Chapter 6 Summary Part I: • Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner. • Pedestals are the part of the problem you know you can already solve, like designing the perfect business card or logo. The hardest thing is training the monkey. • When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress. • Building pedestals creates the illusion that you are making progress toward your goal, but doing the easy stuff is a waste of time if the hard stuff is actually impossible.

Chapter 11 Summary: • Goals, when set, are a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you're trying to gain against the costs you're willing to bear. • Inflexible goals aren't a good fit for a flexible world. • With better advance planning (like identifying monkeys and pedestals and kill criteria) and the help of a good quitting coach, you can make goals more flexible, setting at least one "unless" and planning regular check-ins on the analysis that initially led to setting the goal.

Chapter 11 Summary: • Goals can make it possible to achieve worthwhile things, but goals can also increase the chances that we will escalate commitment when we should quit. • Goals are pass-fail in nature. You either reach the finish line or you don't, and progress along the way matters very little. • Don't just measure whether you hit the goal, ask what you have achieved and learned along the way. • Set intermediate goals and prioritize goals that allow you to recognize progress along the way or acquire something valuable even if you don't reach the goal.

We need to redefine what waste is. What does it mean to waste your time or money or effort? Our problem is that we tend to think about these things in a backward-looking way. We feel like if we walk away from something, that means we've wasted everything that we put into it. But those are resources that are already spent. You can't get them back.