Elon Musk----the person who inspired me to understand the important role of the first

principle thinking in the design process and life

When talking or thinking about certain remarkable people, people only think about what

they have achieved in the past, and how remarkable those achievements are. There is nothing

wrong with that, the problem is most people stop at that level, and leave most juicy stuff

underneath, specifically, why those people are able to do what they are doing, what’s their

motivation, their mental model, their thought process, their decision-making process and so on.

Without all that, achievements are just like magic tricks, they are fun to watch, but you will

always limit yourself to clapping in the crowd rather than actually be a magician yourself. I’m

always fascinated by those tiny group of people in history who manage to dramatically change

their life and the world around them, and I’ve always liked to find out what exactly those people

know and the rest of us don’t. And what did I learn from Elon Musk to level up my own game?

It is really funny that the first time I have a slight interest in a guy named Elon Musk is

because of the Ironman movie. I still remember the day when the 13-year-old me was waiting for

the bus in the year 2008, and the digital screen in the bus stop was playing the first Iron man

movie trailer. A guy wearing fancy suits dodged a tank cannonball with ease and shot a missile

from his right arm, then walked towards the camera, one second later the tank exploded in a

fireball. (picture1)(I had to put a picture here) This scene created a tremendous impact on the 13-

year-old me, I didn’t know any of the superheroes except superman back then, I have no idea

what the movie is about, I just know that whatever it is about, I want to watch it. And the movie

was amazing, it was a real treat for a young boy who loves fancy technology and had a bit of

narcissistic personality in himself.

 Fast forward who knows how long, I was shopping in a bookstore, and I saw a book

named <Silicon Valley Ironman>, and an average-looking guy staring at me through the book

cover.(picture2) To be honest, I was super skeptical, there is no way this guy is as cool as the

Robert Downey junior version of Ironman, I told myself. Just to prove I’m right and also out of a

little bit of curiosity, I bought the book and took a good look into Elon musk on the internet

about who he is and what he has done. Having no idea he would have such a great impact on

how I thought about life and design beforehand.

(picture1) (picture2)

It is not until a few years later I know that Jon Favreau actually sent Robert Downey, Jr.

to spend time with Musk in the SpaceX factory prior to filming the first Iron Man movie so he
could model his character off of Musk, “the real life Iron Man” is not made out of the thin air

after all.

The problem with Elon Musk, though, is that you can’t really put a clear tag on him

because he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:

Fintech

Automotive

Aerospace

Solar Energy

Energy Storage

Satellite

High-Speed Ground Transportation

Multi-Planetary Expansion

And, um, Flame Thrower

I’ll explain later how he inspired and influenced my design process, but first I want to

talk about what he does throughout the years, and what a crazy ride that is.

Musk was born in a difficult mode game, he was born in 1971 in South Africa, and has a

tough childhood combined with hard family life and never fit in school life. Like a lot of other

introverts, he is a self-learner, he learned a lot through reading multiple hours a day during his

childhood. And then he got into his second fixation at the age of nine after he got his first

computer, and fall in love with codding. At the age of 12, he used his skills to created a video

game called Blaster and sold it to a computer magazine for $500 ($12oo in today’s money), not

bad for a 12-year-old if you ask me. I remember when I was 12 I’m still struggling with finishing

all the homework and practicing piano for 1 hour every night. South Africa is hardly ever the
best soil for a young ambitious potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the promised

land and leave South Africa at age of 17 for good. He started out in Canada, which is easier to

immigrate because his mother is a Canadian citizen, and then he transfers to the University of

Pennsylvania as his way into the US.

After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford Ph.D. program to study high-energy-

density capacitors. But he quit that program after two days, because it was 1995, and the internet

was booming, he “Couldn’t stand to just watch the internet go by-he want to jump in to make it

better”. So he dropped out and pursue that path.

After some initial failure, he started a company named Zip2 with his brother. And it was

not a smooth sailed, the brothers had no money, they work almost 24/7 and slept in the office.

