Stop borrowing other people’s answers

Most people, when they face a problem, do not actually solve it. They look around, find how someone else solved something similar, and copy the shape of that solution. It works often enough that the habit gets reinforced. But it also means your decisions are being made by people who faced different constraints, had different goals, and were operating in a different time.

First principles thinking is the antidote. It is the practice of stripping a problem down to its foundational truths and rebuilding your answer from there, rather than from precedent.

Elon Musk talks about it often. So does Jeff Bezos, in his own language. But you don’t need to be building rockets or reshaping retail to benefit from it. You need to be someone who actually wants to think clearly about their business, and is willing to do the uncomfortable work of questioning what they assume they already know.

What it actually means

The term comes from Aristotle, who described first principles as the basic propositions that cannot be deduced from anything else. In practical terms, it means asking: what do I know to be true here, independent of convention or assumption?

Think about pricing. Most founders price their services by looking at what competitors charge and landing somewhere nearby. That is analogous thinking. It is fast, it feels safe, and it leaves value on the table constantly. A first principles approach asks different questions: What does it actually cost me to deliver this? What outcome does it produce for the client? What would someone pay for that outcome if they couldn’t compare it to anything else? The answers lead you somewhere original.

That is the key distinction. Analogous thinking asks: what has been done? First principles thinking asks: what is true?

Why entrepreneurs need it more than anyone

Entrepreneurs live in a strange tension. On one hand, they are trying to do something new. On the other hand, they are surrounded by advice, frameworks, playbooks, and case studies that all tell them how it has been done before. Most of that advice is genuinely useful. But it becomes a liability when it replaces thinking instead of informing it.

The problem is that conventional wisdom about business is almost always built on the constraints of the people who came before you. When those constraints no longer apply, the conventional wisdom becomes actively misleading.

A law firm in 1995 needed physical offices because clients expected them and file management required them. A legal services company in 2025 does not. But if the founders of that 2025 company think primarily by analogy, they will rent offices anyway, because that is what law firms do. First principles thinking lets you see that the office was always just a solution to underlying constraints, not a feature of the thing itself.

This matters most at the moments of highest leverage: pricing, hiring strategy, how you structure your offer, how you acquire clients, what you build next. These are the decisions that compound. Getting them right because you thought clearly, rather than borrowed someone else’s answer, is one of the few real advantages you can build that is hard to replicate.

How to actually do it

The method is simple in structure and genuinely difficult in practice. Start with the question or problem you are trying to solve. Then ask yourself: what are the things I believe to be true about this situation? Write them down. Then, for each one, ask: is this actually true, or is it just what I have always assumed?

What you’re looking for is the layer where assumption runs out and fact begins. Facts are things you could verify independently. Assumptions are things you believe because they’ve always been done that way, or because someone told you, or because you haven’t questioned them yet.

Once you have isolated the actual facts, you build back up from there. You ask: given only what is true, what would the right answer look like if I were designing it from scratch?

This process almost always surfaces at least one assumption you were treating as a constraint that turns out to be optional. That is where your opportunity is.

“The goal is not to be contrarian. The goal is to be accurate. First principles thinking will sometimes lead you to the same conclusion everyone else reached. That’s fine. What matters is that you got there by reasoning, not reflex.”

A practical example

Say you’re trying to decide whether to hire a salesperson. The conventional wisdom is: once you have product-market fit, hire sales. You’ve heard it a hundred times.

First principles says: stop. What is actually true here? A salesperson produces value when the sales motion is understood, when the product solves a defined problem for a defined customer, and when the bottleneck to growth is outreach volume rather than message or fit. Is that your situation? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe the real bottleneck is that your offer isn’t sharp enough and adding a salesperson will just scale the confusion faster.

The point is not that hiring a salesperson is wrong. The point is that you should arrive at that decision through your own analysis of your own situation, not because someone with a podcast told you that’s what you do at this stage.

The resistance you will feel

First principles thinking is slow at first. It feels inefficient when you could just look at what similar businesses do and move on. And there is a real cost to it: it forces you to sit with uncertainty longer than is comfortable, and it sometimes leads you to conclusions that are hard to defend to people who are thinking by analogy.

It also requires genuine intellectual honesty. You will sometimes discover that the thing you’ve been doing is built on an assumption that doesn’t hold. That is an uncomfortable moment. Most people, when they reach it, find a reason to dismiss the finding rather than update their behaviour. The entrepreneurs who benefit from this kind of thinking are the ones who resist that reflex.

But with practice, it gets faster. You start to recognise assumptions more quickly. You develop an instinct for the questions that are worth decomposing and the ones that don’t need it. And you build a track record of decisions that were made on clear reasoning, which compounds in ways that borrowed answers never do.

Where to start

Pick one thing in your business that you haven’t questioned in a while. Your pricing model. Your client acquisition process. How you structure your team. Your go-to-market approach. Something that you do the way you do it largely because that’s how it’s done.

Ask: if I were designing this from scratch, knowing only what is actually true about my customers, my costs, and my capabilities, would I arrive at the same answer?

If the honest answer is no, you have found your leverage point. That’s where first principles thinking earns its keep.