It was some good old-fashioned Greek logic.
When José Mourinho sat down at his first press conference as Manchester United manager, he summoned some reasoning that dates back to 384 BC and the northern periphery of classical Greece. More recently, it’s a mental model that’s been applied by Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City.
Aristotle’s often described as the first scientist in history. A student at Plato’s academy, his works are the earliest known formal study of logic. He wrote, “The naturally proper direction of our road is from things better known and clearer to us, to things that are clearer and better known by nature; for the things known to us are not the same as the things known unconditionally. Hence it is necessary for us to progress, following this procedure, from the things that are less clear by nature, but clearer to us, towards things that are clearer and better known by nature.”
It’s easy for us apply subjective hindsight to Mourinho’s announcement that Rooney will revert to playing as a striker, and tell ourselves that it’s the obvious thing to do. But it wasn’t obvious to England coach Roy Hodgson, because as humans we mostly reason by analogy and compare our decisions to things that are nearby, something that’s already been done or is similar to what other people are doing.
Hodgson reasoned that Rooney should play in midfield because that is what Louis Van Gaal decided and, perhaps, because of longer-standing narrative in the press about Rooney having lost a yard of pace or summoning the spirit of Paul Scholes’ deeper-lying heyday. Mourinho, to his credit, broke this chain. He did this as Aristotle would, by moving towards things that are clearer and better known by nature.
“Maybe he is not a striker any more. Maybe he is not a No9 any more but, with me, he will never be a No6. He will never be somebody playing 50 metres from the goal. You can tell me his passing is amazing. Yes, his passing is amazing but my passing is also amazing without pressure. There are many players with a great pass but to be there and put the ball in the net is the most difficult thing to find. So, for me, he will be a nine or a 10 – a nine and a half maybe – but not a six and not even an eight.”
Elon Musk is a bold, outrageous visionary who’s actually getting big stuff like electric cars and sending rockets to Mars done. At Tesla, Musk’s management style is to take complex problems like the cost of building rockets or the stock market values of the material constituents of battery packs and break them down to their first principles:
“First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there.
Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”
With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”
It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminium, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”
It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realises.”
What’s true is that Wayne Rooney knows where the goal is. This isn’t a subjective statement because the numbers show this to be true. So this is where Mourinho has chosen to reason up from.
Zlatan nod downs to Rooney half-volleys, anyone?