But eventually, the company grew, and in 1999, the company was sold for $307 million and Elon

made 22 million at the age of 27.

For most people with that amount of money at age of 27, the typical playbook is either

retire off into the Hawaii beach of leisure and angle investing or if he still feels like playing, he

can start a company using his reputation with other people’s money, but he dives straight into a

much harder, much more complex industry and collaterally came up with what we know today as

PayPal. Although, there is some disagreement inside the company and Elon walks away. But he

walks away as the company’s largest shareholder, with $180 million (after taxes).

As a 31-year-old mega-rich entrepreneur, he then made the seemingly most crazy, almost

unthinkable decision: start a rocket company called SpaceX with 100 million of his money,

which its sole purpose is to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at

least a million people over the next century.

 Then two years later, as his “ rocket project” was just to get going, he decided to launch

the second venture called “Tesla” in one of the hardest industries——the auto industry. The

purpose of Tesla is to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future.

Another 2 years later, he threw another 10 million to start another company, called

SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by covering every rooftop of the

city with solar panels, and ultimately “accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy”.

If you are someone who just observing his choices after his Paypal sale, you would think

it’s an ambitious story that’s not gonna end well. A delusional internet multi-millionaire threw

all his money into one impossible project after another, doing everything to achieve utterly

unrealistic dreams.

And who would have thought, tesla will became the world’s most valuable car company,

and spaceX is the only private space company that could send rocket to the orbital and reuse the

rocket, those Youtube video of two Falcon9 booster slowly descending from the sky and land in

the center of the marker simultaneously gets me everytime. Not to mention his “new” venture

starlink has sent 1443 satellites to the space and people from all over the world could access the

high speed low latency internet. And for a cherry on the top, this guy is once the richest man in

the world, how amazing is that, it almost feel like it is capitalism at its finest.

Don’t give me wrong, I don’t just blindly idolize superheroes or real-life remarkable

people, the only reason that I admire them is that I found something I could learn from them.

Even when I was a kid, I’ve never argued with my friends about whether Michael Jordan or

Kobe Bryant is the greatest player of all time, I found that argument meaningless. I admire him

not because of all the ventures he did or he is once the richest person on earth, although those are

indeed impressive. The things that really grab my attention are his mental model to understand
the world and how he could achieve outstanding outcomes in such a variety of industries. Also,

why he makes those seemingly strange choices. Because the ultimate reason I like someone is

that I can learn from them, and level up my own game.

Thus, the first mystery I have to solve in his decision-making process. I have to

understand why Elon is doing what he’s doing, why did he start an internet company, then a

payment company, then a rocket company, a car company, an energy company.

People might say that most of his decision pays off big is because he is a creative genius

or he has substantially high IQ than most of the people. But if I stop there, I would have never

learned anything from the great people, Mozart is the greatest musician because he is talented,

Einstein is the most brilliant scientist because he is a genius, Michale Jordan is the most

influential basketball player because he was born for basketball. There is a quote from a famous

musician, “For 37 years I’ve practiced fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!”

Also, IQ is definitely a factor but far from the most important factor in my opinion. Chris Langan

is the World’s Smartest Man. That’s not an opinion, it’s a statement of fact. Mr. Langan’s IQ is

nearly 200. Oh, and he’s spent 20 years being a bouncer at a bar. I definitely cherry-picking here

and there, but the point is, talent and IQ are important but not an excuse to limit yourself. And

Elon’s secret weapon turns out to be surprisingly simple yet really practical to implement in real

life, reasoning from first principles.

The way Elon thinks is really odd and strange to most of people, there is a famous

example about fear of darkness:

Human child: “I’m scared of the dark because that’s when all the scary thing like ghost or

monster is going to get me and I won’t be able to see it coming.”

 Elon: “When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to

understand, dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength—400 to 700

nanometers. Then I thought, well it’s really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn’t

afraid of the dark anymore after that.”

