If you’ve heard of First Principles thinking. Maybe the opposite of that would be results-oriented thinking. Which might be described as find someone that’s done what you want to do and just copy what they did, replicate the process. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s priority isn’t innovation, discovery, creativity, taking risks or exploration. Its priority would mainly be getting results from a process that’s been proven.
First Principles thinking is reverse engineering the ideal, perfect product or outcome and determining what are the fundamental principles of what makes that perfect, ideal, desirable. Then putting all your focus, emphasis and priority in making those principles what you are good at, your expertise and theoretically you will get the ideal, perfect product or close. It’s more time consuming, there isn’t a right or wrong way, it’s riskier, requires trial and error, incurs more errors and isn’t guaranteed the outcome. But hopefully by the end of it the person going through the principles will understand the process inside and out with the ability to innovate upon innovation because they understand the inner-workings and the causal sequences.
I think the point that goes missing in this way of thinking or maybe where people might not go far enough is that, there maybe deeper levels to getting to the absolute, zeroed-out First Principle – meaning we might derive what we think is the first principle but if we dig deeper there might be an even more refined, essential fundamental principle to the core. And the thing is, we might not be able to see deeper into the core until you start the process, until you start digging. You might not have the penetrating insight, tools or experience to get to that inner-core from the onset, but with experience and practice becomes easier to do.