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How Operating from First Principles Improved My Entrepreneurial Work

“It’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.” — Elon Musk

Dima Syrotkin
Entrepreneurship Handbook
6 min readAug 14, 2020

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What does it take to be a successful entrepreneur?

As the CEO of a startup for the last 4 years and a part-time advisor for 2 others, I think about this question multiple times a day.

From my experience — and also that of my fellow entrepreneurial friends — the biggest areas budding founders struggle with (and even seasoned vets) is decision-making and execution.

We either don’t know what to focus on or we aren’t able to get sh*t done.

At the end of the day, though there are exceptions and the challenges sometimes run deeper than that, if you struggle with making decisions and your execution is suboptimal, you’re not going to get very far.

When faced with these challenges, though simple, what helps me is looking at things from the first principles. Here is what Elon Musk has to say about it:

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other…

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Published in Entrepreneurship Handbook

How to succeed in entrepreneurship; feat. founder stories, design articles, and startup deep dives that inspire your entrepreneurial journey.

Written by Dima Syrotkin

CEO @pandatronai dev self-awareness 📚 metamodernism. Rebuild 🇺🇦

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