Breaking Down the Situation — First Principle Thinking

For some people, a problem is a big deal, for some, it’s just a situation, like a puzzle, they believe there is a way to solve it. The difference between these two types of people is not physical, but there’s an enormous cliff between their mindsets. One is a solver and the other is a weeper.

First Principle Thinking, seems like professional corporate jargon that your boss uses in company pep talks. That’s why the main title of this essay is the layman’s term for that: “Breaking Down the Situation”.

What is First Principle Thinking?

First principle thinking is not a set of rules or some success mantra, that you’ll follow and achieve your goals. Rather it’s breaking down a situation or a problem into its elementary blocks, free from any pre-assumptions or cultural beliefs, thinking with pure reasoning.

The first principle thinking is breaking down a thought until its irreducible. Questioning your own thought process recursively. The benefit of having elementary blocks of a situation is it gives you flexibility in solving it — think of them as Lego blocks, if you have them you can build anything with them.

Understanding of the first principle changes with the amount of knowledge we gain. Suppose, your car breaks down, you may try to repair it. According to you, the building blocks of a car are the engine, battery, wheels, etc. — hence less flexibility, but a car mechanic has more knowledge about the car and its parts. According to him, the building blocks of a car are the crankshaft, cylinder head, pistons, and spark plugs(parts of a car engine) or different parts of a car battery, which means more parts to tweak, hence more flexibility in finding a solution. Let’s talk about ways to think in the first principle.

Five-Whys Technique

Five whys is a default mode in children. They will keep asking why things happen, how things happen, how the world works, and what are those twinkling white spots in the night sky. There comes a point in this series of Whys when you hit the wall, that is what the first principle is.

The goal here is to get to a “what” or “how” question through a series of “whys” so that you can detach reliable knowledge from pre-assumed ideas or shared beliefs. Let’s understand through an example:

1. Why didn’t you get promoted? — Because you submitted your work late multiple times.
2. Why you submitted your work late? — Because you procrastinate a lot.
3. Why do you procrastinate? — Because you can’t focus on one thing at a time.
4. Why can’t you focus on one thing at a time? — Because of overthinking and social media addiction
5. How to stop overthinking and social media addiction?

Bingo! You’ve hit the first principle. So the core problem lies with your social media addiction and hyperactive mind. So, the solution is to reduce or stop social media usage and meditate to reduce overthinking and be calm.

First principal thinking requires you to stop, relax, think, and understand the situation. It might slow you down in the short term, but no use in being fast when you’re going in the wrong direction.

Hope you got something valuable from this article. But just reading this self-help kind of content is not enough. If you’re not applying this in your life then it’s of no use. Knowing and controlling the basic blocks of any situation gives you control over the whole situation. And lastly, one more why: Why aren’t you subscribing to the newsletter?