first principle building

by elon musk

1. question the requirements

   1. your requirements are definitely dumb

   2. doesn't matter who gave them to - particulary dangerous if a smart person gave it to you as you might not question them

   3. no matter who you are - everyone is wrong some of the time

2. remove unnecessary steps

   1. try very hard to delete part of the process

   2. if you are not occasionally adding things back in you're not deleting enough

   3. the bias is very strong towards "let's add this part of the process in case we need it"

3. simplify and optimize

   1. it's the third step, not the third step

4. accelerate time-to-learning

   1. accelerate the cycle time

   2. if you're moving too slowly, go faster

   3. but don't go faster until you worked on the other three things first

5. automate