If you were trying to teach a monkey to stand on the top of a ten-foot pedestal and recite Shakespeare, what should you do first? Train the monkey, or build the pedestal? There’s no point in building the pedestal first. All of the risk is in training the monkey. Yet, a lot of people will build the pedestal first because it’s easy to default to what feels like progress. I recently heard this extreme example on an episode of Simon Sinek’s podcast “A Bit of Optimism”. It resonated with me both as an investor and a leader. As an investor, my view on growth has changed significantly over the past 2 years. Growth isn’t just a function of more sales, it’s a function of systematically derisking the business over time. Those two are linked. To give you an example, take a company where the revenues are overly exposed to one industry. Launching into new ones both grows and de-risks the business. In the analogy above, building market analysis and PowerPoints equate to building the pedestal. Those are important pieces, but the difficult part will be selling the product – getting customer feedback quickly and closing the first sales are the higher-leverage tasks. Another great example lies within the diligence process. Our evaluations cover dozens of variables, but in every deal only a few matter. It’s important to quickly get to the 2-3 risks that will make or break a business and start our process there. We don’t build the deal memo in the same order every time. We start with those highest-risk items and work our way down. Going the opposite way runs the chance that we create anchoring bias. It’s psychologically very easy to gain conviction by solving the easiest variables and then overlooking the most difficult ones that matter most. This process order also creates more efficiency and for a small team that’s important. Just as we prioritize critical risks in deal evaluation, effective leadership requires helping people to identify and execute on the most consequential actions over a long period of time. Like in investing, we can put compounding to work. I start every one-on-one with this question: “What’s the most important thing you need to get done this week?” Focus matters and we aren’t here to build pedestals. PowerPoints are fine, but solutions and execution are better. We all get pulled in 100 different directions during the week, but to move the needle we need to execute on the tasks that will move us closer to our goal. If we can do those repeatedly and with consistency, we’ll look up at the end of the year and be proud of what we’ve accomplished. When we have the discipline to prioritize high-impact work over easy wins, we build better businesses, make better investment decisions, and create opportunities for bigger impact. We also probably end up more satisfied with our work. So, in a sentence I never thought I’d write – spend more time identifying monkeys.