Chef Massimo Bottura was stuck.
His Modena restaurant, Osteria Francescana, was doing well serving traditional fare, but he felt creatively boxed in. While working in New York he met his wife, Lara, who opened a new door: art. They made a ritual of visiting galleries every weekend and kept it up when they returned to Italy.
At the Venice Biennale, lightning struck. In a room hung with Maurizio Cattelan’s eerily realistic pigeons, complete with droppings trailing down the walls, Bottura saw his path.
If he wanted to make his mark, he said, he’d need to climb to the rafters and “poop” on the generations before him (his words, not mine).
First, though, he had to go back to the drawing board and ask why he was a chef at all.
What Rose to the Surface
After a period of reflection, three priorities became clear:
Communicate emotion and memory
Respect ingredients as building blocks to reinvent tradition
Express what Italy means to him
From that foundation came a provocation: Six Tortellini Walking to the Broth.
Six tortellini — no more. Instead of spoonfuls, he asked diners to pay attention to each piece.
The locals were livid. You don’t mess with tradition. You don’t mess with Nonna. But persistence, craft, and a little luck won them over, then the wider world.
Another emblem of his approach was Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart, a dessert that turned a kitchen accident and childhood memory into playful haute cuisine.
Osteria Francescana would go on to be ranked among the best restaurants in the world.
Dogma and Analogy
“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
— Bertrand Russell
When we face a problem, we usually reach for one of two tools: analogy or first principles.
Reasoning by analogy relies on what has worked before. We look at precedents, tweak the method, and infer that things similar in one respect are likely similar in others. This is practical and often right.
It’s also, at times, essential. In safety-critical domains such as aviation checklists, clinical protocols, and nuclear operations, analogy and standard operating procedures save lives. Novelty for its own sake would be reckless.
The craft is knowing when to follow the map and when to draw a new one.
Still, our love of analogy can blunt originality. We project familiar forms into the future and mistake today’s categories for tomorrow’s reality.
Think of the refrain: “AI will steal our jobs.” That assumes the number of roles is fixed rather than transformed by new work we can’t yet see. A decade ago, “UX designer” was barely on the radar; now it’s everywhere.
The toxic form of analogy is dogma. You’ll hear it when curiosity hits a wall:
“That’s how we’ve always done it.”
“Because I said so.”
Deference to authority can short-circuit our own reasoning. Real innovation, and a genuinely self-directed life, require building a thinking process free of those shackles.
That means identifying your values and testing them in the real world. It can be painful, but it’s the work.
What Is True?
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
— Galileo
Thinking for ourselves starts with a shift of stance. We are the scientist in the lab, not the experiment. We are the chessboard, not the pawns.
“First principles” has deep roots. Aristotle called them “the first basis from which a thing is known.” Centuries later, Descartes used systematic doubt, stripping beliefs back to what could not be denied, arriving at “I think, therefore I am.”
Closer to our time, consider Dee Hock, the founder of Visa.
In the late 1960s, credit cards were chaotic: banks in silos, slow transactions, rampant fraud, no standards. The system tottered under lawsuits and instability.
Hock stepped back to first principles and reframed money itself:
“Money had become guaranteed alphanumeric data expressed in the currency symbol of one country or another. Thus, a bank would become no more than an institution for the custody, loan, and exchange of guaranteed alphanumeric data.”
In other words, money in a digital era is data.
By discarding assumptions about banking, he designed Visa as a decentralised, self-organising network. A bold break from the old paradigm.
The prompt for you is simple: substitute money with whatever you’re trying to create, and substitute expensive or impossible with your current assumptions.
The Five Whys
There’s also a humbler path: become your six-year-old self and ask why — then ask again. Often five whys will get you to a root cause.
Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, offers a classic example:
A new release broke a key feature. Why? A server failed.
Why did it fail? An obscure subsystem was misused.
Why was it misused? The engineer didn’t know how to use it properly.
Why didn’t he know? He was never trained.
Why wasn’t he trained? His manager doesn’t believe in training new engineers because “we’re too busy.”
What looks like a technical fault is revealed as a human one — and that’s where the fix belongs.
