Monkey and the pedestal: Insights on Prioritizing Tasks and Avoiding Sunk Costs

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When embarking on a new project, prioritize addressing the most significant unknowns before investing time and resources into other elements that may create an illusion of progress. In the scenario of training a monkey to juggle flaming torches, the focus should be on determining whether the monkey can truly juggle rather than constructing a pedestal. Building the pedestal first leads to unnecessary efforts, as it may distract from the essential task of training the monkey, which is the actual bottleneck in achieving the desired outcome. Additionally, creating this pedestal can give a false sense of achievement, as it represents a task that is already known to be doable. Ultimately, this can lead to the sunk cost fallacy; if too much effort is put into the unnecessary pedestal, individuals might feel pressured to continue despite realizing that training the monkey is not feasible, since they want to justify the resources already expended. Avoiding this trap requires focusing on solving the real challenges upfront and recognizing when to pivot away from unproductive paths.

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Should people spend more time becoming better decision-makers? What are the main things that determine how our lives turn out? What's wrong with pro / con lists? When should we deviate from making decisions based on expected value calculations? What kinds of uncertainty might we encounter in the decision-making process? Are explicit decision calculations self-defeating? How similar is intuitive decision-making to decision-making that's based on calculations? How useful are heuristics? How can we know which decisions are significant enough to warrant calculations? What makes a decision hard? What's the omission / commission bias? What lessons can we learn from monkeys and pedestals? Should decision-making strategies be taught in primary and secondary schools?

Annie Duke is an author, speaker, and consultant in the decision-making space, as well as Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund. Her latest book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, was released in 2022 from Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint. Her previous book, Thinking in Bets, is a national bestseller. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than $4 million in tournament poker, has won a World Series of Poker bracelet, and is the only woman to have won the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions and the NBC National Poker Heads-Up Championship. She is the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit whose mission is to improve lives by empowering students through decision skills education. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn or via her website, AnnieDuke.com; or subscribe to her newsletter on Substack.

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