See if you understand things from a different perspective, you would have a completely

different attitude towards different things. If you view things as exactly what they actually,

literally are, then you would have a whole new perspective to understand the world. A more

“extreme” but practical example would be Elon’s view of human beings as computers. The most

simplistic definition for a computer is an object that can store and process data, which to be

honest is what’s our brain all about, it processes our sense data and processes them. And the

reason why this mental framework works being that it reasons from the bottom, and forces us to

distinguish between our hardware and software, a distinction we often ignore or feel

uncomfortable thinking too deeply about.

In terms of computer, hardware is the combination of CPU, graphic card, Memorie

module, power supply, and so on. As for humans, hardware is just our physical brain, our body,

and all the talents, motion ability, and all other nature strength and weaknesses. This is what

most people can accept and understand.

Computer software is defined as “the programs and other operating information used by a

computer.” But when it comes to the “software” of people, we have entered a complete chaos

territory. The software of people is what they know and how they think--their belief systems,

mental models, thought patterns. To put most simply, life is just a stream of information input

collected by your senses by your hardware and then transferred by your brain and then processed

by the various software you installed in your brain, namely what you believe and how you think.
And ultimately, using all that data generate the key output, your decision. Your decision lead to

your behaviors, and your behavior have consequences that built up a story namely your life.

Of course, not all the hardware is the same, it’s just a pale of protein and fat tissue handed

to use when we are born. Each brain came with a unique combination of strengths and

weaknesses. But we don’t have control over that, at least not right now.

The real battle lies in the software which will determine what kind of person you are

going to become and what kind of life you are going to live. And the more I learned about Elon

and other people who seemingly have the superhuman ability and always seem to figure out the

smart moves to make, the more I’m convinced that it is the software that really makes the

majority of the difference.

When it comes to most of our software, the way we think, the way we make decisions,

and the way we live our lives, the things we believed, we mostly reasoning by analogy or

conventional wisdom or plain gut feelings. It is really odd that when we made important

decisions in our life, we hardly ever measure our reasoning process, we just eyeball it and never

bother to think about it again until something really bad happened and we have no choice but to

reflect upon our past decisions. Some people literary picked their major in several hours and

never think about it or evaluate the risk and reward of that choice afterward until a midlife crisis

or getting laid off from the job. And then they took a deep hard look at their life and wonder

what did they do with their life earlier.

But Elon’s approach is different, he builds each and every of his software component

himself from the ground up. And Elon calls it “reasoning from first principles.” Most people do

something because it’s always been done that way, or they don’t do something because no one’s

ever successfully achieved that, so it must not be worth doing, But it is not only a too simplistic
approach to questions but also lazy. Look at how people made these choices, “I chose to be a

mathematics because my mom and math teacher always think I’m good at math”, “Eric and I are

best friends because he’s cool and he has a lot of cool friends”, “I have to marry John because

I’m already 26 and it will make my mom happy”, “Every couple around us is having kids, I want

to have kids too, they are so cute”.

In Science, building something from the ground up means starting with what the evidence

shoals us to be true. A scientist doesn’t say, “Well, we know Earth is the center of the universe

because that’s the way it looks, that’s what makes sense which everybody think so, and it also fit

our religion so it must be true,” a real scientist says, “The part of the stars that I can see at night

appears to always move one direction of the sky from another, which would be the case if the

universe is spinning around us and we are the center, but it also could be the earth itself is

spinning in a complicated start system, so it appears everything is spinning around us. Both are

reasonable hypotheses, but until we have the tools and technology that can be used to prove or

disprove either hypothesis, it should be left as an open question for now.”

