First principles thinking is the practice of reasoning from underlying causes rather than inherited instructions. Instead of asking what is usually done, it asks what must be true. The goal is to understand the forces and constraints that make a system behave the way it does. Often the same forces that tradition learned to accommodate long before it could explain them.. I spent the summer of 1991 making bread in Paul Bunyan’s all-you-can-eat restaurant in Wisconsin Dells. The