Stop Chasing The Ball

“First you must not fool yourself and you’re the easiest person to fool.”

— Richard Feynman

I was sitting in an interview at AIMCo, trying to land a summer finance internship, when the partner leaned forward and tossed out a simple icebreaker.

“Which person on the soccer pitch is most important?”

The question was fitting. He had just learned how much I loved the sport. It was a soft lob. An innocent “get to know you” designed to see how I’d handle a low stakes conversation.

My brain immediately went into search mode. I scanned for the correct answer, the one that would make me sound like a seasoned tactician. The striker who scores? The keeper who saves? The midfielder who connects?

But then I stopped. I realized I was trying to solve a puzzle using someone else’s pieces. I was looking for an answer inside the box he had drawn, playing by a set of rules I hadn’t interrogated yet.

I paused and asked: “Does the coach count?”

The partner smiled. He didn’t actually care about the tactical merits of the coach versus the striker. He wasn’t looking for a lecture on 4-4-2 vs 4-5-1 formations. But the answer landed. It showed him I wasn’t just another candidate reciting a playbook. I was someone who looked at the frame before looking at the picture. That soft lob turned into a firm offer because he realized I didn’t just think, I deconstructed.

That moment stuck with me. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it then, but that’s what first principles thinking looks like. It isn’t about being clever or contrarian for the sake of it. It’s about the courage to identify the assumptions you choose to stand on before the reasoning even begins. It is the difference between playing the game and understanding the geometry that makes the game possible.

Searching for “first principles” is 1400% more popular today than it was fifteen years ago. It’s a favourite buzzword of Silicon Valley, a badge of honour used to indicate a differentiated, deeper level of thought. But like anything that finds a wave to ride on, its substance and definition has been diluted and stretched with time.

As we should all surely hope, principled thought isn’t a modern invention. We didn’t just stumble into the incredible feats of human history. The concept of first principles dates back to Aristotle, who described it as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” His point was simple: you cannot truly understand a complex system until you understand the primary components that make it up.

Since then, life has gotten increasingly complex. Complex in terms of understanding, and in terms of satisfying our basic needs. It’s no surprise that people turn to convenience. We have built massive systems across government, corporate policy, and social algorithms that often handle the “thinking” for us. We’ve traded personal agency for convenience, often unknowingly.

The mind is a muscle. When you stop using it, you lose it. Outsourcing our judgement also means inheriting intellectual laziness. It’s the manager who hires a big-name consulting firm so they can’t be blamed if the project fails. It’s the student who uses AI to summarize a book they haven’t read. We have traded depth for what Naval Ravikant calls “reasoning by proxy”. We look at “best practices” and call it strategy.

In soccer terms, it’s like only watching film of the defending Champions League winners and trying to copy their style without understanding why that specific style worked for those specific players against that specific opponent. We have reached a point where we’ve lost our grip on the fundamentals, starving for understanding, while being fed a diet of acceptance.

In the age of AI, this atrophy is even more dangerous. When information is a commodity and proxies can be generated in seconds, original thought is the only true differentiator left. Practicing it is what helps keep us real, and human.

To move from thinking by proxy to origin of thought, you have to find bedrock.

Think of a first principle as a foundational truth that cannot be deduced any further. It is the absolute bottom of the logic chain. Most people think they are standing on solid ground, but they are actually standing on the “fill”, made up by layers of tradition, corporate policy, and “the way we’ve always done it” attitude piling on top of the truth.

When you deconstruct a problem, you are digging through that fill until your shovel hits something that doesn’t budge. That is your bedrock. As Charlie Munger famously advised: “You should understand things to their fundamentals, but not any further.”

Once you reach that bedrock, you realize some of the layers above were optional. You can build a new structure from the ground up without the baggage of how it’s always been done.

Here’s three of my favourite examples of first principles in practice:

1. The Experience Design (The Airbnb Lens): The “fill” for travel was that people want hotels because they want professional consistency. Chesky and Gebbia looked at the first principle: People want to belong. They realized that trust could be manufactured through a digital reputation system, turning a stranger’s spare bedroom into a viable asset that delivered against the travellers inherent desire for belonging.

2. The Scouting Revolution (The Moneyball Lens): For a century, the “fill” was the “eye test.” Baseball scouts relied on proxies like a player’s physique, the “sound” the ball made off the bat, or even if they had a nice jawline. The industry assumed that if a player looked like a star, he would play like a star.

Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s stripped the game down to its basics: to score a run, you first have to not get out (p.s. also a great example of inversion btw). He ignored the scouts and focused on a single, unglamorous metric: on-base percentage. He recruited players who were too short or had ugly swings simply because they had a mathematical knack for reaching first base. By ignoring the scouting playbook and playing the math of the field, he built a championship-level team for a fraction of the cost of his competitors.

3. The Reusable Rocket (The Elon Musk Lens): The “fill” was the assumption that rockets are disposable. For decades, everyone operated under the belief that once a rocket delivered its payload, the machine was not-salvageable. It was the equivalent of flying a Boeing 747 from New York to London and then crashing the plane into the Atlantic.

Musk calculated the price of the raw materials required to build a rocket and realized those materials accounted for only 2% of the total launch price. The remaining 98% of the cost was the labor and engineering being thrown into the ocean after one use. By identifying that fuel is cheap but the machine is expensive, he pivoted to reusability and broke the industry’s most expensive habit.

A common trap in the Mental Wealth journey is confusing mental models with first principles.

Think of mental models as your machinery for digging. If first principles are the bedrock, then mental models are the backhoes and excavators. Trying to reach the truth with raw, unguided thought is like trying to dig a skyscraper’s foundation with a hand trowel. It’s possible, but it’s exhausting.

Mental models, like inversion or the 80/20 rule, solve for time-to-understanding. They let you clear the topsoil of a problem in minutes so you can get to work on the bedrock.

The goal is to be a pursuer of understanding, not a collector of frameworks. Otherwise, you’ll likely get caught up riding the backhoe without ever actually digging. You become a victim of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (because you own a blue car, you suddenly see blue cars everywhere). When you over-rely on a handful of models, you begin to force-fit them into every situation because you have to. You stop seeing the world as it is and start seeing it as your toolkit dictates. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail. You think the world has changed, but really, your internal filter is just pattern-matching the surface while the bedrock remains buried.

I got the offer for AIMCo, but I didn’t take it.

On paper, AIMCo had the “brand reputation” of a major investment firm. It was a safe, prestigious play. But AIMCo only helped me solve for the proxy, crunching numbers in excel because I could. On the other hand, another opportunity at EPCOR offered the chance to see the physics of the game. They wanted me to truly understand energy markets, run the auctions, and see how the gears actually turned.

In soccer, memorizing the coach’s drills will get you onto the pitch. Hard work and discipline can make you a starter. But to truly differentiate, you have to do what Lionel Messi did.

For decades, the proxy for a world-class #10 was a player who was big, strong, and physically dominant. The playbook said you needed to be a traditional powerhouse to survive the middle of the park. Messi ignored the playbook. He didn’t try to become something he wasn’t. Instead, he doubled down on his specific physics. Low center of gravity. Explosive speed. The ability to process the geometry of the pitch faster than anyone else.

He deconstructed what it meant to be a playmaker. He didn’t just fit into a system. He became the architect of a new one. By getting deep on his specific strengths rather than trying to fit the big and strong mold, he changed the way entire teams were built around him. He discovered how he was uniquely positioned to not chase the ball, and instead have everyone chase after him.

I’m glad I had the foresight to choose the field over the playbook back then, even if I didn’t have the words for it yet.