• First principles thinking: actively questioning every assumption you think you know about a given problem or scenario  and then creating new knowledge and solutions from scratch. 
• Reasoning by analogy: building knowledge and solving problems based on prior assumptions, beliefs and widely held ‘best practices’ approved by majority of people.

1. Identify and define your current assumptions;
2. Breakdown the problem into its fundamental principles;
3. Create new solutions from scratch.

The First Principles Thinking can be applied in our daily life:

• Starting a business requires first principles thinking to build a fundamentally better product or service.
• On a busy day, first principles thinking makes us do what's essential while not being bogged down with time constraints.
• Applying the first principles toward good health will make us feel considerably better than obeying some diet or exercise routine that we hate.

You can’t please everybody that you meet in life.

Critics are not all bad. You can learn things about yourself from them too. The solution is to learn from criticism, not be afraid of it.

See career challenges for what they are: an opportunity to try something different. 

If your career never got messed up, then you’d probably stay in your comfort-zone for your entire life and never try something different.

Instead of thinking of a cut-and-dry end goal to certain situations, creative people sit back and examine the problem in different ways before beginning to work.

If you find yourself stagnating by focusing on generic problems, try to re-conceptualize the problem by focusing on a more meaningful angle.

For example: Instead of thinking “What would be something cool to paint?” rather ask, “What sort of painting evokes the feeling of loneliness that we all encounter after a break-up?”

Creating “psychological” distance may be useful for breaking through a creative block.

Try to imagine your creative task as being disconnected and distant from your current position/location - this may make the problem more accessible and can encourage higher level thinking.

• Eliciting new knowledge: when you stop problem-solving, your brain keeps working on it in the background and may come across memories you may have ignored when you were actively trying to think about the problem.
• Selective forgetting: an incubation period weakens the unhelpful solutions that are distracting you. 
• Problem restructuring: stepping away from the problem lets your brain reorganize the problem.

When you're struggling with a problem or decision take a break from thinking hard.

Some studies say an incubation period as short as 10 minutes might be enough to gain a new perspective. But that’s not unanimous, so you might want to experiment to discover what works for you. 

It means producing something novel or original, evaluating, solving problems, whether on paper, on stage, in a laboratory or even in the shower.

Geniuses know “how” to think, instead of “what” to think.

People who are more creative can simultaneously engage brain networks that don’t typically work together.

Great problem solvers take a high-level view of the issues involved and jot down a list of all the potential factors that could get in the way of a solution. 

So many times great opportunities are wrapped up inside simple problems.

The problem at hand may be symptomatic of bigger problems with your systems or perhaps your industry.

The key to shifting your perspective and developing the habit of thinking big involves stepping outside of yourself and into another persona — essentially becoming someone who will help you see things bigger, better and more creatively.

You must also think from the perspective of having no limitations or fears and ask big questions persistently until the right answer comes to mind.

• Limiting habits: procrastination, immediatism, negative thinking, making excuses, solving insignificant problems, over-analyzing, perfectionism.
• People criticize and judge the unknown and big ideas are often so.
• Fears of failure and the unknown restrict us to small thoughts, decisions, and actions. 
• Lack of time turns us into small thinkers and immediatists. 
• Lack of incentives robs you of the motivation to stretch yourself emotionally or physically. 

The frames we create for what we experience both inform and limit the way we think.  And most of the time we are not aware of the frames we are using.

Being able to question and shift your frame of reference is an important key to enhancing your imagination because it reveals completely different insights.