But in life, reasoning from the first principle is much more tricky and messy. Because

there isn’t that much “proven to be true” evidence for you to build from the ground up. We are

still trying to figure out “what happiness means?” “Can money buy happiness?” “What’s the

meaning of life?” “What I’m I going to do with my life?” such and such. In life, you are

completely on your own, or even worse, your reasoning is being affected by others. Oftentimes,

we grow up with a set of beliefs and what we know is “true”, oftentimes these are a combination

of what your parents believe to be true and your 5-year-old brain trying to make sense of the

world. You’ll believe a lot of stuff when you grew up, some are unharmful and don’t really

matter, like chimney climbing Senta Clouse, penny giving tooth fairy, or egg layer eastern
bunny. These would naturally fade while you grew up, and even if you still believe in those as an

adult, they won’t really have that much of a meaningful impact on your life. But there is a lot of

belief that you grew up with that will really haunt you later in life if you don’t take a close look

and examining them carefully. For example, you grew up with a belief that you are going to be

an excellent lawyer and then you’ll be respected by others. You work your way to the law school

ignore countless opportunities to pursue your passion for art and romantic relationships and

working twenty-four-seven to earn an internship position in a top-tier law firm and working like

horse for another ten years finally became a “successful lawyer”. But you don’t feel any

fulfillment even though you have achieved your “dream”, which you firmly believed in years,

Until a deep night, after you trace that “Lawyer Dream” way back to its origin, found out that the

only reason you want to became a lawyer is because that is your mom’s dream job and she kind

of forced that on you consciously or unconsciously. And you realize that you never really even

have the thought to question that whether you want to be a lawyer is an original thought, and

your own accumulated wisdom actually justifies that level of conviction you feel about your core

belief. In a case like this, it is a true tragedy that you regret that all the times you could have

spent on other meaningful activities rather than solely pursue this dream of yours. Here is a

simple calculation of how much time a career would take up a men’s life. For the majority of us,

a career will likely eat up somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 hours. In the twenty-first

century, a healthy normal human life runs at about 750,000 hours. After you subtract childhood

(around 175,000 hours) and the portion of your adult life you’ll spend sleeping, eating,

exercising, along with general life upkeep (around 325,000 hours), you’re left with 250,000

“somewhat meaningful adult hours.” So a typical career will take up somewhere between 20%

and 60% of your meaningful adult time—not some random choice you want passively made.
 The reason I make career path as an example is that it is the most obvious example in this

less obvious category of false belief. When people facing career obstacles and failure, they

usually would look back and realize that it is about the choice he made sometime during his early

life, and often times could find some traces of evidence of where does that false idea came from.

But for a lot of other more subtle and complex but utterly important choices, the choices which

has a tremendous impact on the rest of your life, like what kind of friends you choose to make, or

which country or city do you want to live in, or whether you want to get married or whom, or if

you ever want to have kids or how do you want to raise them, or what should be your life’s

ultimate value or goals. These are all hard questions that deserve days, weeks, months, even

years of hard thinking and constant experimenting. And when you facing obstacles in these

areas, people often won’t trace them back to their belief system, rather blame the world around

them. When they always have a conflict with their friends, they won’t trace back their thought

process about choosing a friend, they’ll just complain that all their friends are dicks; when they

live in a city that doesn’t fit them, they won’t trace back to the past when they unconsciously

being effect by the conventional wisdom that big cities always better, they’ll just complain that

“LA sucks, but all my friends are here so I guess I’m stuck here”; when they having an argument

with their spouse every night, wondering why is this woman/man make no sense, they wouldn’t

trace back to the past that his father told him always looking for a certain type of girl/boy

because they have certain qualities that your father unconsciously desire but has nothing to do

with you.

I’m not saying that all the conventional wisdom or your family belief system is false, I’m

just saying, it is seriously important to examine what you believe is true and reasoning from the

bottom to come up with your own idea and reason.

 And that’s just the first part, you examining all your reasoning process and belief system,

rebuild your own software from the ground up. Slowly and carefully replacing all your parts like

the Ship of Theseus. The second part is adjusting each component, belief, and conclusion as new

information and evidence came in.

