A First Principles Approach
The Tools I Use Everyday
Looking for an approach that will give you better results, with whatever you're trying to accomplish, immediately?
I want to explain how I think about business, marketing, and life, because it’s very distinct, and I’m 100% certain that if you shift to this way of thinking, it’s going to give you an instant superpower.
It’s called first principles thinking, and goes back to Ancient Greece and Aristotle. It was a way to teach people how to think and break problems down to their fundamental building blocks so that they could be put back together in new ways. Basically, the idea is to stop pushing against a problem at the level of the problem, and instead, to get underneath it and understand the building blocks. Once you understand the building blocks, you can rearrange them in more creative or logical ways and then build back up to a solution.
We use it all the time at Chief Detective. It’s one of our core values.
It’s a more sophisticated, more effective way of thinking and approaching problems, and it’s been used in the scientific world for a long time. Charles Darwin was a prototypical first principles thinker. As he was trying to create a grand unifying theory for the evolution of life, his challenge to himself was, "How do I get beyond the observable layer of existence and get to the building blocks — the big ideas behind it?"
Why doesn't that exist for business??
I’ve never understood why there isn't a user manual for building direct to consumer companies and e-commerce businesses. At some point along the way, it hit me like a ton of bricks: these companies are all the same. They're all the same and they're formulaic. You can cut to the chase and get to success a lot faster if you embrace the essential truths and building blocks that underlie them — those unifying facts that for some reason just haven't been compiled into a user manual.
So that’s what I’m going to share across the videos and newsletters that I’ve been starting to create: the big building block concepts and tools that I’ve pulled together over a long span of building companies that you will hopefully find helpful as 1st Principle unlocks for growing your own business. This post is to first explain more the context of first principles thinking and how to apply it.
Some Background
I first started to develop these tools when I was doing consulting. When you're in that role, you're always walking into a competition of ideas. The challenge was always, "We're growing at 10%, and we want to grow at 30%. What should we do?" And you can't do everything. You have to prioritize. "So, what are the three or four things we're going to do?" That's the competition of ideas. And I found that usually, the most loudly asserted opinion would win over the right thing. I saw it as my job to stabilize those conversations and orient them towards first principles of building businesses. So that's what I did. Over the time of three, four years of doing that consulting work, I developed my own set of first principles that let me walk into companies with a point of view that was based in facts — immutable, non-debatable facts for building businesses. And from there we could work with the facts to find the right solution.
So here we go. First principles tools I use every day.
Start with the business growth pyramid. In my consulting work, people would be almost panicky, asking "What should we do when growth stalls out?" So you’ve got to put your shoulders down and realize that the laws of physics already exist. We just need to work with them as basic assumptions. We are not on a new planet where we need to refigure the laws of gravity. We are not lost in the woods. We are on a reasonably paved road building a business. We’re auto mechanics with a defined set of pieces and tools, not rocket scientists battling great complexity and optionality.
If you're looking at your business and thinking, "Okay, I need to grow the hell out of this thing next year, what should we prioritize? We can only do a few things," the starting point is the growth pyramid. That's what the game board for the team debate should be. That pyramid. Use it to lift up the hood and look at what's actually happening. And what you’ll find is that you've suddenly got this kind of "You are here" arrow, like in the mall, pointing to the problems. So then it's like, "Okay, I can see the problems. Now we just need to debate the relative importance of those and what we should focus on."
The winners win. And they win and they win and they win. Strengthen strengths, figure out what's working about the business and pour water on it. It is a universal principle, that to me is the law of gravity for building businesses. It's also true in life, by the way, in terms of building on your gifts. Whatever you are good at, do that. It’s just such a fundamental law that gets ignored left and right. I’ve got a whole piece devoted to this principle here, or if you prefer it on YouTube, it's here.
Spearpoint marketing. We use this all day long at Chief Detective for doing advertising, and really, for any kind of thinking. It's just a good tool for placing the level of your thinking.
Start with these tools and I guarantee that you are instantly going to be better at business and marketing. You're instantly going to be thinking about things in a more effective way.
First Principles and Chief Detective
When I moved on from consulting and started to build Chief Detective, these first principles became the basis of the company. It’s how I can pass on 30 years of experience building businesses to the people, right out of college, that I hire. It’s what we teach at Chief Detective. And we've now thrown hundreds of millions of dollars of spend on Meta applying these frameworks into building companies, so I consider them to be very proven. I just think that they're fact. And I really encourage you to dig into these, in terms of your global mindset and how you think about things.
And in terms of your business problems? Shift to a first principles approach. Because what are businesses? They're problem after problem after problem. And this is a really good way to come at them.
Applying First Principles to Life
The other cool thing about first principles is that they also apply to life. And as you might have detected, I’m obsessed with the dual journey of growing your business and growing your life at the same time. (And by the way, I'm also an absolute self-help book junkie. It’s just my passion.)
To me, success is an inner journey, and it should be an inner journey. That's where it gets its meaning. On my own journey, as I was building companies and really working hard on myself and my personal growth, I realized that all of the tools I was developing for business could be flipped over and applied to life.
They all had an analog in life.
And just like when I realized that all businesses are basically the same, I realized that in life, it's all the same pieces and parts.
It's even the same with the multibillion-dollar self-help industry. There are basically three or four concepts behind all of those books and modalities, and if you just grab those three or four concepts and apply them to your life, you're going to have a dramatically different outcome with whatever you're trying to accomplish. These are basic concepts for success that should be put into a user manual and taught in high schools. They shouldn't be patented. It should just be, "These are the first principles of being successful." Seriously, I don't think you should be able to go into adulthood without learning about the core first principles of making yourself successful.
First Principles Make Things More Fun
The last thing I would say about first principles thinking is that it really should make things more fun. That was another thing I realized going into so many of these businesses as a consultant. Things were so tight. And when it gets tight, you lose creativity. It takes looseness and humor and fun and camaraderie to actually come up with something creative and bring magic into a brand.
My big hope is that in sharing these first principles tools and this way of thinking, your shoulders go down and whatever you're trying to do is more fun. One of my son's math teachers told me one time that, "The kids who are really good at math are the ones who actually enjoy the math." And I think that's such a great phrase because math is problem solving. And when you're in the middle of a problem, if you clench up and you panic, you're never going to solve it. But the kids who really enjoy it and love being in that quicksand, trying to figure stuff out, those are the kids who get really good at math.
It's the same in business and life. The people who keep their shoulders down and enjoy the math of life and marketing and business, those are the people who get really good at them.
So that’s it! The protractor and compass hanging on the pegboard in front of me. Tools to make problem solving tangible and fun, to help you prioritize, and to give you clarity and confidence. I hope that in sharing these tools, and this way of thinking, you enjoy the math of whatever you're trying to accomplish.
And as always, good luck!
Emily