Imagine that you’re trying to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in a public park. If you can achieve such an impressive spectacle, you’ve got a moneymaking act on your hands.
[Recognize] that there are two pieces to becoming successful at this endeavor: training the monkey and building the pedestal. One piece of the puzzle presents a possibly intractable obstacle in the way of success. And the other is building the pedestal. People have been building pedestals since ancient Greece and probably before. Over two-plus millennia, pedestals have been thoroughly figured out. You can buy one at a furniture store or a hardware store, or turn a milk crate upside down.
The bottleneck, the hard thing, is training a monkey to juggle flaming torches.
The point of this mental model is to remind you that there is no point building the pedestal if you can’t train the monkey.
In other words, you ought to tackle the hardest part of the problem first.