I am an intensively reflective person. Recently, I am learning how insightful it is to question everything in life. Correlated to this, is first principles thinking as Aristotle famously laid the principle in his works “Metaphysics” - “The first principle is the first basis from which a thing is known”

First Principles Thinking

From the way I understand First Principles Thinking, it requires breaking down complex problems/topics/thoughts into their most fundamental truths and building from there, forming a sequence of smaller pieces of truth and transforming them into a greater truth you are in search of.

This same principle applies to solving any problem you are facing in life, be it personally, at work, or anywhere. Most of the successful people I have known in life have embraced this way of thinking, from Elon Musk reducing the battery prices from $600 per kilowatt to $128/kWh to Jeff Bezos, who instead of copying existing bookstore models, broke the problem down to its core.

Jeff noticed that when it comes to books, customers wanted selection, price and convenience. A non conventional way of solving this would be trying to compete with existing book sellers in physical locations, optimize for marketing, spending on advertising etc but since Jeff broke down the problem to its core, he discovered that an online store can solve his customer pain points better than a physical store.

One can apply this principle in all areas of life. Let’s say you are deciding whether you want to go to college. This is a valid decision to question for various personal reasons people have spanning from financial, time, return on investment etc. You can break this problem/decision to deeper truths regarding what you want in life for example: how do you want to spend the next X years of your life? What are you passionate about, are you passionate about building machine learning models sitting infront of your computer for 8 hours a day, or are you passionate about music, or singing? How much money do you have now, how much are you willing to invest in education, and how much do you want in return? Answering these questions, will often expose more truths and facts about your life which may guide you to make a better decision.

Question Everything

One recent approach I have been taking in life is having a basic assumption that I don’t fully understand anything. Which leads me to question everything in life in search for more hidden truths. I have been able to think more clearly and rationaly when I have questioned everything in front of me which has presented me with more data points on a given topic and thus leads to making better informed decisions.

One of the most underrated life lessons I have learned recently, is to learn from everything that sorrounds you, and to kind of look at things from a bird’s eye point of view. This is incredibly even more powerful when you try to gather all context pertaining the situation from an outsiders perspective, and then the next thing is to reflect on it. By doing this, it helps eliminate your personal bias, and you give yourself the ability to really zoom out, gather the details, and its almost as if a movie unfolds in front of you where since you have all the context that the movie characters do not have, you start to see how vulnerable one can be in making mistakes.

But you won’t be able to do this without taking some time and putting effort into gathering those facts, and taking the time to carefully watch the situation unfold and reflect upon it.

Steve Jobs once questioned - why do we need physical keyboards on a phone? which led to one of the most profound breakthroughs in tech and mobile computing. Out of that question, the iPhone was born. Today, Apple sells over 200 Million iPhones every year.

Life is like a movie

There is a quote from Buddha - “If you deeply observe, everything is your teacher”. This quote deeply resonates with me, and is the basis of what I am going to discuss next.

Coming back to reflecting on everything that sorrounds you, I have found this to be incredibly eye opening. It has unlocked a profound truth in my life, which is, life provides us not just second, but third, fourth and so on number of chances to change our life, but we fail to recognize it. Why is it that we fail to recognize it? We make assumptions, and never question a situation/decision, therefore never seeking any answers, and just like that, the life changing opportunity passes by, and you never realized it. Simply, if you don’t have answers to the things that matter in your life, you will never find a path to change your life.

I learnt this incredible lesson from looking around me, and starting to notice everything that goes around me more closely. If you are someone open to new perspectives, in my opinion, life itself is more like a movie. Every situation, every conversation, every scene, every flashback you have when you reflect, really unfolds before you, right inside your mind. As if we are watching a movie, there are incredible opportunities to draw insights as an outsider, which is often to see, because you view things as an outsider rather than your own restricted lens. Do you know someone from college who got incredibly successful? Learn from them! Do you know someone who switched their career to something they always talked so passionately about with you before? Learn from them! How did they do it? What steps did they take? What mistakes did they make and how did they learn? Everything is right infront of you, you just need to start noticing. I have found this incredibly powerful.

You are a decision away from changing your life

When you watch this movie called life unfold infront of you, you suddenly realize how many life changing missed opportunities occur in everyone’s life. I recently lived for a about 3 months in San Fransisco for a new job I took on. For the first 2 months, I was so busy, or atleast I thought I was, in my job that I failed to look past it. I always wanted to meet new people in Tech, attend more events and participate in hackathons. I remember seeing emails and social media posts on these events, and I would just brush it off, without giving my situation more thought, without questioning more, thinking that “I do not have the time”. Signals as small as these, can be life changing. One weekend, I asked myself, “What is stopping me from going to this event?”, and turns out nothing, trully nothing was indeed stopping me. I decided to attend a hackathon, and it trully changed my life since then, and my perspective on many other things in life. On my 3rd month, due to personal reasons, I had to leave SF, and in retrospect, had I never went to that event, I would have missed a life changing opportunity, just because I failed to recognize it.

I trully believe that life does not just give you a 2nd chance, but also gives you a 3rd, 4th and many more chances. Your job as you walk through this path called life, is to stop and question things and situations, trying to recognize these chances. 99% of the time, these opportunities are presented to us, and because we are so busy walking, not trying to stop, because apparently if we stop - someone told us we are doomed, and therefore we never see and recognize these chances. Stop, question and learn to recognize!