For example, we used to think of Newton’s law as unquestionable physics law amone the

universe, and for hundreds of years, it certainly seems like everything checks out. Until Einstein

came up with the general relativity theory and prove that Newton’s law was actually can be only

used when we narrow the object size, and it stops working at extreme conditions, while general

relativity theory works no matter what. That’s a new piece of information for us to update our

model. But that’s not the end of the story, people found out that general relativity also fails to

apply on a tiny scale and there are a new set of laws needed to measure that circumstance.

And similar to the earlier example, life is much more complex and messier than science.

There aren’t any Newton’s law or General relativity theory to guide us through our life. What

we do have is all the random theory that parents, school, and conventional wisdom through at us.

”Study Art and you’ll end up poor”, “Debt is bad”,” You should be an engineer”,” Work hard is

the only way to wealth” Some make sense, some are completely random or outdated. I’m not

saying that you should never trust your patents’ opinion or conventional wisdom (a lot of times

they are right), what I’m trying to say is, if you choose to believe in something, you better know

where does that idea came from, what’s the fundamental reason behind that idea, and how much

you chose to trust it. If it comes from other people, you have to know the reason behind that idea

otherwise you are handing out your freedom of choice to other people. The point is, you have to

come up with your own “first principle”, namely what is absolutely true to yourself, and start

from there and think for yourself, examining all your thoughts carefully, and rebuild yourself like
The Ship of Theseus, piece by piece you put together a new version of you, repair and replace

certain parts along the way.

This is how Elon made his career choice, he said:”The thing that I care about is—when I

look into the future, I see the future as a series of branching probability streams. So you have to

ask, what are we doing to move down the good stream—the one that’s likely to make for a good

future? Because otherwise, you look ahead, and it’s like “Oh it’s dark.” If you’re projecting to

the future, and you’re saying “Wow, we’re gonna end up in some terrible situation,” that’s

depressing.”

And with that worry of the humanity in mind, he thought hard about the first principles

question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” and put together a list of five things:

“the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular, the permanent extension of life

beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.” As you can

clearly see, Paypal is about the internet, Tesla and the solar city are about sustainable energy,

SpaceX is about space exploration and made human being a multi-planetary species, also, tesla

made artificial intelligence self-driving chips and software.

In the meanwhile, the reality is not super friendly to him, he was a teenager born in South Afica

with no money, reputation, or any meaningful connections, and he has limited knowledge and

skills about those fields he was interested in. This is why he made the decision to move to

Canada first and then work his way to being able to legally stay in the US after college. And he

also needs to expand his knowledge tree so he went to a Ph.D. program at Stanford to study high

energy density capacitors, a technology that is the center of the answer of his first principle.
 And then some of the adjustments along the way, he quit the Ph.D. program at Stanford

because the internet is rapidly changing the world and he wants jumping in to make it better, and

he did.

After the PayPal sale, Musk is an extremely wealthy and relatively young 31 year old

tech billionaire, he has to figure out what does he want to do next. And most of the people would

be tricked by the conventional wisdom of “whatever you do, definitely don’t risk losing that money

you have” or some seemingly logical conclusion, that he should stick with the internet where he

is good at, and it is too late to do something revolutionary in a different field. But Musk went

back to the first principles, he still needs to do the most impactful thing to make the human the

multi-planetary specious in order to survive any catastrophic event that may happen on earth.

And Conventional wisdom said that he has no formal education in rocket science and he

has no clue how to build a rocket, let alone send it to mars. But his first principle thinking told

him that formal education is just a structured way to download information to your brain and it

might be a good way to become an expert but definitely not the only way. So he begins to read

all about rocket science and meeting experts and ask all kinds of questions to gain knowledge

rapidly about the rocket field.

And Conventional wisdom said that no one has ever successfully pull it off to build a

successful rocket with a private company, those projects are extremely expensive and time

consuming that only nations can do that. And only handful of the nation on planet earth can send

people to space, and mars? You must be joking. But Elon started crunching numbers to do the

math himself. Here’s how he justifies his decision:” Historically, all rockets have been

expensive, so therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive. But actually, that’s not true.

