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This is a long article from Wait but Why, and the last of a 4-post series on Elon Musk and his endeavours. This post is from 2015, but I would consider it an evergreen piece of content for the concept it treats: reasoning from first principle, a life-changing approach to life that the author argues is what makes Elon Musk (and most great scientists and inventors) stand out from the crowd.
Thinking from first principles is like being a chef: putting together unexplored combinations of raw ingredients, in a well-thought manner, in order to create a new, delicious dish. In order to come up with new food combinations that work well together, great chefs start from the very essence of each raw material, trying to figure out which ones can create a tasty mix of delicate flavour.
Cooks, on the other hand, follow the recipes created by chefs in order to replicate something invented by someone else. They follow the cookbook and comply with the rules of the game, not digging deep into the reason those ingredients go well together. Cooks reason from analogy.
Although we're naturally prone to believe that being a "chef" is better than being a "cook", this is not the right way to approach this topic. They are just 2 different manners of facing a similar problem. However, one can certainly argue that it's being a chef that can bring change and innovation in society.
Tim Urban, author of the article, shows the 3 epiphanies that a human being has to go through in order to start thinking from first principles, which requires a lot more cognitive effort compared to reasoning from analogy.
The first epiphany is about shattering a protective shell of arrogance to lay bare a starting point of humility. The second epiphany is about confidence—the confidence to emerge from that humility through a pathway built on first principles instead of by analogy. It’s a confidence that says, “I may not know much, but no one else does either, so I might as well be the most knowledgeable person on Earth.” So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the three key objectives—to be humbler about what we know, more confident about what’s possible, and less afraid of things that don’t matter.
Should we actually eat clean? This is an ongoing debate in the health and fitness community, particularly due to the fact that "clean" eating is such a vast and blurred topic. In this video, Jeff Nippard puts forward a well-proven hypotheses: striving to eat only what the general consensus considers "clean" food (i.e. not calorie-dense, with a balanced division of macronutrients, and a solid amount of micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals) may not be the best solution to establishing a long-term diet that aims at being maintained for life. That's especially because clean food is normally boring and does not taste good.
This argument has its foundations on the basic principle behind maintaining a healthy body weight and muscle mass: being aware of the amount of calories eaten on a weekly and daily basis. Our bodies do not recognize clean food; it first and foremost cares about calories and macro nutrients. And secondarily about micro nutrients.
So, having a balance diet in which clean, high-in-micro nutrient foods and less "healthy" food are combined may be a more sustainable approach in order to keep the habit going over the long-run.
This video is a Deep Dive by Ali Abdaal in conversation with productivity expert Tiago Forte. Tiago Forte is widely known in the tech and productivity communities for the invention of the concept of having a second brain, stored in our computers using some note-taking app or a simple google sheet.
The idea of a second brain comes from the fact that we live in a world in which we consume and get exposed to a ton of information, which most of the times we cannot remember in the situations we need it. A second brain comes handy when it comes to recalling information and knowledge we know we have been exposed to at some point but cannot seem to remember in the exact moment we need it.
This long conversation treats this topic at large, defines the best apps of the moment that can really help us manage our second brain most effectively and efficiently, and reminds us that just hoarding on knowledge is not enough to process it properly and make it our own; creating content out of that second brain is an integral and fundamental part in the building of the second brain itself.
What's more, the two productivity enthusiasts discuss meditation, productivity, psychedelics, slow burns vs. heavy lifts, and Forte's course on building a second brain, which is open for enrollment. Here is the **link to a Notion page** that summarizes all of the content of the conversation that you can find in the video description.
“I don’t know what a business is. All a company is is a bunch of people together to create a product or service. There’s no such thing as a business, just pursuit of a goal—a group of people pursuing a goal.”
ELON MUSK
“Life has to be more than about solving problems. There have to be things that inspire you—that make you proud to be a member of humanity. The Apollo program is certainly an example of that. Only a handful of people went to the moon—and yet, actually we all went to the moon. We went with them vicariously. We shared in that adventure. I don’t think anyone would say that that was a bad idea, that that wasn’t great. We need more of those things—at least we need some of those things.”
ELON MUSK