The Groove Issue 45 - How to Think in First Principles
Welcome to the 45th issue of The Groove.
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HOW TO THINK IN FIRST PRINCIPLES
Imagine if you could really get to the root cause of problems or discover profitable business opportunities by stripping away every unnecessary concept, obstacle, or preconception. There would be sufficient clarity on knowing exactly where to go for the solutions to your needs.
Whether your objective is inventing a service that the market really needs or marketing your practice in a way that brings great results, thinking in first principles also helps with creativity. We live such complex lives that we sometimes forget that such a thing exists.
I know it sounds oversimplified, but the point is to be able to see things from an angle where you boil the issues at hand down to its pure essence.
Break Things Down to The Core
Statue of Aristotle in the Aristotlepark of Stagira in Greece.
Aristotle, one of the greatest Greek philosophers and Plato’s most important disciple, wrote about first principles around 300 BC and almost always started his logical reasoning in fields such as physics and ethics from “the first basis from which a thing is known.”
What Aristotle was doing was breaking down a problem into core truths, to see what’s possible with the pieces once they have been separated from everything that adorns or obscures them. He wanted to get to the truth, the essence of things.
If you think about this for a second, you can see that Aristotle’s first principles can be applied to anything. You can discover new business opportunities or come to innovative solutions following this way of thinking.
The key is in asking thorough questions to ourselves, to our clients and to the market and to answer them with brutal honesty. And we must keep digging once we have an answer because there is always a possibility of one more.
Remove All Assumptions
Elon Musk has been known to think in first principles and he also has used the phrase as his preferred deduction method in several interviews.
Since 2002, Musk has put his eye on sending a man to Mars. Even though he isn’t a rocket scientist or an astronaut, he started asking everyone about the cost of building spaceships and why NASA’s missions were so onerous to the United States. He needed to remove all the assumptions that may have been clouding his judgment.
When he started digging, he listed every component that a rocket needs in order to be built, and when he went to gather information in the commodity market, he made the astounding calculation that while manufacturing a spaceship cost $65 million, all the materials needed amounted to less than $1.5 million.
What is the catch? Musk asked himself. After all the research he did, he concluded that there’s no catch other than the markups that contractors and subcontractors were charging NASA for building rockets.
Musk went ahead and opened SpaceX after the realization that he could assemble the necessary teams of engineers, scientists and technicians and build his own rockets at a fraction of the cost. In 2020, SpaceX completed its first successful outer space trip, carrying a capsule with two NASA astronauts, marking the beginning of a new era for American spaceflight.
Ask the Five Whys
“The five whys” is a technique used to get to the root cause of an issue, so it is like thinking in First Principles. It was invented by Sakichi Toyoda, a Japanese entrepreneur and inventor who established the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, and later, Toyota.
When I opened my company almost 13 years ago, I started with many questions, including:
1) Why is the art market so mysterious?
Answer: Because the people in it want to keep it like that.
2) Why aren’t more people collecting art and visiting good galleries?
Answer: Because they are intimidated and don’t know how to start.
3) Why is there not more knowledge and transparency available to potential collectors?
See answer to 1.
4) Why aren’t art advisors also helping their clients curate their collections in a way so that their interiors are enhanced?
Answer: Because they have no time.
5) Why aren’t art advisors spreading knowledge in blogs or social media and supporting galleries and artists in other ways?
See answers to 1 and 2 before.
My reasoning through all these questions left me with one clear answer: if I am going to open this business, I must work hard in giving my clients and my audience knowledge, options, and tools to explore the art world with some level of confidence.
In the beginning, I must have written more than 25 different guides on “How to Navigate the Art World as a Pro” for all sorts of publications from Elle to Departures. And I still get new clients who have never bought a piece of art in their lives, and I am as excited to teach them about the market and show them what I know as I was when I started.
Constantly asking questions of why things are the way they are and whether or not there’s a catch, has served me right throughout all these years in business.
Whatever you choose to do, whether you break pieces apart to the core, remove assumptions or use the five whys, they will all help you develop a first principles mindset.
PS: I was a guest in the Money on My Mind Podcast and had a great time talking about creativity and entrepreneurship, NFTs, the art market and many other interesting things. You can listen here.