The Power of First Principles

Fancy an off-world adventure? Virgin Galactic tickets went on sale to the public on February 16 — so if you’ve got $450K spare you might be able to snap up a seat on one of its suborbital space flights.

It’s not the only company continuing to open up new cosmic frontiers either: Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced it is partnering with Shift4’s Jared Isaacman to launch a trio of commercial space flights designed to help advance human space exploration and scientific understanding. Those are set to begin as early as November of this year.

Great innovators are propelling us further into space, but they’re also furnishing us with new tech here on earth – from self-driving cars to decentralized data storage. But innovation is not always a smooth process and often hits unexpected obstacles. So, is there a reliable way we can all boost our creativity and ingenuity? It seems there might be. A great deal of innovation is driven by the adoption of an analytical approach to problem solving — especially through the use of first principles thinking. Understanding how this works can help people to become successful entrepreneurs and startup founders. Of course, we can’t all be Elon Musk, but we can use the same ideation strategy he used to develop his business.

Graphene’s Founder & Managing Partner Nabil Borhanu has an informative piece on​​ this topic. In short, he says, first principles are the bedrock of our ideas. They are the truths we build on. So, if we can break down our ideas into their fundamental elements, we can reconstruct them in a more organized and robust way. You can also check the video below to hear how Elon Musk talks about first principles.