A Fundamental Belief

This is the next post on first principles and my attempt to understand them. Some of the terms are introduced in the previous posts, Nature, Nurture, and Niceties, What the Hell Are First Principles?, and A Fundamental Truth, if you care to give those a read.

While fundamental truths are the bedrock of first principles, fundamental beliefs are where first principles intersect with human nature and tribe. Beliefs are a powerful thing, just not as powerful as gravity. Most of us aren’t making physical breakthroughs, but we borrow this terminology and slut it up for business development and blogs (present company excluded).

Reid Hoffman, PayPal mafia member and founder of LinkedIn, doesn’t make things in the physical world, but he is still fond of using first principles in business. In his book Masters of Scale he writes, “Instead of blindly following directions, or sticking to an established process, a first-principle thinker will break down a problem to its most basic assumptions, test or question those assumptions, and then re-create them from the ground up. And rather than do things in a habitual way, such a thinker will wonder, ‘Couldn’t we do it this other way instead?’”

Before the founding of SpaceX, a group of PayPal alumni were celebrating in Las Vegas. They had just sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Elon Musk sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.”

PayPal Mafia must have talked about first principles a lot, and their fundamental beliefs. — PayPal Mafia

Reid Hoffman had a similar reaction. After listening to Musk describe his plan to send rockets to Mars, he was puzzled. “How is this a business?” he asked. Musk had a belief, a mission to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization, but he was reading that Russian rocket manual to find the principles.

Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didn’t think economics first. “What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to make it work financially. That’s what makes him a force of nature.”

Hoffman has now opened the definition to include beliefs, not truths and physical laws. And as we’ve seen with Musk, the mission and beliefs often come before the principles of physics. Because they’re easier.

Ask what you want to do, what you want to accomplish, and then study the physical laws at play.

Fundamental beliefs have been around for a long time. Marcus Aurelius, roman emperor and stoic, was thinking about first principles 2000 years ago, before bankrupt car companies were even a glimmer in the emperor’s eye. He knew nothing of the rockets, satellites, and—gulp—business networks to come.

“Now forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don’t let anything distract you,” he writes. “How? Through first principles. Which should govern your intentions and your actions. What principles? Those to do with good and evil. That nothing is good except what leads to fairness, and self-control, and courage, and free will. And nothing bad except what does the opposite.”

Aurelius has expanded even further, the principles of morality, freedom, and human nature.

Successful people, and I’d place Musk, Hoffman, and Aurelius in that camp, have a pattern. Not a copy of each other but a rhyme. They work from first principles rather than formulas. Tech entrepreneur Naval Ravikant echoes this sentiment, describing first principles thinking as “thinking like a scientist”—breaking a problem down to its core components and building up from there. Whether it’s Musk’s rockets, Hoffman’s networks, or Aurelius’ stoicism, they all strip away the layers to get to the bedrock.

Formulas. Best practices. Proxies. These are shorthand. They are taking what has been done before and applying it to the future. And while that approach can work, it has its limits.

What do they stand for? How do they avoid living through proxy? The answer is to become a chef.

And that is what we’ll talk about in the next installment on first principles.