Monkey First principle dictates building the hardest part of the moonshot first

Tackle the most difficult issue first.^[1] If an innovative idea has a single point of failure that, by definition, will cause the entire venture to fail with it, validating the solution to that single point of failure should be the first priority of the innovators. This minimizes the possibility of getting caught in the Sunk Cost Fallacy that would otherwise be likely to occur in proportion to the amount of resources invested in solving the easier issues first.^[2]

In Think Like a Rocket Scientist, Varol explains:

You’ve 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 train it to recite passages from Shakespeare. How do you begin? …If you’re 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, really hard.”
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But here’s the problem: Building the pedestal is the easiest part. “You can always build the pedestal,” Teller says. “All of 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 can’t be trained to talk, let alone recite Shakespeare —you want to know that up front. What’s more, the more time you spend building the pedestal, the harder it becomes to walk away from moonshots that shouldn’t be pursued. This is called the sunk-cost fallacy. Humans are irrationally attached to their investments. The more we invest time, effort, or money, the harder it becomes to change course.

To counter the sunk-cost fallacy, put the monkey first—tackle the hardest part of the moonshot up front. Beginning with the monkey ensures that your moonshot has a good chance of becoming viable before you’ve poured massive amounts of resources into a project.

Varol goes on to explain that the “monkey-first attitude requires developing a set of ‘kill metrics,’ as X [Google’s Moonshot group] calls them, a set of go/no-go criteria for determining when to press ahead and when to quit.” But, he advises, the ”criteria must be defined at the outset—when you’re relatively clearheaded—before your emotional and financial investments might trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cloud your judgment. These “kill metrics” are similar to “stopping rules” from Simple Rules.

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