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Two things shape the course of your life: luck and your decisions (with Annie Duke)
Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg
Monkey and the pedestal: Insights on Prioritizing Tasks and Avoiding Sunk Costs
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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