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A framework for First Principles Thinking

Improve your thinking, become smarter and pioneer the future

Neil Kakkar
10 min readFeb 10, 2019

Read the original post on neilkakkar.com

“Elon Musk used first principles thinking to design a cheap rocket from scratch, re-use it by landing it back on Earth, and on the side — also revolutionised the electric car industry.”

That was the first time I read about First Principles and it made me cry. Cry at my incompetence. But with an inkling of joy — I’d found another missing piece of the puzzle.

That was over a year ago. I was a kid with a messed up thinking process — I hadn’t thought about thinking. It just happened. Most of the time, it still just happens. I don’t think about how I’m thinking. It’s hard.

However, things had moved from the unknown unknown to the known unknown. I had a name for the process — reasoning by analogy versus reasoning by first principles.

Thus began my journey to put this missing piece back in the puzzle.

What puzzle though? The puzzle to becoming great. The puzzle to thinking well. Not to launch my own rockets, or to make my own lemonade when life gives me lemons, but to figure out how to make electricity with the same lemons.

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Neil Kakkar
Neil Kakkar

Written by Neil Kakkar

I write about Code and Life philosophies. Sometimes both. | https://neilkakkar.com | Engineer @PostHog | Write (Code). Create. Recurse.

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