How to lead by first principles
medium.com
medium.com
Read again this: "Were we really destined to be a profitable company that nobody really cared about except for a few carriers? Is this what our team signed up for?" and say it's not a political rhetoric in every way? For the same situation different people can lead their audience to totally different "obvious" conclusions depending on how will they construct the decision rationale (what will they take into account or emphasize and what will they ignore or downplay). The real craft/trick here is how to appear like an impartial judge (i.e. neutral) in the process.
But ultimately, what the author is talking about is really "let's start with the basic blocks and build up".
Of course, at first glance, startups would seem to be against this kind of definition of principles, because they "pivot" to find a market - but that in itself is a core principle. You are not defined by your product, but by your final goal - large revenue and growth matter more than details of the product.
The way to get to your core principles is to ask yourself what aspects of your company are so critical to its integrity that you would rather shut down the company than break those principles.
Answer that, let those answers guide you, let those answers be known when hiring your team, and you will build a company that makes decisions easier, and with less internal conflict.
But when you start off with having "a duty to help seemingly enlightened people like me", you turned what could have been a productive point into a patronizing insult, so I'm not inclined to even have that discussion.
A positive person would rather have taken/considered the compliment from my words. Sorry to offend you.
As long as you can question the premise and dig deeper you are not reasoning from first principle.
I don't even think it really applies to language but instead to science and means something very different.
Aren't those the same thing?
It seems the author is referring to core beliefs or premises that the business was found on, as well as relationships in the team. The point is to get to 'truths' everyone agrees upon. Not unlike first principles in physics - you just assume because of the amount of evidence, that say, thermodynamic laws are true, and everyone can agree on that.
That is actually a psychological textbook trick - you are more productive in persuasion when you first manage to make your targets agreeing with you. From there you build upon whatever is on your agenda. The important part when doing so in the article's context is to make yourself look impartial, which in itself has an effect of preventing further group tensions.
Scientific first principles are not necessarily objectively true but they are the best we know of. I.e. as far as we collectively know this is the first principle.
This vs. I believe this and I am going to reason from here. Which is much more likely to be subjective.
"I think its important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy." -- Elon Musk
Jokes aside, isn't reasoning from first principles about going deeper and deeper to understand the root causes of problems, before working back from them? This seems foundational to problem-solving, but not necessarily an element of leadership.
More likely, this guy read the same quote by Elon Musk.
Like maybe 15 years ago my dad wanted to teach me maths and he kept repeating the importance of learning the 'first principles'. I didn't get a word he was saying at the time, but looking back, he had the idea too.
It's nice to hear somebody else's perspectives otherwise.
"We must pick one or risk failing at both" How is this first principle? Google cannot say we will do search and not android. Are these first principles unique to his business?
It's not only lawyer's trick, it's actually something pretty basic in persuasion's toolkit.