First Principles Thinking

In this episode you'll learn how and why you should think from a first principles perspective.  This is a major element of critical thinking and is a skill that you can develop in yourself that will create clarity in your life.  Learning to think for yourself sets you free and prevents you from becoming someone else's tool. First principles reasoning is one of the most effective and  powerful strategies you can use to break complicated problems down to their most basic elements.  From this, you can then develop a reasoned approach to determining solutions.  Basically, what you're doing with this technique is reverse engineering a problem in order to see what it's made of.  You're breaking it down into its most basic components.  One of the first references to this kind of thinking come to us from the great ancient western philosopher, Aristotle.  Aristotle's view was this:  Start with beliefs that are known to you, and then work backwards to find the underlying truths that those beliefs are built upon.