A First Principles Sprint
Make this practical. Try a short sprint the next time you’re stuck.
1) Define the function.
State plainly what the thing must do for the user or for you. Avoid form words like “report,” “campaign,” or “role.”
2) List constraints.
Write the hard limits: time, money, regulation, skills, materials. Mark which ones are assumptions rather than facts.
3) Test one small, heretical change.
Pick a rule you “know” to be true and break it safely for a week. Measure what happens. Keep what works; discard the rest.
Example: Redesigning a Team Meeting
Suppose your weekly team meeting feels like a drag.
1) Define the function.
The meeting’s purpose isn’t “to have a meeting,” but to align the team on priorities and remove blockers.
2) List constraints.
You have one hour, ten people, and a shared calendar. But are those limits real? Could it be shorter? Asynchronous? Are all ten people essential?
3) Test one small, heretical change.
Cancel the meeting for a week and replace it with a shared document where everyone posts three bullet points: their top priority, one blocker, and one ask. You respond in writing and close the loop by Friday.
After a week, you may find that decisions move faster and people reclaim an hour of focus. Or you might bring the meeting back, but redesigned around conversation, not updates.
Ask Better Questions
The quality of our questions determines the quality of our breakthroughs.
When Steve Jobs reimagined Apple’s retail presence, he didn’t ask, “How do we build the best store?” He asked, “Where do people like to hang out?”
Frank Gehry, the world renowned architect, when designing a school, asks “What is learning? What is teaching?”
For Bottura, the question was “What is food?”
The common thread is function before form. Food should communicate emotion, not just provide nutrition. Retail should be a place people love to be, not merely a showroom. Buildings can choreograph encounters, not just enclose space.
Your career is no different. If you are clear on your values, have honed real skills, and understand how you contribute, then the form of your job matters less than the function it serves.
You get to define the formula.
Conventional Wisdom
First principles thinking places you on a different trajectory that loosens the gravitational pull of convention.
We are social animals, and our emotions make us conform. Often that’s useful, which is why analogy is a good default.
The art is knowing when you’re at a crossroads. There are times to be the cook and follow the recipe, and times to be the chef and write a new one.
When the moment calls for originality, or when your path feels stale, put on the lab coat (or the chef’s hat) and get to work.
Conclusion
Food writer Faith Willinger said it best about Massimo Bottura:
“Massimo brings something else to the plate besides food. He arrived at his own formula for what a three-Michelin-star chef could be. His dishes are made with traditional Modena ingredients but used differently from a trattoria. It’s the art, the music, the place, the ingredients, the whole concept behind the food, that makes it more interesting.
His most important ingredient is his memory: the taste of how things were made, taken and interpreted in a more modern way. He takes what his mother made and turns it into something divine.”
That is the promise of first principles: honour the past, question the assumptions, and build something worthy of memory.
If this essay resonated with you, share it with someone who might be stuck inside tradition.
New essays every week — on meaning, creativity, and work that matters.
DBN in Action
This month on Finding Meaning in Work, Cam shares how a decade in banking gave way to a vocation he’d been circling since childhood: dog behaviour training.
Raised around a family boarding kennel, he never saw dogs as a career until corporate hierarchy and box-ticking became impossible to ignore. At forty, he sat down and wrote a list of what he genuinely liked. Dogs kept winning.
Cam signed up for a training accreditation, joined a mentor circle, learnt quickly inside a busy shelter, and launched Act of Dog with a simple website and a few Google ads. Today he specialises in fear, anxiety and aggression in dogs, starting not with commands but with safety and self-regulation.
You’ll hear the real turning points in Cam’s story: moving to London with no plan, the mentors who nudged him forward, and the partner who quietly believed in him.
What stands out isn’t the leap from banking to dog behaviour work but the way he did it, by following curiosity rather than certainty. His approach applies far beyond dogs: build trust first, then teach.
If you’ve ever thought about changing direction, or you lead people who feel stretched or stuck, this conversation is a reminder that progress doesn’t always come from pushing harder. Sometimes it starts by slowing down long enough to build trust with others.. and with yourself.
Listen now by searching for Finding Meaning in Work on your favourite podcast app, or click the button above
