First of all, this essay isn't about reading dead people's manifestos or asking life's big questions. The phrase "using philosophy" refers to the fundamentals of the practice: using [[The case for first principles thinking|first principles thinking]] to break ideas down coupled with the willingness to understand them. YCombinator, the most successful startup incubator in the world, showcases this well. Over their 20 years of operating they've broken down exactly what traits (inputs) in a founder lead to the best results (outputs) in a startup. Their founder-first ideology comes from witnessing over 7000 founders go through their program, finding patterns and basic truths of what the successful ones did, and adjusted their criteria over the years. They looked at their desired outcome, broke the problem down, and worked backwards to solve the puzzle of what a high potential company looks like at the seed level. The opposite approach is to look at everything like a black box. Take public speaking. General wisdom says some people are lucky enough to have it, while the rest of us don't. Your natural aptitude is the input, the skill is the black box, and the result is the output. Let's use some philosophical thinking to take a closer look into this supposed black box. All great speakers seem confident. Is that because they're just born that way? Or because they've learned to speak with conviction despite how they feel on the inside? Great speakers also choose their words wisely - were they always able to do that? Or did it come from years of trial and error? Are these things we can cultivate within ourselves? The deeper we go, the clearer things seem. Public speaking stops being a black box and becomes a skill. I believe almost any endeavour in life, when examined closely enough, can be distilled into a skill... Including starting a startup. How many people believe all they're missing from starting the next Apple is having a Steve Jobs level idea? Imagine if you tried to get better at a sport the way most people try to run startups. You'd wait around until you had a "revolutionary" idea on how to kick the ball better, then you'd kick the ball like that for 4 years before eventually giving up. The fact that so few people look at starting companies as a skill that can be improved and mastered has always been confusing for me. If being a good developer takes time, practice, and reflection, why would the business side be any different? This essay could almost be called "Using the Art of Learning as a tool", but I believe a foundation of learning is understanding truths, and no field deals with understanding truths like philosophy does. Using philosophy as a tool is just a fancy way of saying you should strive to understand things at their core. This is also why someone who has mastery in one field can master another field much faster. To get good at something you need to deeply understand it. To deeply understand it, you need to think like a philosopher. When you can think like a philosopher for one thing, you can do it for anything. Mastery is a crystal clear understanding paired with unparalleled execution. There's no better way in life to get what you want than to fully understand what's required of you, and be an expert at providing it.