How to Solve Hard Problems

We waste our time chasing the wrong projects. Here's how to know what's worth your time.

- Jason Feifer

YOU’RE TRYING to solve a big problem. Nothing seems to work. Hold up! Before you waste more time, you should consider a problem-solving framework called “the monkey and the pedestal.” It comes out of X, the innovation factory where Alpha-bet, Google’s parent company, takes its most ambitious bets, and it will save you a lot of time. Here’s how it works.

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: