First Principles Thinking

Think differently. Innovate fearlessly. Disrupt the status quo.

This course provides a comprehensive overview of First Principles Thinking, an analytical approach focused on understanding problems at their most fundamental level.

The course covers the foundations of First Principles Thinking, including techniques for breaking down complexity, challenging assumptions, and identifying core truths. As a learner, you will develop skills for applying First Principles across diverse contexts, following masters like Tesla, Darwin, Ford, and Freud.

The course outlines a step-by-step process for employing First Principles: identifying the problem, questioning assumptions, decomposing elements, discerning core principles, then reasoning upward to reconstruct solutions. As a learner, you are guided on overcoming biases and developing cognitive flexibility and persistence. Creative Problem-Solving techniques, Systems Thinking, probabilistic reasoning, risk analysis, and other analytical tools are introduced to enhance First Principles skills.

This course provides extensive opportunities to practice first principles thinking across a wide variety of problems. Through these engaging hands-on activities, you will gradually develop an intuition for this style of reasoning. The course also guides you to reflect on each exercise, analyzing how you identified core principles and assumptions. This meta-cognitive process strengthens your analytical skills over time.

With consistent application across diverse situations, you will progressively gain expertise in quickly stripping away assumptions and conventional thinking to reveal penetrating insights to any problem or situation. The structured practice in this course aims to make First Principles analysis feel like second nature.

Course Details