Thinking Like a Genius — Lessons from Rene Descartes (2024)

One of my favorite people to ever live was Albert Einstein.

Throughout history, there have been few people who have been able to think quite like him.

He started off as an abnormal kid, then a patent clerk, and then studying Physics but he ended and is still a global phenomenon. His name is basically synonymous with genius!

But what surprises me the most with Albert Einstein is that he changed the world using only a piece of paper, a pencil, and time to think. His mind was able to think of things like no other and he was able to answer some of the most daring questions in the history of the human race.

So how did he do it? What was so special about his mind?

The truth is, we can think exactly like Einstein and do what he has done. All it is is a single choice. This choice is well represented in Ray Dalio’s (founder of Bridgewater Associates) book called Principles:

“For me, there is really only one big choice to make in life: Are you willing to fight to find out what’s true? Do you deeply believe that finding out what is true is essential to your well-being? Do you have a genuine need to find out if you or others are doing something wrong that is standing in the way of achieving your goals? If your answer to any of these questions is no, accept that you will never live up to your potential.”

Once we realize that answering these questions is all that stands in the way of our success, we can start chasing what we want.

So let's start thinking better… we just need a little bit of help from one of the greatest Mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers of all time, Rene Descartes.

Descartes did his work in the 17th century. He split his life into devoting himself to Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy.

In Mathematics he created modern analytical geometry and made discoveries which led the famous Cartesian plane to become named after him.

In Physics he studied the metaphysics of the interaction between the mind and the body and reality. He described how our senses can be a flaw to us and therefore has to approach reality with a certain level of doubt.

In Philosophy, he led new ways of approaching problems and led modern philosophy to think in a totally new way in all of the sectors of our lives.

One of the works I admire most of Descartes was titled Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Although he never fully finished the rules and the book was published after his death, I view it as one of the most important takeaways from Descarte.

He wrote the book after his major mathematical journey and discoveries. He wrote the book to discover how he and everybody can approach problems and queries in math, science, life, and philosophy in a proper matter.

Descarte heard that a bunch of ancient mathematicians who made some of the discoveries that accelerated math had created a set of rules for themselves. They viewed these rules and the centerpiece to success. But sadly, the rules were never given to the public. So Descartes decided to make his own.

It should be noted that the book is not seen to have followed a standard chronological order. IT is known as the patchwork thesis of Descartes's life that was never truly finished.

The main point of the book is that we must break our work up into small steps that we can completely understand and which we have utter certainty about.

His reasoning was that if we allowed people to break down big tasks or big problems into smaller more manageable and digestible ones, we can easily solve some of these big problems and questions humans have in our lives.

Although there were a total of 48 rules recorded by Descartes in 1628 and 21 officially published in 1701, there are four core ideas:

1. Certainty: In order to avoid ignorance, we must accept only the things which are true and certain. We must not be able to have any doubt about the ideas we have.
2. Division: In order to solve the problems we want to solve, we must break down the larger umbrella problem into smaller chunks and simple parts.
3. Building: In order to effectively execute on solving a problem, we must go from a simple concept and fundamental truth and work up to more complex ideas and inferences.
4. Checking: In order to ensure certainty and mitigate ignorance, we must re-check our work and reasoning.

These principles, all come together into the way he approached his life. His way goes against a previous way of thinking proposed and followed by someone who was very influential before Descartes… Aristotle.

Aristotle believed in posterior analytics. Aristotle thought of knowledge in this way because it involved producing high-level scientific works using a level of the doubt when approaching and solving problems. We can use things we have some doubt in, in order to be able to create a picture of how life, science, philosophy, and life works.

A good way of viewing this way of thinking known posterior analytics, also known as probable reasoning, is observing what we assume on a day-to-day basis. A major one that affects all of our lives is the sun coming up tomorrow. We technically don’t know if the sun will or will not come up to tomorrow which is a doubt we have in our mind.

Descartes believed in what is known as Scientia which is opposed to probable reasoning mentioned by Aristotle.

Scientia is based on perfect knowledge that is certain and evident without the capability to be doubted. Descartes wanted to eliminate ignorance in his mind. He viewed many of the things we could see as flawed and wanted to rely on pure reason and logic.

A good analogy that he used for this is with finding rotten apples in a basket. We could either try and try and find out where the rotten apples are located, leaving some doubt that some rotten apples could be beneath our ability to reach (like in posterior analytics or probable reasoning). But what Descarte’s Scientia said to do was to dump out what all the apples and analyze each one at a time to find out if they are healthy or rotten.

“Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable.”

The beauty of this rule is shown throughout Descartes's life. He described using it in his mathematical and physicist life by describing the certainty in arithmetic and analytical geometry. But he also reached his most powerful philosophical thought with this method.

