Patrick Campbell: recommendation

Transcript context

…Next topic. First principles thinking. As a renaissance man of a brain, I feel like you've spent a lot of time thinking about from first principles and in our conversations you always have really interesting approaches to things. What have you learned about actually implementing first principle thinking, which people are always talking about. How do I [inaudible 00:35:00] first principle? Yeah, people always talk about it. And there are no good courses that I have found on first principles thinking. There are good blog posts, but the good blog posts kind of explain what it is, and then that's it. It's like, "This is what it is, and here's an example. " And most of them quote Elon Musk about rockets and breaking down the different parts. So what I kind of found is there's the five whys, which I think someone's talked before or at least I've read it in the newsletter before, which is just you keep asking why. Kind of, "Well, this is this way." "Well, why is that?" "Well, this is this way." "Why is that?" I found the model that people who aren't great at first principal thinking or aren't great at talking about it that kind of helps them unlock is this thing called problem, cause, solution. So I learned this in debate in college and high school, and it basically is you have a problem that you're trying to solve. Well, you can't actually solve a problem. So if we talk about world hunger, you can't just solve world hunger because it's kind of the symptom, it's this problem that exists. Well then I want to break down what are all the causes of world hunger? And it's a little more brainstormy when you have these conversations with folks, especially again when they struggle with this. And all of a sudden I could list out all the causes, irrigation crisis, aid not getting to where it needs to be, famines, drought, et cetera. And then what I can do is I can rank those causes in terms of magnitude. So if we're trying to solve world hunger, and for some reason we discovered irrigation was the biggest problem, if we solved irrigation, everything would be great, well then I'm going to align my solutions to all of those different causes. And you get this nice alignment between, well, I can solve a cause, and if I solve the cause that's big enough and proper enough, I'm going to eventually solve the actual problem or mitigate the problem, I should say. So that's the framework that I found really, really useful. And also, it's great for using for presentations, it's great for a mission, it's great for all of these different things because it's a little bit more actionable than just the five whys, which is more of a way to have a conversation. So the way you operationalize this, say problem, cause, solution. You're saying on strategy templates, you write out, "Here's the problem we're trying to solve, here's the source of the issue, and then here's how we're approaching it." Can you talk a bit more about how you implement this at your company and the people you work with?…

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