This is Help Wanted, the show that makes your work work for you. I'm Jason Pfizer,

editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine.

And I'm money expert Nicole Lappin. On Tuesdays, Jason and I answer the helpline and help

callers solve their work problems. And on Thursdays, I give you one way to improve your work and build a career or company you love.

And it starts now.

You're trying to solve a problem, and nothing seems to work.

Here is why. It's because when we solve problems

we often start with the easiest part or with the stuff that we know how to do the

best and then we work our way up. But that's often the wrong approach.

Every big problem has one fundamental challenge and if you don't know what that thing is

then you're just wasting your time. Let's call that

thing the monkey. You must know your monkey. And what is the monkey? I didn't just

come up with that here myself. The monkey is part of a really

eye-opening metaphor that's used at some of the highest levels of innovation in business today.

So let me introduce it to you. The metaphor

goes like this. Imagine that you get a crazy assignment at work. You are

assigned to teach a monkey to recite Shakespeare while standing on a

pedestal. Now, okay, you might ask yourself, what is the first thing I should do here? And then you might think, well, it's to build the

pedestal. That sounds logical. The pedestal is what we would call low-hanging fruit. You know, it's easy, it's small, it's satisfying.

We can tackle it first, it gives us a sense of progress,

if we have a boss who's checking in on us,

now it gives us something to show the boss and say,

...