He wanted to know what is certain about our lives, what cannot be doubted. He branched off by finding that we cannot trust what we see, smell, or touch because our senses have been known to deceive us all the time. What he arrived at is the phrase we all know:

This thought was one of the foundations of his philosophical journey and it followed his rules. He was accepting nothing (our senses) as true, he divided the problem into different parts such as our mind and our body, and he solved the problem from simple to complex. Taking this one simple certainty “I think therefore I am” and branching up from there.

There are two main parts that Scientia and reason can be broken up into:

• Intuition: Our ability to reason our truths. Descartes thought that they arrived off of reason alone and are not based upon our senses at all. His examples were that he think therefore we exist and other mathematical models like a square consist of four sides
• Deduction: Allows us to our intuition and extend it to reach the full potential of Scientia thinking. The knowledge acquired through deduction is not as self-evident as in intuition but it allows us to infer knowledge in which we know as true. The simple example is math. If we are given the intuitive statement 6 + 6 = 4 + 8. Then we can infer using deduction that 6+6 is equal to 12 and 4 + 8 = 12.

Descartes used another analogy to describe this method with intuition and deduction. Descartes compares it with having a long metal chain with 1,000 links. As with our sight, we could never see the full picture, we would only ever to achieve a snapshot.

But with Scientia, we can look at each individual link and analyze and understand it, like with intuition. Then with the knowledge that they are all joined together, we can use deduction to infer the information through the next link and so on.

So how do we start thinking like this? How can we start living the lives like Albert Einstein?

Well, there are three main parts, and the person who really measures up to these parts is the man, the myth, the legend.. Elon Musk.

First-principles thinking is one of the most important skills we can have living in the ever-increasing complexity of the world we live in. Of all the successful people who use first principles, Elon Musk is one of the best examples.

Elon Musk is a productivity and problem-solving genius. He runs Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, a part of Solar City, and so much more. Every time someone hears his name, people are puzzled about how he does it all. You can split him up into 4 different people and each of those people would still be someone we admire.

His major skill is using first principles religiously. Here is a quote from him in an interview:

“Musk: Well, I do think there’s a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are — what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our lives, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations.”

This type of thinking sounds very familiar to what we were talking about before. Boiling something down to its fundamental truths (its intuition) and then going and inferring up from there (deduction). This is the equation for Scientia.

Many like Elon Musk describe describing by analogy as something that is not good because we are just following each other. But sometimes, these thoughts are not based upon fundamental truths so we are just following everybody else but never know where we are going. We just expect that someone else has reasoned it well.

This means, in order to follow first principles thinking we have to not accept what we have thought of before and think in a new way. We must, instead of breaking down things into the way they already do, we have to break them down into their fundamental pieces. For example, if trying to lower the price of a product, don’t expect the price for what it is right now. Break it down into what is required to make the product the materials, the people, the facility and every process in between.

Before we can get to the process of first principles thinking, we must first ask the right question. I love this quote by Einstein:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

This shows how we can arrive at the possibility to use our first principles thinking. It also reminds me of Socrates. Socrates never wrote anything down but he spent his whole life seeking truths. How he did this is with the famous Socratic method. He would walk around Rome and ask a bunch of questions, trying to dig deeper into the root cause of a problem.

Musk’s process does not disappoint either. It is shown that Musk started out asking questions like how can he make enough money, leading him to start his first company Zip2. Once he got more money he started to ask how money could be transferred better which led to X.com and eventually PayPal.

Once he had this money he started asking even bigger questions about the future of humanity. Leading to bigger companies like Tesla and SpaceX. It is clear that the questions we ask have a correlation with the problems we solve.

A method that has been shown to be very popular is a sort of tree-method. Asking a root question like “How can we make rockets less expensive?” which can branch off into multiple questions like “What are the main costs of producing a rocket?”, to “How can we reuse rockets?”, to “How can we get rockets to land on their own?”. Once we are here, it is time for first principles thinking.

Key Takeaway #3: Split up our time into manageable chunks and problems

Someone who does all of the above is someone with a trajectory to the stars (literally). Now there is one part missing from the life we can create. This part is about productivity. One main point of Descartes, as well as Musk, is breaking down problems and your time. Remember that one of the four major points in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind is to break down problems into manageable chunks.

We must break down our time to focus our minds on solving certain problems using the process mentioned above, but we musk go a step further to decide what needs to be done in a certain time, getting us more focused on the different parts of thinking with Scientia.

Elon Musk is famous for time blocking and using this method. He breaks his time up throughout his companies, he is a master multitasker and gives himself time to problem solve and think, minimizing his time doing marketing and other corporation-related tasks in his companies.

Musk is said to have broken down his time into 5-minute chunks so he can solve and get everything done at the end of a day.

The great thing about being alive now and our advantage over Descartes is that we have an amazing tool called the internet!

You can easily plan out your life easily using an application like google calendar and asking specifics for what processes you want to complete in your thinking. You can schedule your own time to develop your vision for the future and build your curiosity and question the making of it.