What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. We're doing things a little differently this week. We dropped our third

mini-series, which means you got two episodes Monday, two episodes today, and two episodes Friday.

You are listening to the third episode in the series, which is a Founders Journal classic,

and also be sure to check out today's second episode on second-order thinking,

as well as both of Monday's episodes. This week's theme for the mini-series is mental models.

We're going to talk about some of the most powerful tools you can use to sharpen your thinking,

prioritizing, and decision-making. Many of these tools have been made famous by leaders

like Elon Musk and Dwight Eisenhower. In today's classic episode, originally published on July 5th,

my birthday of 2021, I'm talking about a mental model known as first principles thinking. Let's hop

into it. As you may or may not know, last week was Elon Musk's 50th birthday, and in celebration of

that, I took time to go down the rabbit hole to better understand how the Edison of our generation

thinks. And just to recap, I spoke last episode about Elon's some-product mindset,

which is a way of viewing the world, not as a fixed pie, and not just as a growing pie,

but with you as an active participant in making the pie bigger for everyone. If you're interested

in better understanding Elon's abundance mindset, I suggest you take a listen to that last episode.

And here's how I think about this episode. If some product thinking is Elon's mental model

for competition and how he views competition, first principles thinking is his way of thinking

about solving problems. First principles thinking, which is sometimes referred to as

reasoning from first principles, is one of the most effective strategies for solving complicated

...