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'Tackle the monkey first': The simple way geniuses approach big tasks

This analogy can help you figure out where to start.

via Leonid Danilov/Pexels and Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The monkey and pedestal problem

When taking on a daunting task, such as buying a house, starting a new career, or making a significant personal change, the most important thing is to establish one’s priorities to get the job done.

It makes sense to tackle the hard part first, but often, we get hung up on the smaller, easier tasks that prevent us from taking on the issue that could make or break the project. That’s when great thinkers use the “monkey and pedestal” analogy to decide where to place their time and energy.

The analogy is simple: If you’re going to create a show in which a monkey stands on a pedestal and recites Shakespeare, it’s best to first focus on teaching the monkey to memorize “Romeo and Juliet” rather than work on building the perfect pedestal.

If the monkey can’t do Shakespeare, then there’s no point in building the pedestal. "Tackle the monkey first. Don't use up all your resources on the easy stuff,” Astro Teller, captain of Alphabet X, Google’s special project division, said, according to Inc.



So, if you are looking to buy a house, it’s best first to arrange a down payment because, without that, it doesn’t matter if you’ve found the best neighborhood or have chosen a real estate agent. If you are starting a new career, ensuring you are qualified for the next step and have proper credentials and experience is more important than searching for your dream company.

In other words, don’t waste your resources on the low-hanging fruit.

“Low-hanging fruit is, by definition, pedestal building, offering the illusion of progress rather than any real ground gained toward reaching an ultimate goal,” side hustle guru Steven Imke writes on his blog. “What makes them low hanging is the fact they are easy, and you already know how to do it. Building pedestals means spending time, money, and other resources on things that don’t bring you closer to the question of whether you can achieve what you are striving for.”

On his blog, Teller explains that Alphabet spent a lot of time working on a project to turn seawater into carbon-neutral fuel. The team got to work on the monkey, determining whether they could make their fuel cost competitive. Unfortunately, the team couldn’t do it, so the project was abandoned. But, if the team had started working on distributing the fuel for the first few years and then turned its focus on how to make it cost-effective, they would have wasted tons of resources to get little in return.



The California high-speed rail project is an example of failure to focus on the monkey.

Annie Duke, author of "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away," shared the California high-speed rail project story on The Brainy Business podcast as an example of what can happen when we pay too much attention to the pedestal and not the monkey. The project, which began in 2008, is to create a high-speed rail from San Francisco in the north of the state to San Diego in the south. The problem? They started working on track in the state's interior instead of focusing on the real problem, figuring out how to build track through two mountain ranges south of Silicon Valley and north of Los Angeles.

"Around 2015, they're like, 'Oops, wait. There are these big mountain ranges that seems like a really big problem for completing the line.' They now estimate the budget to be somewhere around $80 billion," nearly four times the original estimate, she says. In the meantime, California is still building the track in the state's interior while it figures out whether it's even possible to build through the mountain ranges. Or, in terms of this conversation, focusing on the low-hanging fruit.

The monkey and the pedestal analogy may seem like a warning against attempting anything too complicated. But at its core, it’s all about getting the hard part done first, and then once that’s achieved, all you have to worry about is the low-hanging fruit or the things you probably know how to do already. Do the hard part first, and then it’s smooth sailing until you achieve your goal.



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A wildly fascinating map captured our top Google searches for each day of 2021

u/V1Analytics/Reddit

See what Americans in each state searched for each day of 2021 in a one-minute video.

Google has become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that the data it reveals is a pretty decent indicator of our collective reality. It's a weird phenomenon, considering the fact that Google has only been a thing for 25 years—basically a single generation—but here we are.

Now that we're wrapping up 2021, we can look back and see what people were searching for the most throughout the year. Reddit user u/V1Analytics pulled together the top trending search terms from Google's 2021 Year in Search summary (for the period before mid-November 2021) and from Google's Daily Search Trends page (from mid-November to now) and illustrated the daily trends for each state in a one-minute video.

It's fascinating to see what Americans were looking up—as well as what they weren't looking up—the most this year.

Watch:

We start with January 6, 2021, which shows most people Googling "Capitol" and "Biden," which isn't surprising considering the attack on the U.S. Capitol as insurrectionists tried to overturn Biden's presidential election win. What is surprising are the six states that were more interested in the Mega Millions jackpot that day. Like, OK people. Really?

Biden dominated searches through January. Soon we collectively turned to the Gamestop (GME) stock phenomenon before a widespread interest in Valheim (video game launch), The Weeknd (Super Bowl performance) and some random power outages. Valheim was apparently super popular before a universal interest in the government's stimulus checks took over the entire second half of March.

In April, Lil Nas X made a splash, followed by rapper DMX. Then Prince Phillip died and Jake Paul had a first-round TKO.

May through early July brought Dogecoin, Dogecoin and more Dogecoin, followed by AMC stock—a very financial period, with some more power outages thrown in for funsies. (Also, Mississippi really likes Dogecoin. Holy moly.)

