Tackling a hard project You should do this first

Tackling a hard project You should do this firstTackling a hard project You should do this firstYouve just been put in charge of a particularly audacious project at work. Your boss says you have to get a monkey to stand on a pedestal and then train it to recite passages from Shakespeare.How do you begin?Follow Ladders on FlipboardFollow Ladders magazines on Flipboard covering Happiness, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, Neuroscience, and moreThe questioncomes fromAstro Teller, whos the Captain of Moonshots at Google X (yes, thats his real title). Now known simply as X, the notoriously secretive company is dedicated to finding radical solutions to huge problems by developing breakthrough technologies like self-driving cars, autonomous drones, and contact lenses that measure glucose levels. X doesnt innovateforGoogle. X creates the next Google.Lets go back to the monkey-on-a-pedestal exercise. If youre like most people, you begin with building a pedestal. At some point, the boss is going to pop by and ask for a status update, as Teller explains, 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,reallyhard. Youd rather have the boss give you a pat on the back and say, Hey, nice pedestal, great job So you build the pedestal and wait for a Shakespeare-reciting monkey to magically materialize.But heres the problem Building the pedestal is the easiest part. You can always build the pedestal, Tellersays, but the risk and the learning comes from the extremely hard work of first training the monkey. If the project has an Achilles heel- if the monkey cant be trained to talk, let alone recite Shakespeare- you want to know that up front.Whats more, the more time you spend building the pedestal, the harder it becomes to walk away from projects that shouldnt be pursued. This is called the sunk-cost fallacy. Humans find it hard to abandon things if theyve invested time and money on them. If you spent a bunch o f time carving a gorgeous pedestal, youll be reluctant to call it quits.The monkey-first attitude shut down a project calledFoghorn at X. The project was promising at first A member of X read a scientific paper about taking carbon dioxide out of seawater and turning it into affordable, carbon-neutral fuel with the fhigkeit to replace gasoline. This technology sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie, so X- true to its form- took it on.But it turned out that the technology was the pedestal- it was relatively easy to turn seawater into fuel. The monkey was the cost. The process was expensive, particularly in the face of declining gasoline prices. So the team decided to trigger the kill switch and shut down its own project.I get it Theres far more certainty in building a pedestal than in getting a monkey to talk. We know how to build pedestals, so we build them. In our lives, we spend our time doing what we know best- writing emails, attending endless meetings- instead of tackling the hardest part of a project.And its not like building pedestals iscompletelyunjustified. After all, the project requires the monkey to stand on a pedestal. Carving the pedestal gives us the satisfaction of doing something about the problem and getting some sense of progress- while postponing the inevitable. All this churnfeelsproductive, but its not. Weve built a beautiful pedestal, but the monkey still isnt talking.Heres the thing Whats easy often isnt important, and whats important often isnt easy.The next time youre tempted to build a pedestal, train the monkey first instead.Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned law professor and bestselling author.Click hereto download a free copy of his e-book, The Contrarian Handbook 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, youll get the Weekly Contrarian - a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only).Thisart iclefirst appeared onOzanVarol.com.You might also enjoyNew neuroscience reveals 4 rituals that will make you happyStrangers know your social class in the first seven words you say, study finds10 lessons from Benjamin Franklins daily schedule that will double your productivityThe worst mistakes you can make in an interview, according to 12 CEOs10 habits of mentally strong people