The biggest prison in the world is not high walls or iron bars, but the way people think. Many believe they are living freely, but in reality, they are just bouncing against invisible walls in a room they can't see. Even more ironic is that people trapped in the same way of thinking tend to cluster together and affirm each other. This is what is called idiot resonance — the more everyone agrees, the more偏（偏离）they become. Holding a hammer, seeing everything as a nail — what does that mean? It means that as soon as a person gets used to a certain thinking pattern, they will try to fit all problems into that framework. But the question is, can everything be solved with just one hammer?

Elon Musk's story is the most典型的例子 (typical example). Rocket launch costs are too high. A group of experts spent hundreds of hours researching how to cut costs, change materials, and modify structures. The more they researched, the more complex it became, yet they could never escape the original cycle. Until Musk asked a “childish” question: why can't we拾回 (recover) the rockets? Then, with one simple sentence, he elevated the thinking — the floor of the mindset shifted, and so did the ceiling. As a result, reusable rockets were born, and industry costs were cut to unprecedented levels.

Musk often says that what he does is not mysterious; he just thinks from first principles — starting from the fundamentals, without frameworks, without惯性 (inertia), only asking what the essence of things is. In fact, this way of thinking is not invented by Musk; its origin can be traced back over two thousand years to Aristotle. He proposed that every knowledge system has the最不能删 (least deletable) and最不能假的 (least fake) roots. First principles mean bypassing experience, challenging traditional conclusions, returning to these roots, and re-deriving the world. Traditional thinking looks at the past, first principles look at the essence. Traditional paths follow the road, first principles change the map.