Solve New Problems With First Principles Thinking

Step Two: Question Each Assumption

Once you’ve named your assumptions, interrogate them. Ask: “Is this actually true? Or am I just repeating something I’ve heard?”

Here’s the key: the answer should come from evidence, not intuition. Better questions create better lives—so ask yourself: “What data would prove this assumption right or wrong? What would I need to observe to know if this is true?”

You’re facing a problem you’ve never encountered before. No one in your organization has solved this exact thing. Google doesn’t have a clear answer. There’s no playbook, no framework, no precedent.

Most people panic. They look for someone who has solved something similar. They try to apply old solutions to new problems. They guess. They waffle. They call a meeting and hope someone smarter has the answer.

But there’s another way. It’s called first principles thinking. And once you learn it, you realize that being without precedent doesn’t mean you’re stuck. It means you’re liberated.

Let me show you how.

What First Principles Thinking Actually Means

First principles thinking isn’t mystical or complicated. It’s radical common sense. It’s asking: “What do I actually know to be true about this problem, separate from what I’ve been told to believe?”

Most thinking is done by analogy. We see a new problem and think, “Oh, this is like X, so I should do Y.” It’s fast. It’s efficient. It usually works. But when you’re facing a genuinely novel problem, analogy breaks down.

First principles thinking goes deeper. It says: “Forget what I’ve done before. Forget what industry convention says. What are the irreducible facts? What can I know for certain?”

Let me give you an example from history. For centuries, people built ships a certain way. It was tradition. It was “how ships were made.” Everyone believed that wooden hulls were the only way. Until someone stopped and asked: “What is the actual requirement? A vessel that floats and carries cargo. Do the materials have to be wood?” No. They could be iron. And iron ships were better.

That person cut through the assumptions and found the ground truth. Same principle applies to your problem. You need to dig past the “that’s how it’s done” and find what’s actually true.

Step One: Identify Your Assumptions

You’re not stuck—you’re just repeating a pattern. And the pattern usually starts with hidden assumptions.

The first step is to drag these assumptions into the light. Ask yourself: “What am I taking for granted about this problem?”

Let’s say you’re struggling with employee retention. Your assumption might be: “People leave because they get bored” or “People leave because the salary is too low” or “People leave because they want remote work.” All of these might be true. But you haven’t tested them. You’ve just inherited these assumptions from industry chatter.

Write down every assumption you’re making about your problem. Don’t filter them. Don’t judge them. Just list what you’re taking for granted.

This is harder than it sounds. Because assumptions are invisible. They’re the water you’re swimming in. You don’t notice them until you step back.

Step Two: Question Each Assumption

Once you’ve named your assumptions, interrogate them. Ask: “Is this actually true? Or am I just repeating something I’ve heard?”

Here’s the key: the answer should come from evidence, not intuition. Better questions create better lives—so ask yourself: “What data would prove this assumption right or wrong? What would I need to observe to know if this is true?”

Going back to the employee retention example: your assumption is “people leave because salary is too low.” But have you actually asked the people who left why they left? Or are you guessing based on what you read in a Forbes article?

If you actually ask the five employees who quit last year, you might discover something different. Maybe they left because their manager didn’t care about their development. Maybe they left because the work felt meaningless. Maybe they left because they had a two-hour commute. Salary might not even be in the top three.

Reality almost always contradicts our inherited assumptions. But you have to look for it.

Step Three: Break the Problem Into Irreducible Elements

Once you’ve stripped away false assumptions, you’re left with the actual problem. Now break it down into the smallest possible components—the building blocks that can’t be reduced further.

Let’s say you’re building a new software product, and you’ve never done this before. The problem feels huge and intractable. But if you break it into irreducible elements, you get:

• What problem does this solve for the user?
• Who is the user?
• What would they pay for a solution?
• How will they find out about it?
• How will they use it?
• What could go wrong?
• How will we know it’s working?

Now you have manageable pieces instead of an overwhelming whole. Focus determines direction—and when you focus on the irreducible elements, the problem suddenly becomes solvable.

Step Four: Reconstruct From Ground Truth

This is where the real work happens. You’re going to rebuild your approach from the ground up, using only the things you know to be true.

For each irreducible element, ask: “Given what I actually know about this, what would the ideal solution be? Not the practical solution. Not the solution that fits the budget or the timeline. The ideal solution based on truth.”

You’re probably going to find that your ideal solution doesn’t fit the existing constraints. Good. Constraints come later. Right now, you’re thinking. You’re building from first principles. You’re asking: “What would actually work?”

I’ll give you a personal example. Years ago, I was designing a sales training program. The industry standard was to teach people a specific framework, give them scripts, and hope they’d use them. But I stopped and asked: “What does someone actually need to make a sale? Do they need scripts? Or do they need to understand why people buy, and then adapt to each person?”

Ground truth: people respond to genuine connection and outcome focus, not canned scripts. So I rebuilt my entire program around that. Less memorization. More psychology. More flexibility. It worked better because it was built on what’s actually true about human behavior, not on “that’s how sales training has always been done.”

Step Five: Test Against Reality

The final step is the most important: reality check. If it’s not working, change it.

You’ve built a solution from first principles. But principles don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in the real world, with real friction, real people, real constraints. So you test. Quickly. With the smallest viable version.

And here’s the critical part: you’re not testing to prove yourself right. You’re testing to find out what’s actually true. You’re looking for friction. You’re looking for what doesn’t work. Because every failure teaches you something about reality.

Most people avoid this step. They prefer to stay in the theoretical world where their solution is perfect. But the people who solve genuinely novel problems are the ones who test ruthlessly and learn fast.

Why This Works For Problems You’ve Never Seen Before

Here’s why first principles thinking is so powerful when you’re in uncharted territory: it doesn’t rely on precedent. It relies on reason.

When you’re doing something for the first time, precedent doesn’t exist. So you can’t copy what everyone else does. You have to think. You have to reason your way through it.

The entrepreneurs who built Tesla didn’t have a playbook for making electric cars. They thought from first principles. “What would a car need to be to compete with gas cars?” Lower cost per mile. Better performance. Better experience. And they built backward from there.

The people who figured out remote work in 2020 didn’t have a manual. They thought from first principles. “What do people actually need to do their best work? Not an office. Collaboration. Clarity. Trust. Flexibility.” And they built from there.

And here’s the beautiful part: once you’ve done this once, you’ve proven to yourself that you can solve novel problems. You don’t need permission. You don’t need to wait for someone else to figure it out. You have a thinking process. You have a method. And methods scale.

The Challenge: Use First Principles This Week

You have a problem right now. Something you’re not sure how to solve. Something where the obvious path isn’t working.

Instead of looking for someone who’s solved it before, try this: sit down for an hour and work through these questions:

1. What am I assuming about this problem? (List everything.)
2. Which of these assumptions have I actually tested? (Be honest.)
3. If I stripped away all convention and just asked, “What is actually true here?” what would the answer be?
4. What are the irreducible elements? The smallest pieces this problem can be broken into?
5. Based on ground truth, what would an ideal solution look like?
6. What’s the smallest way I could test this solution?

This process won’t give you the answer. But it will give you a way to think your way to the answer. And that’s far more valuable. Because the answer changes. The way of thinking lasts forever.

You’re not stuck. You’re just not thinking from first principles yet. Change that, and you change everything.