If you say, what is a rocket made of? It’s made of aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. And
you can break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these components? And if you

have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand so that the cost of rearranging the

atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be? And I was like, wow, okay, it’s really

small—it’s like 2% of what a rocket costs. So clearly it would be in how the atoms are arranged

—so you’ve got to figure out how can we get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently.

And so I had a series of meetings on Saturdays with people, some of whom were still working at

the big aerospace companies, just to try to figure out if there’s some catch here that I’m not

appreciating. And I couldn’t figure it out. There doesn’t seem to be any catch. So I started

SpaceX.”

The conventional wisdom and basically everyone said that’s a dumb idea, but his own

software, reasoning from the first principle. The software he build from the ground up and tested

himself alone the life, so he chose to trust his software and invest all his money into his venture.

Now, I am a small-minded product designer, I don’t think I care that much about the

future of humanity as Elon does, and my career choice is also much more simple and small-

minded. I like tinkering and making stuff, and when I went shopping, I always thought:”God, I

wish they could design that in this way, that would be so much better ”, after a while, it seems a

good idea just to do it myself rather than wait other people to came up with the exact product that

fits my needs and aesthetic preference. Also, making stuff and gets my hands dirty makes me

happy, and who doesn’t want happiness in their life?

So how does first principle thinking can help me with my design choice?

Often times, we are amazed by other people’s brilliant ideas, either think highly of other

people or disappointed in why it isn’t us who came up with that brilliant idea. I think the
fundamental reason lies behind how we think, and there are different patterns in terms of how we

think.

I found a neat analogy a few years ago while browsing a random blog, it catogrized

people by the “Cook” and the ”Cheif”.

The way cook and chief cook is similar on the surface but actually has a huge difference.

When a cook needs to cook dishes, he just looks at the dishes that are already being made in the

past by himself or other cooks, and then essentially copy it and maybe add a little bit of personal

tweak here and there, a little more sauce harem and less lemon juice there. Basically, follow an

already written recipe.

But when the chief needs to cook a meal, his thought process is way more complicated.

The cook plays around with all the raw ingredient and using his understanding about theses raw

ingredients and try to make them meets his goal. By keep experimenting and solving this puzzle,

the chief eventually came up with an original dish. And it might similar to cook’s dish or

completely different.

In short, the chef reasoning from the first principle and the cook reasoning from analogy.

Being a chef requires tons of time and energy, which is reasonable because you are trying

to come up with something original, all the paths could be a potential solution, but you have to

walk through all the obstacles to get the destiny. It requires constant try and error just to prove or

disapprove a simple hypothesis, but the potential payoff is huge. Being a cook is far more

relaxing and much more straightforward, without all that time scratching your head just to come

up with a new combination in a completely new way. However, in most situations, being a chief

is honestly a terrible waste of time, and it also came with a really high opportunity cost because

all the time you spent on reinvent the wheel could have been used in other valuable activities.
And time is an extremely valuable unrenewable resource. But that’s just the case for normal

daily decisions, being a designer is a completely different thing. We need to constantly push

ourselves to be the chef rather than the cook.

However, I feel like a lot of the time, designers are being a “Cook” when they really

should be a “Chief”. After they got a client’s offer or topic to work with, they simply look at how

other designer solve the similar problem, and add some personal tweak into it and call it a better

version of that product or even an original idea. And when people ask a designer why they made

certain design decisions, the designer would say a lot of background stories, interesting details

found during research, inspirations got from the prototyping process, so on and so forth, but if

people really grilled a designer on his reasons and on the reasoning beneath them, they end up in

a confusing place. Because lots of these decisions doesn’t have concrete reasoning behind it,

those decisions simply just pops in their head because they saw other designer designed similar

product in the past.

For someone who likes to think, “To be, or not to be, that is the question”.

And for designers, “To create or to copy, it is a question ”.

