There’s a great story from Google X’s Astro Teller about a maxim they use.
Let’s say you’re trying to teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare while on a pedestal. How should you allocate your time and money between training the monkey and building the pedestal?
The right answer, of course, is to spend zero time thinking about the pedestal. But I bet at least a couple of people will rush off and start building a really great pedestal first. Why? Because at some point the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update — and you want to be able to show off something other than a long list of reasons why teaching a monkey to talk is really, really hard.
Tackle the monkey first is a beautiful way of visualizing the idea of testing the riskiest assumptions first.
Tackle the monkey first.
