First Principles
Chef Massimo Bottura was stuck
His restaurant Osteria Francescana, dishing up traditional fare, in the city of Modena was doing well but he felt uninspired and creatively was in a cul de sac
While working in New York he met his wife Lara. Lara introduced Massimo to the world of art. They made it a ritual to visit a gallery every weekend. They kept up this practice on their return to Italy.
They were at an exhibition at the Venice Biannale. They entered a room and in that room was an installation of realistic looking pigeons by artist Maurizio Cattelan perched close to the ceiling. The artist had a cheeky eye for detail and included pigeon droppings dripping down the walls of the room and on the other art works.
Lightning struck. That’s when Massimo realised that if he wanted to make his mark as a chef, he had to go up to the rafters, take a birds eye view and deface the generations and traditions that came before him. He realised that he had to go back to the drawing board and ask himself why. Why was he a chef?
After a period of reflection, what surfaced as being important to him was
- Communicating emotion, memories
- Having maximum respect for ingredients and using those as building blocks to reinvent tradition
- Communicate what Italy means to him
Using those as a foundation he went to work. The first dish he came up with was ‘Six Tortellini walking to the broth’ Six tortellini? What he was asking his diners to do was rather than eat tortellini by the spoonful, step back and regard each tortellini for what it was. The locals were livid. You don’t mess with tradition. You don’t mess with Grandma. But gradually over time with persistence and some luck he was able to convince them..and then eventually the world. His restaurant, Osteria Francescana, is consistently ranked as one of the best restaurants in the world
Dogma and reasoning by analogy
“In all affairs, its a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted”
- Bertrand Russell
When we are at a crossroads or faced with a problem there are usually two ways we arrive at a solution. We reason by analogy or by what’s known as ‘first principles’. When we reason by analogy we rely on base assumptions, we look at history, the way things have been done before and tweak and adjust until we have a better solution or a better way of being. When we reason by analogy we go from the observation that two or more things are similar in some respects to the conclusion that they are probably similar in other respects as well. Reasoning by analogy is usually highly effective and useful for a large number of problems that we face.
However the human tendency for analogy or imitation could be a roadblock to true innovation. When we think about the future, we usually project the familiar forms and functions of the past. For example a common refrain currently is that ‘A.I will steal our jobs’ . Marc Andreeson (silicon valley investor and founder of netscape) calls this the lump of labour fallacy i.e we are taking stock of all current jobs available and projecting (and hoping) that these will be the jobs of the future. When in truth we don’t know what the jobs of the future will be. Ten years ago ‘UX Designer’ wasn’t a job, now they seem to be everywhere (hello to all my UX designer friends)
The toxic version of reasoning by analogy is to be constrained by Dogma. A way to recognise it is when your questioning hits the collective brick walls of ‘Because that’s the way it’s always been done’ or ‘Because I told you so’ . Or believing something is true just because an authority says so. What this does is diminish our own reasoning capabilities and erode confidence in our reasoning process. Innovation or even a unique life path depends on building a reasoning process that’s free from the shackles of the way things have been done. And this is tough because it would entail discovering your own values..and testing those values in the real world..and sometimes that can be painful.
What is True?
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual
- Galileo
It takes some bravery to reason for ourselves because most of us are trapped in our own history. Trapped in versions of ourselves, ways of being in the world, or ways of doing things that we have absorbed rather than thought through. Thinking for ourselves begins with the realisation that we are the scientist in the lab not the experiment…we are the chessboard itself not the pawns.
The term ‘first principles’ has deep philosophical roots. Aristotle described them as ‘the first basis from which a thing is known’. Many centuries later Descartes used a system of doubt now called Cartesian doubt to systematically doubt everything he possibly could until he was left with what he saw as purely unquestionable truths. This process led to his famous dictum ‘I think, therefore I am’
Bringing this to modern times, in practice what this entails is what Elon Musk calls using a physics framework i.e you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and reason up from there. Then you turn it into a game..get down to what you know to be true and use those as puzzle pieces to construct a conclusion.
As Elon recounts on the founding of founding of Tesla..which depended on the use of long range battery packs
Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”
With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?” It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminium, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”
It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realises.
The key assumption shattered by Elon was that historically all battery packs have been expensive so in the future all battery packs will be expensive.
So if you are looking to innovate, in the above statement substitute battery packs with whatever needs to be created and substitute expensive with your current conditions
Another way is to revert back to our annoying little 6-yr old selves and ask Why? And keep asking until you get to a fundamental truth (usually 5 why’s will get you there). Eric Reis, founder of the Lean Startup movement provides this example as applied to a startup:
- A new release broke a key feature for customers. Why? Because a particular server failed.
- Why did the server fail? Because an obscure subsystem was used in the wrong way.
- Why was it used in the wrong way? The engineer who used it didn’t know how to use it properly.
- Why didn’t he know? Because he was never trained.
- Why wasn’t he trained? Because his manager doesn’t believe in training new engineers, because they are “too busy.”
And so in startups and engineering what begins as a purely technical fault is revealed to be a very human fault — and that’s where the problem needs to be addressed.
So then following from that, innovation comes down to the types of questions being asked. I’ve written before on how Steve Jobs when conceptualising the Apple store didn’t ask himself how do I build the best retail store? He asked ‘where do people like hanging out’?..and revolutionised retail from that foundation. The same with Frank Gehry and architecture..if he is designing a school he begins with ‘what is learning’? And ‘what is teaching’ ..for chef Bottura it was ‘what is food’?
The common denominator with this sort of reasoning is that it places function over form i.e food should communicate emotion rather than just provide nutrition, retail should be awe inspiring and buildings are alive and can facilitate interaction. Traditional forms don’t matter. If you are thinking about your career and you are confident in your values, have some skills and are clear on how you can contribute to the world, then the form that career takes pales in significance to the function that career serves. You arrive at your own formula of what a career should be
Conventional Wisdom
What first principles thinking does is put you on a different trajectory..a trajectory that pulls you away from the gravitational force of conventional wisdom. As human beings we usually follow rules not using a rational process but one that is grounded in emotions. We are social animals and these emotions make us conform to the tribe. In most circumstances the emotional reactions produce the rationally correct responses for ourselves and the tribe. That’s why, as mentioned, reasoning by analogy is a great method for a large proportion of problems that we face. The issue then is recognising when we are at a crossroads…when it would be ok to be the cook and follow the prescribed recipe or be the chef and invent a new one. If we then decide that true innovation is required or that we are not satisfied with our life path then it is up to us to chuck on that lab coat (or chef’s hat) and get to work.
Conclusion
As a conclusion I will leave you with what food writer and critic Faith Willinger said about Massimo Botura. I think it’s brilliantly captures the themes of this essay
Massimo brings something else to the plate besides food. He arrived at his own formula about what a 3 michelin star chef could be. His dishes are made with traditional Modena ingredients but used in a different way that a trattoria would use. It’s about the art, music, place, ingredients..it’s about the whole concept behind the food that makes it something far more interesting.
His most important ingredient is his memory. Memory of tasting things of the way things were made and taking those memories and interpreting them in a more modern way.
He takes what his mother made and turns it into something divine.
References and Further reading:
1. The Massimo Bottura Story is from the Netflix series Chef’s Table, season 1 episode 1
2. The Cook and the Chef by Tim Urban, Highly recommend for an incredible deep dive
