My son took summer school a few years ago to get ahead in his school work before taking a month long trip to Australia.
All of a sudden I was immersed back into Grade 10 Science.
It really wasn’t much different than I remember – a little bit of “if the ball drops from this height and hits the ground after so many seconds, how fast was it travelling?”, a little bit of H2O, and some plant stuff.
But I realized as he was learning – he didn’t actually know the difference between when he was learning something, and when it made sense.
It was all foggy to him.
When we don’t know or seek clarity, we feel like we are in a fog. And that is how he was feeling doing school work.
We started to go back to first principles.
“A first principle is a basic proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.” – Wikipedia
Elon Musk famously uses first principals. When he decided he wanted to go to space, he saw the price of a space ship. It was too expensive. So he broke it down to the basic parts and built his own (I am over simplifying this and might even has some parts wrong).
The point is that when you feel like you are in a fog, you have to start breaking it down until you have full clarity.
You will know the moment it starts to make sense, if that is what you are seeking.
All of a sudden a complex problem or thought becomes simple.
How do you break it down?
You start checking your assumptions and start asking questions.
Start with the parts you know for sure. Not the parts you are guessing and not the parts you are assuming. Start with what you know. If you don’t know, then ask and research.
Anything can be broken down into first principals. They are the most important part.
The more simple and clear you are – the better results you will get.