It’s not that we need to be the chief all the time, but I think it’s really beneficial for

designer to have a deep understanding of this two concepts, and adjusting their role accordingly.

A lot of time being a designer indeed need to be a cook, a product that are being refurnished

being called a “new design” probably does worth to spent all that time and energy to be a chef

type designer. And a lot of times, a chef type designer could also came up with similar product as

a cook type designer, the outcome may be similar at first glance, but the process determined how

much you learn from the design process and how consistent your design work will be in the

future.
 And being a cook type designer from time to time is by no means a bad thing, because by

reasoning from analogy, you can understand a new concept in a extremely small amount of time,

because you are comparing a new domain with your familiar doman, which is far more energy

and time efficient than always start from the ground zero and reinventing the wheel. As a matter

of fact, being about to reasoning from analogy is one of the most important reason that children

can learn new knowledge so fast, because the more new model they learn, the more new model

they can compare and analogy with, and create a chain reaction of fast learning.

Which is why

Another reason why first principle thinking is good for the design process is design is a

messy process. It never works at the first time, you have to constantly revisit the first version, or

third, or twenty-first version to see which aspect you did right here and not so great there. And at

that point all the past research you made, all the feedbacks your different generations of

prototype gets, all the good and bad ideas from the past get mixed together. And it’s really hard

to keep a straight head and knowing what is what, let alone making an excellent design choice.

It is not humanly possible to keep track of all the ideas and pros and cons of each of them,

oftentimes you have to keep reevaluate everything. First principle thinking is a killer tool for you
in this situation because all the reasons and ideas came from the first principle reasoning method

has a clear line of ratiocination process and reasoning road map.

I once hear a product designer said design is dancing with chains, you are always trying

to make you best move while fighting all the constrains. I found that analogy realistic but not so

romantic. The idea of wearing a chain makes me feel like a prisoner instead of a creator, so

instead a came up with another analogy.

I view the design process as preparing a symphony performance, and you are the

conductor, at first you have to get to know each of your musicians, their strengths, weaknesses,

and where they shine. Just like a designer have to know all kinds of materials and their strength

and weaknesses. A conductor also has to know how to make all kinds of different musical

instruments work together. Just like designers have to make all kinds of components made of

different materials and shapes to work together as one piece. And just like contact a symphony,

the real work is often messy, you have to practice certain parts, again and again, that piano player

and drum player just can’t play on the same rhythm. That’s the designer’s equivalent of making

prototypes and test them, and make more prototypes and make more tests. And finally, you’ll be

able to conduct your symphony with ease because you know all your musicians from the bottom

up. Just like a designer maneuver all the design elements, make them work together and came up

with a unified product, because he came up all the design decision by reasoning from the first

principle.

See, this is the beauty of reasoning from analogy, you can inject different emotions into a

completely irrelevant concept. And only made you understand things better but also utlizing your

emotion to full harvest it’s full poteintial.

 As alone as we bear in mind that no analogy is 100% effective. We often cut a lot of

corners and neglect a lot of details while using analogy. Which is why reasoning by analogy is a

nice complementary tool with reasoning from first principle.

Summary

First principle thinking is a powerful yet high energy consumption tool to help people

anylize and understand a difficult challenge. It boils down into the most fundamental truth of a

problem and buid your tower of reason from there. And those reason can form a robust

hypothesis or prototype for you to test, and you can update and improve that prototype against

first principles whenever a valuable new insight came in. keeping your work steadly grounded in

reality.

Analogy can be a really energy efficient complementary tool in order to fast track the

design process, like Pablo Picasso said “Good artists copy, great artists steal” (when I fact check

this, I can’t find any actual proof that Picasso said this, but it’s a inspiring quote nonetheless: ))

Like everything in life, balance is key, life is nothing more than a resource allocation

game. Too much first principle thinking can make you paralize from making any decision, while

too many analogy can make your drift away from the fundamental truth of the problem.

TO THE MOON!