A Lesson Worth Six Months

In 2023, a year after dropping out of university, Jaynit spent six entire months building something nobody wanted.

He wasn’t lazy. Quite the opposite — he poured in all his energy: late nights, weekends, nonstop. The problem was that he was only copying other people’s playbooks. He looked at what successful people in the same field were doing, then built something similar. Copying templates. Following the playbook.

The result was a total failure. Because that template was designed for someone else’s situation: someone else’s audience, someone else’s resources, someone else’s advantages. When he finally stopped and asked himself “what do I actually want to achieve,” the answer was completely different from what he had been building. Six months of work went down the drain, and he started from zero.

This experience taught him a lesson he should have learned long before: most people, including himself, aren’t actually thinking. We’re just pattern matching, copying others, doing what seems to work for other people, without ever asking whether it makes sense for us.

The opposite of this kind of thinking has a name: First Principles Thinking.

What Is First-Principles Thinking

The concept dates back to Aristotle, who defined first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”

Specifically, a first principle is a basic truth that cannot be broken down any further. It is the foundation, the bedrock — something that holds no matter what anyone else thinks or does. When you think from first principles, you start from these foundational truths and build upward. You don’t start from what already exists, you don’t start from what others do — you start from what is fundamentally true and reason forward.

The opposite is Reasoning by Analogy, which is the default mode of thinking for most people:

• “It worked for them, so it should work for me.”
• “That’s how it’s always been done.”
• “Everyone does X, so X must be right.”

Analogy is faster, easier, and takes less effort. But it has a ceiling: you can never surpass what already exists by copying what already exists.

The SpaceX Rocket Cost Case

Elon Musk often talks about this way of thinking. In one interview, he explained how SpaceX rethought rocket costs.

The raw materials of a rocket account for about 2% of its total cost. So what is the remaining 98%? Manufacturing, labor, overhead, profit. All of these can be reduced.

The gap between 2% and 100% is where the opportunity lies. Not incremental improvements to existing rocket designs, but fundamentally rethinking how rockets are built.

Most people never ask these questions. They just accept “rockets are expensive” as a fixed truth, as if it were a law of physics. But it isn’t. It’s just the way things have always been done.

Why We Default to Copying

To be clear, reasoning by analogy isn’t stupid. In fact, it’s very useful most of the time. Following a recipe when learning to cook is perfectly reasonable; copying effective methods when entering a new industry is a good starting point.

The problem is when the analogy becomes invisible — when you forget you’re copying and start believing you’re thinking.

Charlie Munger often talked about this. He said the key word is “fundamental.” Most people’s mental models are not fundamental. They are copies of copies — received wisdom that nobody has examined.

Jaynit fell into analogy mode while building that thing nobody wanted. He looked at successful people in the field, saw what they were doing, and assumed that was the playbook. He never questioned whether their playbook applied to his situation.

He was 23. He didn’t have the audience others had spent a decade building, didn’t have the same resources, didn’t have the same advantages. Why would the same playbook work? But he never asked. He just copied.

Think Like a Physicist

Musk often describes first-principles thinking as “thinking like a physicist.” In physics, you can’t say “well, it just is that way.” You have to understand why. What are the underlying laws? What are the constraints? What is possible within those constraints?

Richard Feynman had a famous learning technique: he would try to explain complex concepts in simple language. If he couldn’t, he knew he didn’t really understand it. That’s basically the whole thing. Most of us are fooling ourselves. We think we understand something because we can repeat what we’ve heard. But repetition is not understanding.

When you only know the conclusion, you can’t adapt. You can’t see when the formula doesn’t apply, can’t create new solutions for new situations. When you understand the first principles, you can rebuild from zero and adapt to anything.

A Concrete Post-Mortem

When Jaynit started creating content after dropping out, he assumed he needed a presence on every platform. Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. Everyone said so: be everywhere, build omnipresence.

But he never questioned that assumption. Did it really hold for him?

Naval Ravikant has a saying: “The first step to getting what you want is knowing what you want.” Jaynit didn’t know what he wanted. He only knew what others were doing. So he copied.

