I originally learned about this anecdote in the book [[Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke]]. It comes from X (Google's Incubator, not the former Twitter), and you can read a more elaborate version on their blog [here](https://blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d). *Having a monkey telling Shakespeare on a pedestal would be quite the number, and could turn certain profit. Once you get that idea, do you start building the pedestal or training the monkey?* The trick is to ask what good is a pedestal if you can't train that monkey. You have no business building a pedestal as long as you didn't prove whether you can teach a monkey to tell poetry or not. Yet too often do we invest considerable time into doing the straightforward tasks instead of asking the hard questions and devising our experiments accordingly so we can fail (learn) as soon as possible. Failing fast won't please your ego, but will spare many resources. What's the most important question for your project right now?