🔥What Athletes can learn from Elon Musk🔥

written by JOSH GESSNER | The Athletter

How did Elon Musk cut the price of a SpaceX rocket by 10x?

First Principles Thinking.

How Athletes can apply this to increase performance:

When Musk started SpaceX, rockets cost over $65 million.

Instead of paying, he broke the rocket down to its first principles:

• What is it made of?

• How much is the material?

• Can I make my own?

He found he was able to make them at a fraction of its market price.

The point:

First Principles thinking is extremely powerful.

The world's greatest thinkers all think this way.

But what is it?

First Principles thinking is when:

You break something down to it's most fundamental level.

Understand the basics, then work up from there.

Elon Musk thinks of it like a tree:

When we think in first principles:

We progress from the most fundamental basics (trunk) and gradually progress to the details (leaves).

We continually question why something is true, until we get to the root of the belief.

I started to think about how athletes can adapt this way of thinking.

What I realized:

It's pretty straight forward - in the physical domains.

For example - I was a pitcher in baseball.

A goal for the majority of my career was to increase pitching velocity.

So if we think in first principles...

Pitching velocity is how much force you can apply to the baseball.

To increase force output:

You have to increase how fast you accelerate.

To increase acceleration:

You can increase strength, power, mobility, mechanics...

You continue to go down the list until you find deficiencies to attack.

This is already done extremely well.

The area that it isn't done as well:

The mental side.

I struggled with the yips from 2019 - 2021.

The way I overcame it?

Figuring out what was happening, by thinking in first principles.

(I didn't know the term at the time)

How it worked:

I asked myself:

Why can't I play catch?

Was it my mechanics?

No... I could throw to a fence fine.

Was it that I was overthinking?

Maybe, but I have no clue how I would think less...

And distracting myself by singing didn't seem like a long term solution.

I kept diving deeper.

As I did, I got to the root cause.

My yips was caused by fear.

The fear of what others thought of me.

And that... wasn't going to be fixed by a sport psychology technique.

If you're an athlete struggling with the mental game, and nothing seems to have worked:

Try thinking in first principles.

Break down exactly why you're experiencing what you're experiencing.

It'll take time, and it'll suck.

But start to think for yourself, and you'll find the root cause.

Main Lesson:

Incorporate first principles thinking into your career by breaking down things to its most basic level.

Ask yourself "Why"? until you find the root cause.

Now go attack it.

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