Then Jeff Bezos went to space and Simone Biles got the twisties, and hey, more power outages! August brought Afghanistan, Hurricane Ida and Jake Paul once again.

In September, Gabby Petito's disappearance had everyone riveted for a solid two weeks before Squid Game, Urban Meyer and Alec Baldwin took over.

October into November saw Travis Scott, Kyle Rittenhouse and Adele dominating people's searches.

Don't blink at the end of November, or you'll miss the school shooting at Oxford High School that piqued people's interest for a day or two before Spotify Wrapped yanked everyone's attention back to what's really important.

Yikes! Tornado in December and then Elon Musk as Time Person of the Year, and that's as far as we've gotten into this month.

It truly is fascinating to see what people were most interested in looking up this year. It's a bit disconcerting in some ways, as well, considering the fact that not one of the top searches had anything to do with the viral pandemic that is still raging and has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans this year alone. Is that a sign that people are tired of the pandemic or just more interested in new things as they come along? Trends can be both organic and driven by what's being covered in the media—and both things can play off of each other—but it's interesting to think about what is missing from this search term synopsis. When we look back at 2021 and its place in U.S. history, is Jake Paul really going to play a bigger role than the coronavirus? Doubtful. Do these search trends offer some indication of why a significant portion of the population is woefully uninformed or misinformed about the pandemic? Possibly.

At any rate, it's an interesting glimpse into what Americans are paying the most attention to.

(A note from V1Analytics about the way the data was collected and presented: "Google Trends provides weekly relative search interest for every search term, along with the interest by state. Using these two datasets for each search term, we're able to calculate the relative search interest for each state for a particular week. Linear interpolation was used to calculate the daily search interest.")

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Beware: Tax companies trick customers with ads that say their services are free

On Dec. 30, the IRS announced it was revamping a long-standing agreement with the online tax preparation industry in which companies offer free filing to people with incomes below certain levels, a category that includes 70% of filers.

The change in what's known as the Free File program came in the wake of multiple ProPublica articles that revealed how the companies in the program steered customers eligible for free filing to their paid offerings. Under the updated agreement, the companies are now prohibited from hiding their Free File webpages from Google searches, and the IRS was allowed to create its own online tax-filing system.

So far, it seems, the companies are abiding by their promise to make their Free File webpages visible in online searches. But the updated agreement appears to have a loophole: It doesn't apply to advertising. Nothing in it, the agreement states, "limits or changes the rights" of participating companies to advertise "as if they were not participating in the Free File program."

As a result, companies like Intuit, whose TurboTax is the top tax prep software, continue to confuse some customers who seek free tax prep into paying. Today, Google searches for "free tax filing" and other similar phrases still yield ads for a plethora of products such as TurboTax's "Free Edition" (its ads promise "100% Free Tax Filing"), which lead customers to pay fees if they don't have simple returns.

Mike Mozart / Flickr

TurboTax's version of Free File — the one that doesn't charge customers anything — typically won't appear until the second page of search results.

Intuit increased its monthly online ad spending noticeably between January 2019 and January 2020, according to search analytics firm Ahrefs. Intuit places its ads strategically in searches for "IRS" and "free file," among thousands of related search terms.

(Ahrefs makes estimates based on search data; it doesn't purport to capture exact numbers but rather to track the general magnitude and direction of the spending.) Ahrefs and a second search analysis firm, SEMRush, say TurboTax spends more on digital ads than competitors TaxAct, TaxSlayer and H&R Block combined.

Intuit does not advertise its Free File offering on Google, according to SEMRush and Ahrefs. (Tax Time Allies, which is funded by Intuit, does advertise Free File, according to Intuit. SEMRush and Ahrefs estimate that spending is a fraction of what Intuit spends on Free Edition.)

Outside of the advertising realm, TurboTax still appears to favor products like Free Edition. So-called organic links to Free Edition appear ahead of links to Free File in many searches, data from SEMRush and Ahrefs shows. TurboTax accomplishes that, search engine optimization expert Rhea Drysdale said, in part by inserting keywords — the word "free" is used 54 times on Free Edition's webpage. By comparison, Drysdale said, the TurboTax Free File landing page uses "free" 19 times.

Google's algorithms are both secret and complicated, so SEO experts can't say for certain why one link appears above another one. But there are many common SEO tactics that TurboTax can use to ensure its Free Edition appears above the Free File program.

"My belief is that you can control a lot [with SEO] within reason," Drysdale said. "Using technical innovations in Google and understanding user behavior, you can see tremendous results from it." Intuit, she added, doesn't "have to do a lot" because it's "such a large player in the field."

via Pro Publica

An Intuit spokesman, Rick Heineman, said the SEO and advertising estimates cited in this article "are not nearly accurate." He added, "Rather than trying to hide Free File as ProPublica has inaccurately claimed, last year TurboTax did more than anyone else to promote it. … Intuit has for two decades provided free tax preparation and has helped taxpayers file more completely free tax returns than all other tax prep software companies combined, including 13 million totally free returns last year alone."

