First principles thinking is not an innate gift. It is a practice built through deliberate repetition of a simple discipline: before accepting a constraint or a solution, asking 'how do I know this is true?' The people who think most clearly from first principles have almost always built the habit through years of applying the question to small things as well as large ones. The compounding works like this: each time you question an inherited assumption and update your understanding, your mental model of the world becomes slightly more accurate. A more accurate model produces better questions. Better questions produce better decisions. Better decisions produce better results — which give you more data to refine the model. The practice is not about being smarter. It is about being systematically more honest about what you actually know versus what you have simply accepted.