re trying to learn.
For instance, in managing a real estate business, I need to know the foundations of:
- Marketing, which builds on principles of psychology and sociology
- Engineering, which builds on math and physics principles
- Finance, which is essentially the wise sourcing and using of funds
Much of what we know (or think we know) today are built on sand, not solid ground.
We must spend time learning slow and few than fast but nothing.
4 — In Encouraging Innovation
Do you know what kills creativity? Blind acceptance.
Whether in solo or corporate careers, our default mode is to accept things as they are, especially the convenient, oppressive, and annoying ways of doing things.
We say, “That’s just how things work, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
By doing that, we reinforce red tape and the slog of boring work.
In business, we’re fond of ‘stealing plays’ and following a competitor’s tactics. Then, we tweak it a bit, following the system to complete failure because our context is entirely different from theirs.
“That’s how it’s done in that other company. It’s industry standard. And that’s how we ought to do it here.”
This is called incremental thinking, one version of thinking by analogy.
It’s hard work to change what has been established. It’s comfortable and even rewarding for some. The bad news is, that’s true. The good news is, there’s a tremendous upside in changing things by starting with first principles.
To do this, we can ask ‘why’ five times until we arrive at the root cause. We must empathize with customers and employees, and from there, build solutions. We should clearly define our values to inform our strategies and decisions.
To combat FOMO, we need to start with the first principles.
5 — Productivity and Self-Help
We’ve all seen these types of articles:
- ‘10 hacks for maximum productivity’
- ‘5 zero-cost ways to live a happier life’
- ‘8 mindset secrets for achieving your goals faster’
Writers love writing them. It doesn’t take much time and they could just draw from their personal experiences. It’s also easy to copy — there are millions of self-help pieces on the internet.
And readers love reading them. They get energized and excited to apply what they’ve learned. Then, they don’t stick.
These listicles are like leaves in the tree of knowledge. It’s easy to pick them, but they’re not very useful. Without the tough work of understanding the trunk, we won’t make those habits stick.
From where do we draw understanding? Theory. I like reading about psychology:
- Mindfulness by Ellen Langer
- Logotherapy by Viktor Frankl
- Flourishing by Martin Seligman
- Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Thinking: Fast & Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Books (written by experts who made thorough studies), unlike articles, are comprehensive. They first explain the principles, then teach us how to apply them to different contexts.
Theory after theory, I become more able to self-regulate and self-actualize (and yes, call BS on some of those listicles). I think of it as building a psychological immune system.
To live a meaningful life, focus on the essence and ignore form.
I would build on what Musk said. We don’t just reason from first principles, we live and learn from them.
- We absorb the science behind our daily routines
- When making buying decisions, we insert a rational process for better outcomes
- When learning, we learn from the trunk, and not the leaves
- To encourage innovation, we empathize from the ground up
- In self-development, we build confidence with the help of theory and practical frameworks
With first principles, we bypass social and cultural influences. We seek to understand. We align what we do with what we value.
By doing things, we rely less on people and circumstances to direct our growth. Wisdom compounds and returns snowball over time.
Hannah To is an entrepreneur and creative educator. She writes about thinking, productivity, and lifelong learning. Stay in touch! ✨
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