the first basis from which a thing is known

in early 2000s Musk launched SpaceX.

His vision was to build reusable rockets and establish a colony on Mars.

but the problem was, he didn’t know how to build rockets and nobody would sell their technology to him (inc. Russians) and besides no rocket was re-usable then, it was destroyed once launched.

so 2 problems.

seems crazy but he taught himself rocket technology and decided to build re-usable rockets himself

but how? a typical rocket costed 100s of million of dollars

Musk said in one of his interviews that he approaches every problem from First Principles

What is the rocket composed of?

• aerospace grade aluminium alloys
• some titanium
• copper
• carbon fibre

He found that these were just 2% of the cost of a typical rocket on the market.

thinking from First Principles is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there.

which is what he did and made it re-usable.

this got the cost of rockets and launches down by a factor of 10

Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known”

reducing to what is true and cannot be reduced further. once you know that you start building up from there.

this is the essence of it, Musk didn’t stop there, he also brought the cost of a EV car battery down by a factor of 6, no small feat. It made EV cars viable.

what does this mean for us mortals?

deconstruct then reconstruct.

break a problem or anything to its most fundamental parts, question each assumption and then assemble it again, but more efficiently to suit the objective.

say, we want to get in shape, the fundamental principle here is

consuming less calories than we burn.

there are only 2 levers to make this happen, food and exercise. everything else is noise and bloated bureaucracy.

fin.