PANCHAMAHABHUTA SIDDHANT - FIRST EVER USE OF ‘FIRST PRINCIPLES THINKING APPROACH’ IN HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

A few days ago, I just went through a thought- provoking interview of world’s richest man ‘Elon Musk’ (the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Company), talking about the use of ‘first principles thinking’ in his professional life. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”In theory, first principles thinking requires you to dig deeper and deeper until you are left with only the foundational truths of a situation. In other words, ‘a first principle is a basic assumption that cannot be de- duced any further.Elon explained, to achieve the success you don't have to simplify every problem down to the atomic level to get the benefits of first principles thinking. You just need to go one or two levels deeper than most people.He further explained that first principle thinking means “boiling problems down to their most funda- mental truths” and then reasoning up from there. Through most of our life, we get through life by rea- soning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations.In his own words, Elon said, let’s think about Rocket. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade alumini- um alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fibre. Then he asked himself, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two per cent of the typical price.”