Name: The Most Powerful Way to Think | First Principles
Uploaded: 2021-03-19T21:00:07.000Z
Duration: 8 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the previous video, we discussed the idea of power and created a framework for thinking

I claimed that someone needed two fundamental ingredients to be powerful: a true understanding

of the world and the resources to shape it.

As promised, we're going to go over what I left out of the last video which was how

to obtain a truer understanding of the world.

I believe this essay will shine light on the fact that some ways of thinking are more useful

Out of all of the essays that I've ever written, this one is the most important.

Today, we'll be discussing how to think from first principles.

First principles are the fundamental building blocks of an idea; they are the most indivisible

parts that we know to be true and that we use to build more complex thoughts.

I know this sounds a little abstract right now but let me give you some history, an analogy,

Thinking from first principles isn't a new or groundbreaking idea.

In fact, it's been the dominant mode of thinking among all great scientists and philosophers

for awhile now; it's probably the single most consistent factor among great thinkers.

Although there have been many practitioners of this way of thinking, I'd like to zoom

in on one that you may have heard about: Aristotle.

He was a prolific organizer who believed that everything could be divided into categories

The smallest subcategory in any domain is what we would call a first principle.

He was also one of the earliest empiricists that we know about.

Empiricist: someone who believes that all knowledge is achieved through experience.

As one of the earliest major contributors to the study of biology, it makes sense that

Aristotle was a first principles thinker.

He would dissect animals to gain real world knowledge and then use his capacity for reason

to organize and categorize this information.

This cycle of seeking knowledge through experience and using reason to give it structure is how

one comes to know the first principles of a subject.

Aristotle believed that we couldn't possess true knowledge unless we understood these

…we do not think we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions

or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.

Now that you have a slight understanding of the history, let me give you an analogy about

Imagine your knowledge in a specific domain as a tree.

Someone who thinks from first principles - an unconventional thinker - will understand that

body of knowledge from the fruit all the way down to the root.

The fruit is what we see in front of us: it's the unearned knowledge that we can obtain,

We can look at an apple tree, say that it's just a thing that produces apples, and call

It's a very shallow understanding of the tree but it's not untrue.

On the other hand , a first principles thinker will want to know how this creation really

They will see that the apple is connected to a branch.

Every branch is a subset of a greater whole called the trunk.

Finally, they see that the root is the most fundamental part of the tree which gives rise

They have gathered multiple pieces of information about the tree through experience but they

have also organized the pieces of information in relation to each other.

These free-floating facts have been transformed into an organized body of knowledge.

The conventional thinker will believe that they can put the apple seeds anywhere and

grow delicious apples; they lack true understanding.

Upon examining the roots, the first principles thinker will see that a delicious fruit starts

with good soil; they have a nuanced understanding.

The conventional thinker is the guy at the cocktail party who has all of the interesting

facts: his knowledge consists solely of fruit that he can display.

On the contrary, the unconventional thinker is consistently focused on building trees

Like Aristotle, he or she goes back and forth between experience and reason to build an

organized and structured body of knowledge.

A tree planted in good soil will have strong and healthy roots and thus produce delicious

Likewise, an idea that blooms from true and beautiful first principles will itself be

Naturally, if the simple parts that make up a complex whole are good and true, then the

complex whole must be good and true as well.

This is important because, as we discussed in the last video, a true understanding of

Any complex beliefs we hold can only be true if the parts that make it up are true.

To make this more concrete, let's think about the process of writing an essay from

A well-written essay is like a delicious fruit: it's enjoyable to consume and difficult

to produce without understanding its fundamentals.

We can identify its fundamentals by breaking it down into its component parts.

Well, a paragraph is a collection of sentences.

Words are a collection of letters and letters are the fundamental building blocks of an

Once the components of an essay are understood, we can look at improving each one from the

If we can make each individual component remarkable then the totality should be remarkable and

that is the art of first principles thinking.

Several benefits come from understanding an idea down to its fundamental components.

Once you understand the fundamentals of an idea, you can rearrange them, change them,

or put them together differently to create a new idea or product.

In our writing example, we could have created another layer above the essay: we could call

A fundamental component can be changed in order to improve an idea or a product.

For example, once we knew the fundamental components of the essay, we could put each

of them under scrutiny to see how each component could be its best.

But, without knowing these components, it's impossible to make any sort of improvement.