I came across this piece of wisdom in Annie Duke’s book Quit, and I love it.
The concept also shows up in Google X—the division responsible for tackling the company’s most audacious bets. Self-driving cars. Internet balloons. Robotics.
At X, they use a mental model to prioritize work:
If your goal is to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare while standing on a pedestal…
You don’t start by building the pedestal.
Why?
Because building a pedestal is easy. Training a monkey to speak? That’s the hard part—and also the part that determines whether the whole idea is viable.
Their rule: Train the monkey first.
Monkeys vs. Pedestals
Every ambitious project has both:
- Pedestals are the easy, visible tasks that feel like momentum—branding, design, internal docs, pitch decks.
- Monkeys are the core risk. The technical breakthrough. The customer acquisition engine. The behavioral change.
Early-stage teams—especially smart ones—fall into the trap of polishing pedestals while ignoring the monkey.
It feels like progress.
It looks good to stakeholders.
But it’s often just delay dressed up as productivity.
What Pedestals Look Like in Startups
Here’s what pedestal-building looks like in the wild:
- A team spends three weeks debating the homepage copy… but hasn’t tested whether anyone even wants the product.
- Founders obsess over pricing models… without a single paying customer.
- Engineers build dashboards and settings pages… before nailing core functionality.
Pedestals create the illusion of traction—but if the monkey isn’t trainable, none of it matters.
Why This Matters
The risk isn’t just wasted effort. It’s sunk cost.
Every hour spent on a pedestal is time not spent validating whether the idea is even worth pursuing. And when the hard part eventually rears its head—as it always does—teams are so far invested they can’t walk away cleanly.
Founders end up burning cash, time, and morale trying to rescue a business that was never viable in the first place.
This model helps you get to “no” faster—which, paradoxically, is how great companies eventually find their “yes.”
If you’re leading a startup, here’s the framework:
- Identify the Monkey: What’s the hardest, riskiest part of your plan? That’s what you should be tackling first.
- Kill Pedestal Work (for now): Fancy doesn’t matter until the core problem is solved. Build the ugly version first.
- Get to No Quickly: If the monkey can’t be trained, you want to find out before you’ve built the stage lights and booked the theater.
Look at what your team is working on right now.
Ask yourself: Are we training the monkey? Or are we just building a pedestal because it’s safer, cleaner, and easier to talk about?