Atoms are the smallest particle of an element. From this single statement you can build up most of physics. The speed with which atoms move is temperature and the number of times the atoms hit something is pressure and so on. And because you can build the rest of physics from here, you can understand anything in physics by breaking it down to the level of this statement. People call a statement like this the First Principle. But I think the name First Principle does not accurately represent the statement because it implies something that has already been defined. When, in fact, most of the times you have to figure it out on your own. The name also implies that it explicitly applies to concepts when it also applies to systems. Therefore, I will use the more appropriate name Defining Factor. A Defining Factor determines how something will behave. So you can understand anything after you break it down to its Defining Factor. I'll share an example of the Defining Factor of a system and a concept. For a system, let's take the example of the system of Netlfix. For Netflix it is important that they need to have the most content on their platform and they do. And Netflix understood early on that to have the most content on their platform, their licensing system has to be fast. Therefore they created a system where its people could license content and pay for it without getting approval from anyone else in the company. Moving from the norm of approval to accountability. A system so unique that any new executive hired in the position to license was shocked at the lack of red tape and the ability to spend millions of dollars on their own. But it worked and continues to work today with Netflix having more content than any other streaming platform (Movies and TV shows combined). The Defining Factor of Netflix is a system of complete discretion to its employees in licensing content. (See No Rules Rules by Reed Hastings for reference) Now for a concept, take money. Money is a shared fiction. It does not have any value itself. People are what give it its value. The Defining Factor of money is that people need to exchange services and goods and need a medium to do so. From here you can build on why a physical labourer works much harder than Mark Zuckerberg but makes much less than him. It is because the service the labourer is giving is his time which is limited to about 10 hours a day while Zuckerberg is giving a software which is limited not by his time but by the servers needed to run them. And then from here you can also explain why software developers doing the same work can make over a hundred thousand dollars in a year in the US while those in Pakistan are limited to making a few thousand dollars. This is because in the US, the companies are selling software which is not limited by the number of hours they work while those in Pakistan are mostly selling development as a service which is limited by the time available to those developers. Now coming back to the Defining Factor of money being the exchange of services and goods, to make more money than others, you have to provide services to more people than you buy them from or provide a more valuable service than you buy from them. One way to do this is to start your own company as explained beautifully in paulgraham.com/wealth.html An important part of finding the Defining Factor is to not let yourself be confused by other factors that are significant about the thing but are not the Defining Factor. One way to differentiate the Defining Factor from other significant factors is that the Defining Factor will help explain extrapolate to other true statements but the significant factors will not. Let's take an example of this and look at the definition of a dictionary which lists a number of significant factors of the dictionary. "a book or electronic resource that lists the words of a language (typically in alphabetical order) and gives their meaning, or gives the equivalent words in a different language, often also providing information about pronunciation, origin, and usage." This is another problem in learning about things from others. Because you often get a list of significant factors about the thing without specifically getting the Defining Factor. The Defining Factor of a dictionary is that it records how words are used. And this alone can help explain every behavior of the dictionary so that it can be a list or it can be a single word on a webpage or it can be a logographic symbol like in the Chinese language. It can also help explain why one word can have multiple meanings because it is used in multiple ways. Let's take another example of separating Defining Factor from significant factors. The CPU Cache has many significant factors. It is faster than Ram and closer to the CPU than Ram. But these cannot help explain why Cache cannot be as big as the Ram. The Defining Factor of CPU Cache is that it uses a system where the search in Cache is done without knowing where in Cache the data is or even if the data is in the Cache, as opposed to Ram which has all data stored against defined addresses and the search has to first find the address of the data it is looking for then go to that address to get that data. A simple analogy is that Cache is like the 3 drawers on your desk while Ram is like your cupboard which has over 10 drawers. When you need to use something frequently, you just place it in one of the desk drawers without having to remember which. Then later you can just go through all the 3 drawers on your desk very quickly to see which one has it. But you use the cupboard drawers differently to store things in their fixed places. Therefore you need to remember which drawer you placed individual items in because you would not want to go through all 10 drawers just to find that one thing. The downside of this is that in addition to storing things in your cupboard you have to remember/store address of which drawer has which item. So this basically turns it into a double search where you first look for the data which mentions which cupboard drawer something is in and then go to that drawer to get that thing. So the Defining Factor of Cache is looking through a small number of places for frequently used data. And from this you can explain why Cache cannot be as big as Ram because Cache depends on looking through all the available slots without knowing which one the data is in and if you increase the number of slots from 3 to 10, it would take much longer to look through all of them before finding the data. Imaging looking through 10 drawers without knowing which one has what you're looking for compared to only 3 desk drawers. This is why Cache cannot be as large as Ram because its system looking for something without remembering where it was depends on it being small to look through quickly. Like the things discussed above, everything can be broken down to their Defining Factor including complete fields like Psychology and Sociology or concepts like Startups and. And it is best that you do break them down if you want to understand or work with them.