I'm going to give you the closest thing to a superpower that anyone can give you.

I'm going to give you the closest thing to a superpower that anyone can give you. It's not a theory, it's not a concept, it's literally a way of thinking. It was birthed originally by Aristotle, but it has recently been made popular again by Elon Musk. And regardless of what you think of him, I have observed this way of thinking again and again and again and again in the most extraordinary minds of our generation. It's called first principles thinking. And to explain what first principles thinking is, I'm first going to compare it to what is the basic way of thinking and we're all probably using this right now, it's called analogy thinking. Analogy thinking is following someone else's plan, assuming what everyone else assumes is true, basically basing your truth on what has been done before. First principles thinking requires you to break down all of those assumptions by asking what is true over and over and over again, and then reconstructing into the reality that you want. I'm going to give you two examples to break it down really clearly. Let's use SpaceX as an example, Elon Musk. He wants to build SpaceX, everyone is telling him rockets are really expensive, other people have tried to do this, rockets are too expensive. So analogy thinking is rockets are too expensive, he needs to somehow come up with the money to buy the rockets. First principles thinking is he was like, well what needs to be true? It isn't that he necessarily needs to buy the rockets. Elon Musk went on to find out that if he bought all the raw material to build his own rocket, the cost was only 2% of what buying a full-blown rocket was. So he bought all the raw materials to make a rocket and hired a team to build the rocket for him. That is first principles thinking. Another example that's a little bit deeper, easy to understand, weight loss. Let's say the goal is to lose weight. Okay, analogy thinking is basing your strategy on what other people are doing. Somebody else is dairy-free, so I'm going to try dairy-free, that's all analogy thinking. First principles thinking is, well, what actually needs to be true to achieve fat loss? Calorie deficit over time, muscle requires a certain amount of protein and some type of resistance training. And then in order to do this, it needs to be done over time, so it needs to be easy to follow, needs to be low stress. Um, that's just a truth, you can't argue with that, right? That's the deconstruction. Second step is the reconstruction. So, reconstruction asks you to be an inventor of the reality that you're wanting to create. How do I make hitting my protein automatic? And because I want to do this for as long as possible, how do I reduce my decision fatigue? Reconstruction is where the magic happens. So to do this for yourself, there are three steps. Number one is identify where there is analogy thinking. So, where am I comparing to others? And then step into first principles thinking. What must be true for this to work? Given those truths, what is the simplest truth I can sustain?