First principles thinking is one of the best ways to discover new solutions.
Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” it’s a tool to help break down complicated problems by separating what we know is absolutely true from anything that is an assumption. What remains are the essentials. If you know the first principles of something, you can build the rest of your knowledge around them to produce something new.
While you could take this way of thinking down to an atomic level, a lot of value is gained by simply going a level or two deeper than most people. Solutions are based on what you see. Different answers reveal themselves at different levels.
If I hand you a house made from Lego blocks, you know it’s possible to make a house. Thinking at the first layer, you might move a few blocks around and, in the process, slightly improve the house. Most people stop here. They are presented with something that already exists and they endeavor to make it slightly better. Going a layer deeper and breaking the Lego house into individual pieces opens the door to possibility: not only can you build a better house, you can build something entirely different.
Everything that exists is effectively a set of Lego blocks, assembled in a certain way, that can be taken apart and reassembled. A bike is just a seat, chain, body, handlebars, etc. Breaking the bike down into its parts allows you to reassemble the parts into something new. However, you can also go deeper, melting the parts into their core metals and making a shield, sword, or anything else, limited only by material and imagination.
I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
Richard Feynman
The Basics
The idea of building knowledge from first principles has a long tradition in philosophy. In the Western canon, it goes back to Plato, with significant contributions from Aristotle and Descartes. Essentially, these thinkers sought foundational knowledge that would remain constant and serve as a basis for building everything else, from our ethical systems to our social structures.