Most people copy what works. First principle thinkers ask why it works. First principles thinking is the act of breaking down an idea or thought into it's most basic components and building it back from the ground up. You'll know you have a first principles understanding of something when you're able to start from scratch and derive same conclusion you already have in a logical and step by step way. Thinking from first principles has a number of different benefits. First you avoid the pitfall of cargo culting. Cargo culting is the act of doing things without understanding the underlying reasons that they should be done in the first place. A common example of this can be found in people who are trying to grow on social media. Usually their first instinct is to mimic what they see from popular creators. Maybe they'll buy a fancy microphone, or try to hire an editor. While most big creators do have those things, it would be mistaking correlation for causation. Those things are a byproduct of their success, not the origin. First principles thinking gives you the ability to look past the surface of what you see to understand what might really be happening. Just simply asking yourself "what makes a video perform well" might lead you to researching a list of common attributes you've found in successful videos. That list might then include things like having a strong hook or keeping your viewers engaged - both of which improve your odds of success way more than a new microphone would. Naturally your next question might be "what makes a good hook?". We're systematically building our understanding of how to become a content creator from the ground up. A solid understanding is like a pyramid. If the foundation is rickety, everything above it risks collapsing at a moment's notice. As humans we tend to think at the highest level of abstraction because it saves time. This shortcut in thinking means we often stack bricks on a foundation that may be unstable, or may not even exist in the first place. While it seems more time consuming, and does come with an overhead cost, spending the time to assess the foundation upon which we build our understandings on is crucial for ever truly understanding something at a deep level. In hardware, the idea of hot-swapping a component is changing one part out for another without needing to replace the rest of the system. In our case, replacing one brick near the foundation could mean redoing a disproportional amount of bricks above it. The lower down the pyramid the issue is, the more it costs to fix it. On the contrary, a solid foundation means our broken bricks, if any, are likely to be closer to the top of the pyramid, and thus less costly to swap. We can afford to fail faster, and make more mistakes since the cost is low. A first principles understanding also makes it easier to swap bricks out for other ones in general. A baker who knows how the recipe was created can tweak it a lot more easily than someone simply following the recipe. You also don't have to remember as many things. In physics, you can usually skip memorizing formulas, since like a first principled understanding of an idea, you can always derive it again from other fundamental pieces of information. You're also afforded more confidence in your viewpoints. A sign of a wise thinker is someone who gladly welcomes opposing arguments towards their belief. Their foundation is usually sturdy enough to ward off most attacks, and for the ones it can't, they're happy to replace the faulty brick with another one that's closer to the truth. First principles thinking isn't just a way of thinking, but a skill that's meant to be practiced and used on a daily basis. You'll never able to outgrow that which you mimic without understanding. Copy to compete. Understand to surpass.