First-Principles Creativity
To create something truly original, strip away assumptions and analogies and create from first principles.
We live in a golden age of creative templates.
There’s a swipe file for every format. A prompt for every block. A Notion dashboard for every creator’s dream.
We’ve never had more creative tools at our fingertips—and yet many smart, ambitious creatives feel stuck, derivative, or worse: invisible.
They’re not lazy. They don’t lack talent. They’re just trapped in borrowed thinking.
We’re told to steal like an artist, but that doesn’t mean simply copying what worked before. We know that everything is a remix, but that doesn’t mean riding the coattails of someone else’s creative insight.
You know the drill. You sit down to create and instead find yourself buried in a dozen browser tabs, surfing X for the latest trends. Browsing Tik Tok for what has worked for others in your space. Reading yet another article about how to spark inspiration.
But if you copy the surface-level strategies of other creators, you’ll produce surface-level work that starts to look, sound, and feel the same as everyone else’s.
It’s time for a different path. It’s time to start creating from first principles.
Creating from first principles means stripping away conventional wisdom and analogy. It means focusing on the most basic propositions, assumptions, or facts that cannot be reduced or deduced from anything more fundamental than themselves.
In the domain of engineering, first principles means designing from the laws of Newtonian physics.
In business, first principles means reasoning the needs of a customer and the laws of economics.
So what are the first principles of creativity?
They’re not techniques or tactics or hacks. They’re not tools or templates. They’re deeper than that.
The first principles of creativity are the conditions that make original thought possible.
They are the raw inputs—the elemental forces—beneath the human spark of creativity. Principles such as:
Curiosity: the drive to explore what others overlook.
Constraint: the limits that free your creative energies.
Tension: the internal and external frictions that demand resolution.
Play: the freedom to experiment without knowing or determining the outcome.
Connection: the spark that comes from combining existing elements in unexpected ways.
When you create from first principles, you’re not reverse-engineering someone else’s formula for success. You’re asking what is my idea made of?
What irreducible truths do I know to be real for my creative project?
And how can I use the answer to these questions to redefine my creative approach and solve my creative problems?
It’s how Albert Einstein rethought time. Steve Jobs rethought the computer. How Miles Davis rethought jazz.
And it’s how you can rethink your next creative project from the ground up, using first-principles creativity.
P.S. If you want to make this real, I have a list of questions that can help you get to the core of your own creative project. Hit reply and ask for the FPC questions challenge if you want it.