Google's policy bars misrepresentation in ads. It states that advertisers must "clearly and conspicuously disclose the ... full expense that a user will bear." According to a Google spokesperson, TurboTax's ads do not violate its terms. The spokesperson said Google requires advertisers to disclose "criteria for any free offers." TurboTax discloses that Free Edition applies only to "simple tax returns" on its landing page.

Whether it's a question of advertising or SEO, the result seems to be that some low-income taxpayers who qualify to file for free are still paying for TurboTax this tax season — even after the change in the agreement with the IRS. Lyle Hill, a warehouse worker in Georgia with an adjusted gross income of $10,390 last year, said he was looking to file his taxes for free, but he got confused and ended up paying $120 to file his federal and state taxes through Free Edition.

Intuit, he added, declined to refund his fees when he subsequently told the company he'd been steered into a paid option when he'd wanted the free one. Alvyn Velazquez, a student in New York, recounted a similar journey that ended with him paying $120 after going through the Free Edition portal.

Max Miller, an Arkansan who was self-employed in 2019, also encountered difficulties. Miller said he had sought free filing for four years in a row and each time ended up paying TurboTax for Free Edition. After reading ProPublica's reporting last year, Miller intentionally searched for the Free File program in January — and he still struggled to find it online. "Even when I was looking for Free File," he said, "it still wasn't coming up."

Alongside its online ad campaign, Intuit also has three active, national television advertisements for Free Edition that have aired more than 12,000 times since premiering in January 2019, according to metrics from iSpot.tv, a company that tracks TV advertisements. And on Facebook and Instagram, there are more than 500 active advertisements that mention the word "free" and redirect users to download the TurboTax app — in which users cannot access Free File — and to the Free Edition landing page.

An audit released on Feb. 3 by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that last year, 14 million people who qualified for Free File instead paid what ProPublica estimated could amount to about $1 billion in tax prep services to various companies.

The article was originally published by Pro Publica and was written by Will Young.

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YouTube's CEO blasts that sexist Google memo in a powerful, deeply personal essay.

“Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?”

Of all the people to field that question, it's somewhat sobering that Susan Wojcicki — the CEO of YouTube — would be asked it by her own daughter.

"As my child asked me the question I’d long sought to overcome in my own life, I thought about how tragic it was that this unfounded bias was now being exposed to a new generation," Wojcicki wrote in a powerful and deeply personal new essay published by Fortune.

Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for Vanity Fair.

Her daughter's question was prompted by a leaked internal memo written by an engineer at Google, which owns YouTube.

In case you literally missed the memo: James Damore, a former senior software engineer in Google’s search division, sent out a jaw-droppingly offensive analysis to his co-workers falsely asserting that there are biological explanations that justify a lack of female representation in tech fields.

With the memo, Damore was intending to curb bias among his colleagues that, in his opinion, unfairly attributed too much of the gender gap in tech to social factors (like sexism and implicit bias). The problem is, the gap exists solely because of those types of factors — not biological ones. His memo, which sparked frustrations and anger among Google employees, eventually leaked to the press. Damore was fired on Monday.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Not only was the memo painfully inaccurate in explaining how biological differences between men and women supposedly justify the gender gap in tech, it also did very little in pointing out the systemic barriers and implicit biases that actually prevent women from excelling in the industry.

The memo was especially appalling to women like Wojcicki, who's spent much of her adult life overcoming very real(aka, absolutely not biologically based) barriers and biases against women in tech.

As Wojcicki wrote in her essay (emphasis added):

"I’ve had my abilities and commitment to my job questioned. I’ve been left out of key industry events and social gatherings. I’ve had meetings with external leaders where they primarily addressed the more junior male colleagues. I’ve had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men. No matter how often this all happened, it still hurt."

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images.

In her essay, Wojcicki also spelled out why Damore's firing isn't a matter of free speech, as some have argued. "While people may have a right to express their beliefs in public, that does not mean companies cannot take action when women are subjected to comments that perpetuate negative stereotypes about them based on their gender," Wojcicki noted, calling discrimination of all kinds against all groups of people inexcusable.

"What if we replaced the word 'women' in the memo with another group?" she wrote. "What if the memo said that biological differences amongst Black, Hispanic, or LGBTQ employees explained their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles? ... I don’t ask this to compare one group to another, but rather to point out that the language of discrimination can take many different forms and none are acceptable or productive."

For Wojcicki, this issue isn't just personal to her — it's one that's shaping how her own child sees herself and her future.

So it makes sense that the YouTube CEO gave her daughter an answer that cuts straight to the truth.

"Do differences in biology explain the tech gender gap?"

"No," Wojcicki told her daughter. "It’s not true."

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