"Use first-principles thinking as a universal method Musk described first-principles reasoning not as a physics-only tool but as something 'that can be applied to really any walk of life.' The process: 'boil something down to the most fundamental principles — the things that we are most confident are true at a foundational level — and that sets your axiomatic base, and then you reason up from there and cross-check your conclusion against those axiomatic truths.' Applied to any costly or seemingly intractable problem, this method cuts through inherited assumptions and reveals whether the difficulty is real or merely habitual. Source: Elon Musk, Lex Fridman Podcast, Elon Musk"