Jason Feifer, Entrepreneur March–April 2025:

[Consider] a problem-solving framework called “the monkey and the pedestal.” […]

Imagine getting a crazy assignment at work: You must teach a monkey to recite Shakespeare while standing on a pedestal. Now ask yourself: What’s the first thing you should do?

Maybe you say, “Build the pedestal!”

That sounds logical. The pedestal is what we call low-hanging fruit—the small, easy stuff that we love to tackle first, because it gives us a sense of progress. But that’s the wrong answer.

“There is no point in building pedestals if you can’t solve for the monkey,” writes behavioral researcher Annie Duke, whom I first learned this from. Because, sure, you could build an amazing pedestal—but what’s the point, if a monkey can’t learn to recite Shakespeare on it?

In other words, the monkey and the pedestal are two different kinds of solutions:

• THE MONKEY is the pivotal part of any problem—and if you don’t solve for the monkey, nothing else you do matters.
• THE PEDESTAL is everything else you do to solve the problem—often because it’s easier, less scary, or more obvious than the monkey.

Now here’s our biggest obstacle: When we take on big projects, we often have no idea what the hardest part is! That’s the point of this exercise. You must step back and ask yourself: What’s my monkey?