The Big Ideas

Take the best big ideas from a variety of disciplines.

Learn to bridge jurisdictions.

Taking the big ideas from philosophy, the natural sciences, psychology, engineering, or computer science, means that you can see the operations of the world from an emergent vantage point; how processes come together, and how they cohere, into making the phenomena that fill reality.

One of the advantages in big idea thinking is getting to the bottom of what constitutes reality.

It is a way of reasoning from first principles; to think bottom up. It is to think about what you know is fundamentally true –– the first principles –– to new and sound conclusions or solutions.

First principles are like the building blocks which one’s conclusions rest upon. So ask: “What am I sure of that’s true?” and then reason from there.

We know the world is made of atoms, which make molecules, and which make organisms and the objects of reality. Ask yourself: how else could atoms be put together to make something that could be of value?

The natural world is the ultimate engineer. It has fashioned galaxies, stars, planets, organisms, and inanimate matter. How could we use the fundamental principles of reality to get to the root of causes and to solutions that are of value to us?