How to get unstuck and start gaining traction on your most audacious goals.
The Monkey and the Pedestal
Imagine you’re asked to create a new attraction for your local park: a monkey reciting Shakespeare on a pedestal. You’re excited about the project and keen to get started. But which element do you tackle first?
Option 1: Build the pedestal first. You’re confident you can make quick progress, because even an ornate pedestal is simple to construct.
Option 2: Train the monkey to speak, even though you have no idea where to start or whether it can even be done.
This analogy comes from Astro Teller, head of innovation at Google X (AKA the ‘Moonshot Factory’).
His point is that as humans, we’re tempted to start with the piece of the project that we are most confident about – the easy, safe work of pedestal-building. But starting with the pedestal creates a false sense of progress. (We’re already halfway done! This is going great!)
If you haven’t solved the most difficult, crucial, highest-risk element (AKA the monkey), you’re wasting your resources building an irrelevant pedestal that will never be used.
His advice is to always tackle the monkey first.
Start with the most likely failure point so you can learn quickly and save both time and money.
Where’s the Monkey in Your Business?
Astro Teller and his team were working on a project to turn seawater into fuel. Building the core technology was do-able for the crack team of scientists working on the project, making it a pedestal problem. Their monkey – the hardest, most urgent challenge – was making the fuel cost-competitive. When he realized they couldn’t solve the monkey problem, Teller called off the project to re-allocate the team and budget to projects with better success odds.
So where’s the monkey in your business plan? Identifying your most likely failure point will help you avoid wasting resources building pedestals.
Here’s what I mean:
- Imagine an accountant who spends three months building a client portal, designing onboarding workflows, and writing a welcome email sequence, all in preparation for launching a new advisory service tier. But she hasn’t dealt with the monkey: Will her existing clients pay more for advisory conversations?
- Or a plumber who wants to move into commercial contracts because the margins are better, so they build a new page for the website and get new uniforms with updated branding instead of dealing with the monkey: Can the current crew, using existing equipment, complete a commercial job?
- Or a retail store owner who believes a loyalty program would bring customers back more often. He spends weeks researching software, designing a points structure, and training the team. But he hasn’t tackled the monkey: Will customers value a loyalty program, or do they come back (or not) for other reasons entirely?
In each case, the pedestal work feels like progress. All those To Do’s are getting done!
But each business is wasting resources until the critical questions are answered.
Tackling the Monkey
It’s easy to waste time working on the wrong part of a project, but confronting the hardest element can also cause paralysis.
You’ve got the monkey, but you still don’t know how you’re going to train it to recite Shakespeare!
You’ve got to figure out the first step.
The remedy is deliberately narrowing your focus. Break the big, impossible thing into its component parts, and take just one step at a time. Remember that you don’t need to know where you’ll park at the destination before you pull out of your driveway.
Two Ways to Get Unstuck
You might recognize yourself as one of these:
- The pedestal builder has been “getting ready” for longer than they want to admit. Their to-do list is full of activity but the core question (e.g. Will anyone pay for this?) remains untested. They need to stop building, stop taking classes, and go find the monkey.
- The paralyzed planner has found the monkey, but they don’t know how to teach it to talk. They’re stuck in planning mode because the project feels impossible. They need to narrow their focus and just take one next step, even if they can’t see the entire path clearly.
Both are stuck, but for different reasons and with different paths forward.
If you think about your goals for the year ahead, which position do you find yourself in?
This Week’s Takeaway
When you’re working toward an ambitious goal, start at the place the idea will most likely fail. If you can’t solve the monkey problem, don’t waste time building a pedestal.
Once you’ve found the monkey, break down the impossible task into simple steps and focus on progress, not the big picture.
The goal is the best possible allocation of your time, money, team, and energy.
If you want someone to coach you through it, let’s connect.
Up Next – ActionCLUB: The Follow-Up Formula
Join the local business community in networking, learning, and pushing each other to excel on Friday, April 17th from 10-1 for my next in-person get-together, at ActionCLUB.
This month we’ll be discussing tactical, actionable insights and tools on how to build a sales process that closes, without feeling pushy.
Details
- Friday April 17th, 10am-1pm
- Located at Idea Mississauga, Square One
- Interactive session: “The Follow-Up Formula”
- Featuring table discussions & a networking lunch with local entrepreneurs
Supercommunicators: By Charles Duhigg
This book offers a useful lens on why some conversations seem effortless while others stall out. It breaks communication down into three layers: practical, emotional, and social, and suggests that most disconnects happen when we’re not aligned on which one we’re actually having. It’s a helpful framework for navigating everyday interactions, especially in business settings where what’s being said often isn’t the whole story.
Thanks for reading The Extra Mile! Subscribe below to receive new posts and support my work. If you enjoyed what you read, share or leave a comment!
