Note: I wrote this on 18/05/2026 after once again forgetting that this superpower exists.

The Art of Ignoring What Everyone Else Assumes

Thinking, well, is a lot complicated. As someone who likes to automate a lot of low leverage thinking, having a structure to how I think is really important. If it were up to me, I would want to make as little decisions as possible so I can use my brain power in things that actually matter to me. If I’m getting paid to solve problems, I might as well extract as much as possible from the brain juices.

Meta-thinking, or thinking about thinking is actually really interesting. If you get enough data points and can identify your own patterns, you can actually sculpt your own thinking. Every time I do try to enhance this aspect of my life, I almost always converge into one single improvement - being a first principles thinker. Once you get the hang of it, it almost feels illegal.

First principles thinking is the act of breaking down the problem into two categories - absolute truths and assumptions. The key is to traverse as deep as possible to reach a foundational statement that can’t be deduced further, and then work your way with the assumptions to find a viable option in the solution space.

There have been a debate among the engineering community on what kind of engineer one should be - should you be a “jack of all trades” generalist, or a “master of one” specialist. I was always of the assumption that being a generalist offers way more to problem solving than a specialist in one. Ideas and problems from different domains often take the same structure and you can borrow solutions from it if you are not myopic about the structure.

More often than not, what I’ve realized is that for either generalist or specialist - one thing that is foundational is being a first principles thinker. Being a generalist doesn’t mean you should have surface level knowledge of many fields, and so do being a specialist doesn’t mean you cannot do basic things from other domain. First principles thinking help in either case because it is actually agnostic to what do you want to do with it. What first principles thinking basically does is create a simple loop - fundamentals build reasoning and reasoning strengthens your fundamentals. Intuitions are far more risky to be reliable, so having a fallback of first principles thinking is a really good skill to have in your arsenal. It does require a lot of mental effort and habit to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, problem solving becomes really addictive.