“Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.”—Stephen Covey
ELON MUSK
Creative challenges are complicated to solve. This makes the need for a sound plan to attack these challenges even more pressing. This is where the idea of mental systems step in.
Mental systems serve as scaffolding for your thoughts. They help you break down complex challenges into simpler ones, allowing your mind to work through them rather than drowning in anxiety. Think of them as ways to protect yourself from mental noise to make the best decisions possible with limited knowledge. This concept helped Elon Musk. Elon went from being a self-taught scientist to founding arguably the most important and profitable companies of our era—PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink.
In 2002, Elon Musk had the ambitious idea to send humanity’s first manned-rocket to Mars. The first thing he needed for this mission was a rocket suitable for spaceflight. He approached several rocket manufacturing companies and, to his dismay, found that it was expensive to build them. The average cost was over $60 million. This was when he took this problem and applied his go-to mental system, first principle thinking.
In an interview, he revealed how he applied this mental system to get around the high prices of purchasing a pre-made space rocket. He said, “I tend to approach things from a physics framework. Physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So, I said, okay, let’s look at the first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2% of the typical price.” The other 98% of the costs came from the inability to reuse the rocket after it’s launched. The multi-million dollar rocket is left floating in space.
In another interview, he compared it to commercial airlines. “If aircraft were not reusable and you needed a new one for every flight, then each ticket would cost millions of dollars, at least. One way. And you’d need two for a two-way trip. And almost no one would be able to afford to fly.”
This led to a clear answer to the creative challenge. Rather than purchasing pre-made rockets at astronomical rates, Elon decided to form a company, SpaceX. They acquired the materials he needed at affordable prices and started building reusable rockets. SpaceX eventually successfully designed them, bringing space launches down to a tiny fraction of the industry’s typical costs. As a result of Elon’s first principles thinking, we can witness commercial space travel today.
FIRST PRINCIPLE THINKING
The Greek philosopher Aristotle described first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” First principle thinking is a way to take a step back and look at things from a fresh perspective. It’s approaching creative problems by breaking them down into their most basic and fundamental parts. Then, you can evaluate the pieces to find alternative solutions or ways to reach your goal.
As the famous military strategist John Boyd explained, think about any three objects, such as a sailboat, a tank, and a tricycle. Break them down into parts, and then see if you can combine components from each to create something new. You can make a snowmobile, for instance, if you combine parts in one particular order. Another arrangement may give you an armored boat, and so on. This is how first principles thinking works—first deconstruct, then reconstruct. Once you have a solid foundation of baseline knowledge, you can improve each element before reassembling it.