When he finally broke it down with first principles:

• What do I want to achieve? Build an audience interested in what I do.
• Where do these people actually spend time? Mostly Twitter, maybe YouTube. Instagram doesn’t fit his domain well.
• What are my constraints? Time. I can’t do everything well.
• What’s the first-principles answer? Go deep on one or two platforms instead of going shallow on five.

This seems obvious in hindsight. But he spent months spreading himself thin because he never questioned the “be everywhere” assumption.

The Socratic Method

First-principles thinking is essentially applying the Socratic method to problems. Socrates would take a widely held belief and keep asking “why?” and “is this actually true?” until the belief either proved itself or crumbled.

Most beliefs crumble. They rest on assumptions nobody has examined.

Shane Parrish writes on Farnam Street that this process is uncomfortable. It makes you feel stupid. You realize how much of what you “know” you don’t actually know — you’re just repeating other people’s words. But that discomfort is exactly the point. On the other side of the discomfort is genuine understanding.

A few useful questions:

• What do I actually know to be true, versus what am I assuming?
• Why do I believe this? Where does this belief come from?
• If I had to rebuild from zero, what would I do?

Simple questions. But sitting down and facing them is hard. Your brain wants to skip them and return to the comfortable analogy.

When NOT to Use First-Principles Thinking

To be honest, first-principles thinking isn’t always the right approach. It’s slow and energy-intensive. For most everyday decisions, analogy is enough.

Jeff Bezos talked about this at Amazon, distinguishing what he called Type 1 and Type 2 decisions. Type 1 decisions are one-way doors — irreversible, high-consequence. These are Type 1 decisions, worth thinking about from first principles. Type 2 decisions are reversible; you can change your mind. For those, decide quickly, use analogy.

The mistake is applying analogy thinking to Type 1 decisions, or wasting first-principles thinking on things that don’t matter.

How to Exercise This Muscle

Jaynit admits he isn’t naturally good at first-principles thinking. His default mode is still copying and following templates. But he keeps trying to exercise this muscle.

A few methods that helped him:

1. Write it down

When he’s stuck on a problem, he writes down every assumption he holds about it. Simply listing them makes them visible. Then he can question them one by one.

2. Keep asking “why”

Like toddlers. Why is this true? Why do I believe that? Usually after three or four whys, you hit something fundamental — or something obviously unexamined.

3. Imagine starting from zero

If I knew nothing about how this “should” work, what would I do?

Peter Thiel has a famous interview question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Essentially it asks: where have you done first-principles thinking and reached a conclusion different from the crowd? Most people can’t answer it. Because most people don’t think from first principles. They think by analogy. So they end up with the same conclusions as everyone else.

The Henry Ford Carriage Parable

There’s a story about Henry Ford, possibly apocryphal, that illustrates this well.

Supposedly someone asked him about customer research: what do customers want? He said: if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

That’s the difference.

• Analogy thinking: People use horses for transportation. Give them better horses.
• First principles: What problem actually needs solving? Getting from A to B. What’s the best way? Maybe it’s not a horse at all.

The person asking for a faster horse wasn’t wrong. He was just reasoning from what already exists. He couldn’t imagine something that doesn’t exist yet.

That’s why breakthrough ideas rarely come from copying. Copying keeps you inside the box of what already exists.

The Most Uncomfortable Part

First-principles thinking is uncomfortable because it makes you take responsibility.

When you reason by analogy, you have an excuse: “I did what everyone said to do. I followed best practices. It’s not my fault.”

When you reason from first principles, you own the outcome. You questioned the assumptions. You made the decision.

Most people don’t want that responsibility. It’s easier to follow a template and blame the template when things go wrong.

But the people who actually create new things accept that responsibility. They reason from the fundamentals, make original bets, and bear the consequences.

Finally

The six months Jaynit wasted still bothers him somewhat. Not regret — he learned from it. But he thinks about how much time he could have saved if he had stopped earlier to question his assumptions.

Most of the time, the assumptions hold. But sometimes they don’t. And that’s where all the opportunity lies.

Original post: https://x.com/jaynitx/status/2052734499319091384