What do Marie Kondo, the Buddha, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Tim Ferris have in common? They all use absolute thinking.
Absolute thinking is what happens when you set your personal standards of what is "acceptable" according to first principles. Most people don't think from first principles at all. Most people, when solving a problem, use status quo logic. Status quo logic works by looking at what most people do and then copying them. First principles logic ignores status quo entirely and reasons instead from what is known to be true and what is known to be false.
| when you should use status quo logic | when you should use first principles logic |
|---|---|
| if you're dumb | if you're exceptionally smart |
| if mediocre is good enough | in winner-take-all competitions |
| if the positive outcomes are short-tailed | if the positive outcomes are long-tailed |
| if creativity is punished (e.g. in school and doing taxes) | when creativity is allowed (e.g. when inventing things) |
First principles thinking and status quo orientation are two orthogonal means of solving problems. Generally-speaking, it's usually a good idea to try out both status quo logic and first principles logic, and then use whichever logical process produced a better result.
Most people, when calibrating ambition, look at the successful people around them, and use that to calibrate expectations. This is a reasonable thing to do, but being reasonable doesn't get you out-of-sample results.
Ambitious people, when calibrating ambition, usually look to the most successful people they've ever heard of, and use those examples to calibrate expectations. This has the advantage of setting a high target, but it leads to directional errors. Public biographies of famous people are mostly propaganda. In addition, exceptional people lived in exceptional circumstances. Becoming Shogun was a rational ambition for Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1598. Becoming Shogun is not a rational ambition for Takagawa Iori living in 2026. The flow of power has avulsed.
If you're ambitious and you want to live an out-of-sample life, then you can't copy anyone else's strategy exactly, because those examples are a priori in-sample. This is true for all startup founders and artistic creatives, along with anyone who wants to live an exceptionally intentional life. If you want to be the best that it is possible to be, then you have to use absolute thinking, because anything else is a copy of an imperfect role model—and it's easier to copy the imperfections than the perfections.
Absolute thinking asks "given immutable constraints $C$ and value function $V$, what is the best possible value of $V$" and then uses that target as its north star. Absolute thinking is painful, because it makes clear the difference between your current life and the much better life you're not living. It forces you to think too. Done effectively, absolute thinking doesn't even feel like ambition, because it ignores relative positioning. Either you converge on what everyone else is doing, or you stumble upon a secret and notice that everyone around you is insane or a zombie.
Here are some examples of absolute thinking at work in different domains.