About The Enterprising Ape

At some point, nearly everyone runs into a problem that should be simple, but somehow isn’t. While those around you seem to be tapdancing their way through it, here you are with what appear to be two left shoes.

You might be staring at information that is technically correct but is somehow entirely unhelpful. Maybe you’re starting to wonder if you need another coffee to understand it. Maybe you’re wondering if you’ve had too much coffee and that’s why it won’t sink in. Perhaps you’re wondering whether the sadist who wrote the document you’re contending with has ever had to actually use it and you momentarily imagine them being unceremoniously fired. Then you start thinking about coffee again.

In any event, you feel stuck, like you’ve hit a road block, and despite knowing that you are objectively a reasonably intelligent and capable person, in these moments you feel anything but competent.

Here at The Enterprising Ape, we’ve experienced this problem. Often. In fact, we’ve heard so many people experience this style of problem and so frequently that we wanted to pull the idea apart. Test it from odd angles. Chase the how and why down poorly labelled side paths and try not to get too distracted by side quests along the way. During our travels, we’ve developed some mildly bizarre techniques — an odd reframe, a slightly unhinged metaphor, a constraint that feels a bit unorthodox — and yet, somehow (weirdly) works.

The Enterprising Ape is a collection of those explorations.

We’re interested in what happens when psychology, decision-making, and human performance are taken out of their pristine diagrams and actually used by real people with overloaded brains and limited patience. We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we are trying to create different tools for the terrain that may work better for some of us when the traditional methods fail. Even where it means wandering off the old beaten path and coming back with field notes that make more sense told as bonfire stories than trying to wrap our heads around a 3kg instruction manual… written in Old English… and stored in a binder.

Some of the strategies we share sound strange; a few are borderline absurd. Most started as experiments designed to answer a simple question: what would make this make sense?

The Enterprising Ape exists to share those findings — the odd navigational choices, the reframes that shouldn’t work but do, and the mental shortcuts that make complex things feel oddly manageable again.

Explore. Have a chuckle. Take what’s helpful, and use it to your own evolutionary advantage.