The Observer Effect – Tobi Lütke

This interview with Tobi Lütke of Shopify is wide ranging (and long!) but there is so much that resonated or made me think in it.

I love his grounding on learning as a core value. That is something I believe both personally and organizationally. I firmly believe that all great technology organizations are learning organizations! I suspect that the technology qualifier in there could easily be removed as well.

I have a complex set of thoughts on this. It is really my core value. I believe that the job we all have in life is to acquire knowledge and wisdom and then share it. I just don’t know what else there is. This is the bedrock of my belief system.

When I get close to any field, I think about how far I want to go. I'm probably further along with programming. I don’t know if I want to get from 90 to 91% in programming when, with the same amount of work, I could figure out the first 60 to 70% of UX or even something like drawing. There’s a recent book about this called Range, which I really like. The book pushes in this direction and explores this topic a bit more than I do. But I just found myself nodding throughout reading it, because it turns out that very often—really, every field has fundamental wisdom that you discover when you're learning and talking to the people who have mastered it. I find that going wide and learning the best lessons from the people who have dedicated their entire lives to a certain pursuit gets you really, really close to mastery.

Another reference to Range by David Epstein, time to just read that. I love the idea that you can learn the first 80% of a topic in 20% of the time. That feels about right to me.

This learning belief is one of the reasons I read widely, publish a blog and newsletter, and love trying things.

I dig that Lütke also enjoys playing a variety of games, both traditional and large online games.

But the major reason why video games are valuable is because of this concept of transfer learning. For instance, people who are good at chess understand when it's time to perform tactics, and when it's time to focus on positional development. Not just in chess, but also in life.

He referenced Factorio, which I hadn't heard of but looks cool. I'm a little older that Lütke so perhaps that is why he didn't call out SimCity, but to me that is right in line with the type of game and learning that you can get from it that he calls out. I used to love playing with the various constraints of SimCity. Sadly, EA decided to layer more junk on it over the years and the original spirit of the game is lost in my opinion.

I dig his idea of a trust battery. It is a good metaphor for something that I suspect we all do. Referring to it as a battery makes it resonate really well.

What people want to do in a company is get to the 80% or 100% level in the area that they run. You gain full autonomy this way. It’s a process that cannot be given to people by title or something like that.

And his focus on coaching (which is really just accelerated learning right, go back to the first principle) is great. This push that just to stay where you are in a growth company requires continual learning and investment is so true!

That's something I explain to people quite frequently. It's not optional to grow, especially when it comes to executives. The learning curve of being a great executive is a lot less like learning the guitar, and a lot more like skydiving. It’s the kind of thing you should not do without an instructor. A coach is probably one of the highest returns on investment anyone can do with their attention. An hour spent with a coach has a 10x, 50x, 100x potential return on time spent. I was really lucky and met a great coach who actually joined Shopify full time just to do coaching and lead our talent acceleration team.

If you aren't constantly learning, you are falling behind, and the faster the organization you are in is growing the faster you will fall behind.

He calls out some great books including Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Both are reads that my book club has picked and are very good.

He also referenced Roblox which got me to install that and give it a look. 🕳🐇