First Principles Are Just the Beginning
Everyone talks about reasoning from first principles. But the real challenge isn't breaking things down to fundamentals - it's having the conviction to rebuild them differently than everyone else.
There's a certain kind of intellectual flattery in claiming to think from first principles. It sounds rigorous. Elon Musk talks about it. It implies you're not just following the crowd, that you've done the hard work of questioning assumptions.
But I've noticed something about myself: I'm better at the deconstruction than the reconstruction.
Breaking things down is satisfying. You find the atomic truths, the irreducible facts, and suddenly the conventional wisdom looks arbitrary. Why do we do it this way? Because everyone else does. The emperor has no clothes. You feel clever.
The harder part comes next. Once you've dismantled the existing structure, you have to build something new. And here's where most first-principles thinking quietly fails: the rebuild often looks suspiciously similar to what everyone else already concluded.
That's because the conventional wisdom usually exists for reasons. Not always good ones. But reasons. And those reasons exert a gravitational pull on even the most independent thinker. You end up at roughly the same destination, just with extra steps and the false confidence of someone who believes they arrived there independently.
The people who actually change things aren't just good at reasoning from fundamentals. They're willing to follow that reasoning somewhere uncomfortable. Somewhere that makes them look wrong until it makes them look prescient.
First principles thinking is necessary but not sufficient. The sufficient part is conviction - the willingness to act on conclusions that seem obvious to you and absurd to everyone else. To hold a position long enough for reality to render its verdict.
I'm still working on that part.