If innovation is born of imitation, and to create new, we must first understand the old, then as we progress, soon we will be incapable of creation entirely, for it will take more than a lifetime to have first learned the old.

Now, this might seem counterintuitive initially, so here’s a little illustration: let’s say you want to build a house tomorrow. How would you go about doing it? Do you immediately have the necessary knowledge and training and experience to build a stable, safe home?

Perhaps, but for the rest of us not in the construction business, it’d take a little time for us to become comfortable enough with our abilities, to know the limits of our knowledge, and to be sure that said limits extend beyond the minimum required to successfully build a home and live in it ourselves.

Let’s say it takes you a year to learn what you need and build the house. On to the next adventure—it’s time to build a bridge. But you don’t know anything about building bridges! You just got done building a house, and that alone put you greatly out of your comfort zone. But it’s always been a dream of yours, so you gather HRK’s Fundamentals of Physics and teachers and YouTube videos, and five years later, you’ve got yourself a bridge.

Now you want to build a skyscraper. Would you argue, in good faith, that it’s just like building a series of houses stacked atop each other? No! So to build this, there’s even more knowledge that you have to accumulate and synthesize and apply. You are fortunate in that there is a collected body of work on the matter of building skyscrapers, so you can leverage what the greats of the past knew.

But if you wanted to build a space elevator… well, that’s another thing entirely. You’re now, at least in theory, one of the most qualified people to build such a technically challenging construct—afterall, you already have intensive construction experience (decades of it, I might add)—but that’s not necessarily true. And even if you were to build that, the possibility that you’d have enough of the remainder of your life to teach the rest of us how to build said elevator is slim to none, for this endeavour is likely to take even longer than everything else you’ve ever worked on, and by the time it’s finished you’re more likely to be in the ground than in space surveying your magnificent creation.

Perhaps if you’d tackled this problem as an outsider, you’d have conceived a more innovative solution. At the least, you would’ve been able to leverage some of the simplifications that others who wanted to engineer low-gravity tech, without necessarily knowing how to build houses and bridges and skyscrapers, devised.

But because you started from the origins of architecture and engineering, you were set in your ways, instead of building a space elevator, all you left was a fireman’s pole (and, you can’t even start fires in space on account of the vacuum!).

This is the raison d’être of my hybrid approach to first principles thinking—building from scratch while learning just what we need, when we need it. This saves me from the problem of thinking by analogy (“let’s build the GitHub for CAD”—in truth, this is a useful idea), while also allowing me to call upon the knowledge base I’ve formed during my own endeavours; when starting something de novo, I’ve found it’s easier to extract only the most valuable insights from those before me. This last bit is, admittedly, a break from a purely Cartesian thought process, but it’s saved me energy, and, most importantly in this brief life, time.

So on your next project, consider architecting your work ab initio, unconstrained by the preconceived notions of mortal man.