First Principles Thinking

Language: English
Created by: Apexity by Apex Hatchers, Jumana Attaree
Rate: 4.4 / 81 ratings
Enroll: 11,402  students

What you’ll learn

• Learn a step-by-step framework for applying first principles of thinking to break down complex problems and identify core truths.
• Develop skills for questioning assumptions, analyzing problems from multiple perspectives, and avoiding biases.
• Gain experience applying first principles across diverse contexts such as technology, business, and social issues.
• Strengthen creative problem-solving abilities using techniques like Socratic questioning, abstraction, and deductive reasoning.
• Build cognitive flexibility to adapt approaches and cognitive persistence to overcome challenges.
• Through consistent practice and reflection, cultivate intuition for First Principles analysis on a wide range of problems.

Requirements

• This course has been designed to be accessible to a wide range of learners, and as such, there are no specific prerequisites.

Description

This course provides a comprehensive overview of First Principles Thinking, an analytical approach focused on understanding problems at their most fundamental level.

The course covers the foundations of First Principles Thinking, including techniques for breaking down complexity, challenging assumptions, and identifying core truths. As a learner, you will develop skills for applying First Principles across diverse contexts, following masters like Tesla, Darwin, Ford, and Freud.

The course outlines a step-by-step process for employing First Principles: identifying the problem, questioning assumptions, decomposing elements, discerning core principles, then reasoning upward to reconstruct solutions. As a learner, you are guided on overcoming biases and developing cognitive flexibility and persistence. Creative Problem-Solving techniques, Systems Thinking, probabilistic reasoning, risk analysis, and other analytical tools are introduced to enhance First Principles skills.

This course provides extensive opportunities to practice first principles thinking across a wide variety of problems. Through these engaging hands-on activities, you will gradually develop an intuition for this style of reasoning. The course also guides you to reflect on each exercise, analyzing how you identified core principles and assumptions. This meta-cognitive process strengthens your analytical skills over time.

With consistent application across diverse situations, you will progressively gain expertise in quickly stripping away assumptions and conventional thinking to reveal penetrating insights to any problem or situation. The structured practice in this course aims to make First Principles analysis feel like second nature.

Who this course is for:

• Whether you’re new to the world of business and organizational dynamics or already have some background knowledge, this course is structured to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter, making it suitable for both beginners and those with prior experience.