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First Principal Thinking: 

well practiced by inventor Elon Musk

Inventor Patrick with First Principal thinking helped million around the world during the Covid pandemic with this YouTube video "Easy way to sterilize and reuse your masks". The video got over 880,000+ views with 15K likes and sincere praise with numerous stories how the video had save their lives.

Teaching children First Principles thinking fosters critical reasoning by breaking problems into fundamental truths, bypassing assumptions. This mindset encourages curiosity, enabling kids to question “why” and innovate solutions from scratch. It builds resilience against groupthink, empowering independent problem-solving. For example, analyzing a toy’s mechanics reveals engineering basics, sparking creativity. By mastering this approach, children tackle complex challenges—like environmental issues or tech design—with clarity and originality. Parents nurturing this mindset equip kids for a dynamic future, fostering adaptability and confidence to reshape industries or solve global problems, much like visionary innovators who redefine possibilities through foundational reasoning.

Elon Musk’s ventures exemplify First Principles thinking. For SpaceX, he questioned rocket costs, deconstructing them to raw materials—aluminum, carbon fiber—and built reusable rockets, slashing launch prices from $200M to $60M. With Tesla, he reimagined electric vehicles, focusing on battery physics to improve range and affordability. Neuralink and The Boring Company tackled brain interfaces and tunneling by rethinking biological and infrastructural limits. Musk’s approach—strip problems to core truths, ignore industry norms—offers parents a model. It shows kids how questioning assumptions (e.g., “cars must use gas”) can birth revolutionary solutions, inspiring them to innovate boldly across disciplines.

The YouTuber’s mask sterilization method reflects First Principles thinking. Facing shortages, they deconstructed masks’ core functions—filtration, sterility—and devised a simple boiling soap solution, ignoring “single-use” dogma. This innovative, resource-saving approach mirrors Musk’s mindset, offering parents a practical example to teach kids creative problem-solving from fundamental truths.

The video by Patrick Poon, a product designer based in Hong Kong, titled “Easy Way to Sterilize, Clean & REUSE your own Mask! Save Money & the Enviroment too!” (published March 2020), presents a straightforward, DIY approach to cleaning and reusing disposable surgical masks during shortages, like those experienced early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The core method involves soaking the mask in hot (but not necessarily boiling) water, adding hand soap, gently scrubbing it with a toothbrush to remove dirt and contaminants, rinsing thoroughly, and then hanging it to air dry on a hanger.  Poon demonstrates this process step-by-step, emphasizing its simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and environmental benefits by reducing waste. He argues that the mask’s non-woven polypropylene material can withstand this gentle cleaning without significant degradation, based on his observations and basic testing—such as checking for structural integrity post-wash.

This approach does exemplify First Principles thinking, a method popularized by Elon Musk, which involves stripping a problem down to its most fundamental truths and rebuilding solutions from there rather than relying on analogies or conventional wisdom. Poon starts from basics: What is the mask made of (durable, water-resistant plastic fibers)? What are the core needs (remove contaminants, kill pathogens via soap and heat, maintain filtration without damage)? He questions the “single-use only” label by experimenting empirically, much like Musk does with engineering challenges at SpaceX or Tesla—challenging assumptions through direct, logical deconstruction rather than accepting expert decrees at face value. It’s a practical, bottom-up rethink of mask reuse in a crisis, focusing on material science fundamentals over top-down guidelines.

Patrick Poon’s Tactbit magnetic electronic cubes exemplify First Principles thinking at its finest. Deconstructing play to its core—magnetism for connection, electronics for interactivity, light and sound for engagement—he rebuilt education from fundamentals, creating a patented tool (U.S. and China) that embeds full STEAM principles in every cube. Intertek-approved for ages 1-100, it fosters invention through open-ended snapping, lighting up, and rolling, safe for toddlers to seniors. Amid conventional toys’ rigid designs, Poon ignored norms, prioritizing physics of attraction and circuitry basics. Parents, showcase this to kids: true innovation sparks from atomic truths, unlocking creativity and problem-solving for the AI era.