A “The Knowledge Project Episode” with Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke (@tobi).
You can find the full podcast at fs.blog (full transcript)
I mean you are valuable because of the brain you’ve got. It’s your experience, it’s your skill, it’s your actual life story rolled up, it’s your intuition, it’s your ability to make great decisions quickly. So often this anxiety that we are talking about problem popping up the stack to your actual question, it’s that people confuse their own self-worth and their role in the world and their ability to, well feed your family frankly, with the continuation of jobs and the continuation of a role that they have.Tobi Lütke
Here are some of the most interesting highlights to me:
28:28
“The best thing founders can do is subtraction. It’s much, much, much easier to add things than it is to remove things. Adding things is a lot more expensive than removing things. However, it requires some measure of bravery and risk-taking.”
35:26
“Very, very, very smart people in groups sometimes do extremely entertainingly dumb things”
54:39
“Technology is for enablement, people are the point of it all, and people are awesome, and people are creative, and people need to be augmented with technology, and I think that’s obligation of the technology industry to cause this, to help instead of replacing our people. What we should replace is toil and drudgery and bullshit.”
Pre-computer era and the large amount of brilliant people who were dedicated to calculus for example during the Manhattan Project VS One person learning programming in a week on khan academy and programming a function that could do exactly the same thing
“The amount of productivity added to the world is not the utility value of a function. It is freeing all the best people at calculus on planet Earth to do productive work and actually write these functions”
01:04:00
Did I do the most optimal decision with the information available?:
“Was it a choice for a certain chance that could have been known and wasn’t considered? Was it invalidated because you didn’t see the bigger picture?
That’s totally your fault on making choice, as long as the bigger picture would’ve been available easily. My test is always wherever any 20 minutes I could have spent to pull this piece of information that I didn’t consider right, into the set of things I used as inputs to make a decision. If so, I wasn’t equal to the task of making the choice at the time and I need to understand this better in the future and improve form.”
How do you keep your cool when everybody around you is sort of losing theirs?
“People have different opinions on what makes them valuable. (…) A lot of people end up getting really invested in their sort of job title as an identity. They think they’re valuable because the job’s valuable.
(…)
People seem to have a fairly low opinion of themselves fundamentally, which I think it’s just so sad because we should have a vastly higher opinion of people’s capabilities in general. I have a very, very high opinion sadly, actually, that makes me sometimes disappointed in people. (…)
I mean you are valuable because of the brain you’ve got. It’s your experience, it’s your skill, it’s your actual life story rolled up, it’s your intuition, it’s your ability to make great decisions quickly. So often this anxiety that we are talking about problem popping up the stack to your actual question, it’s that people confuse their own self-worth and their role in the world and their ability to, well feed your family frankly, with the continuation of jobs and the continuation of a role that they have.
But the question you should have is how can I be valuable? Shopify hired you as a person.”
01:31:00
James Carse’s book, Infinite Games
- Finite games – career ladder – VS Infinite games – fitness
- Life decisions should be based on infinite games.
01:44:00
“I think when you study really, really successful people, you invariably find people who are on some kind of intrinsic, sometimes unacknowledged to our third world, a journey of their own. And they structured their time management in such a way that they spent most of their time doing things that are hyper-valued by society, potentially for the purpose of a job, but actually played dual duty towards their own goals.”
MENTIONED CONTENT FOR FURTHER READING:
Paul Graham’s Essay on Conformism: The Four Quadrants of Conformism
James Carse’s book, Infinite Games