# Sriram Krishnan - Tobi Lütke (Highlights)  ## Metadata **Review**:: [readwise.io](https://readwise.io/bookreview/27018770) **Source**:: #from/readwise #from/reader **Zettel**:: #zettel/fleeting **Status**:: #x **Authors**:: [[Sriram Krishnan]] **Full Title**:: Tobi Lütke **Category**:: #articles #readwise/articles **Category Icon**:: 📰 **Document Tags**:: #favorite **URL**:: [www.theobservereffect.org](https://www.theobservereffect.org/tobi.html) **Host**:: [[www.theobservereffect.org]] **Highlighted**:: [[2023-04-29]] **Created**:: [[2023-04-29]] ## Highlights - My attention is the most liquid and valuable resource that I have. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz568a0jzw4m939e8gd2r3z3)) ^517852940 - We ended up labeling my product-related things red, investor/Board of Director-related things some kind of teal color, et cetera. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz56csa3tn8jrfar8ymzarhq)) ^517853632 - During meetings, I just love to hear the things that teams have discovered. When you're discussing an idea or a decision, I want to know what has been considered. To be honest, I find myself more interested in the inputs of an idea than the actual decision. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz56hbr4eht9cft7db4a4qkx)) ^517854040 - I say this because when I have my own ideas, the first thing I tend to do is just try to falsify them, to figure out why what I'm thinking about is probably incorrect. This is actually something that I have to explain to people that I work with. If I like someone's idea, I tend to do the same thing: I try to poke holes in it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz597e59qhq6v76jggdfx594)) ^517896519 - I usually say, “Well, the implication of this choice means you've made the following assumptions. What inputs did you use to make these foundational assumptions?” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz598czyabkmxksfrvcs9d14)) ^517896549 - The valuable thing about any of these personality-type constructs is that they do a really good job of teaching people that other people are very different. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz59f8ygk9am3bwnwg8vv45n)) ^517896978 - I find that the first 80% of every field is pretty quick to learn—it’s equivalent to the Pareto principle—and I think that creativity generally is people using lessons from one field in another field in different ways. Because of this, I find learning fascinating. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz59gf314d4krbkexw7znf8f)) ^517897022 #takeaway Quickly learn 80% of a new domain to see whether it can be used in the current focused areas. - For instance, Canadians are unbelievably nice. Like, no one wants to ever say anything to upset anyone. This is why we need to emphasize the importance of feedback. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz59xsw67ewjbppm9tqsbw5k)) ^517900447 - I believe that the job we all have in life is to acquire knowledge and wisdom and then share it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5aavj7s1eh0t1s28eyz6np)) ^517905324 - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5ack416pb4jvx8kzh8vct2)) ^517905395 - every field has fundamental wisdom that you discover when you're learning and talking to the people who have mastered it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5acv9gg6w13qh37b9ej1n1)) ^517905396 - I like this stark contrast because I really love failing. I feel so good when I do something, and it just doesn't work; especially if I get the feedback about why it didn't work. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5b6v766a8gwnnkgdzyyrtk)) ^517909400 - When you just watch the game, it looks like you make decisions between extracting resources, investing in expansion, et cetera. By the way, that alone is a lesson that I think Starcraft players are already better at than a lot of people who end up getting MBAs. Both give you the same kind of decision matrix, except in an MBA it’s through business case analysis. You just get a more intuitive feel for this through video games. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5jss3793j4m0rhv59nf764)) ^517959598 - For instance, if your cell phone is 80% charged, you're not worried about finding a charger. But when your phone in your pocket goes into low battery mode, you're thinking about your phone a lot. What people want to do in a company is get to the 80% or 100% level in the area that they run. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5n6f9pn13rz5dyez738r1e)) ^518004879 - The world we're designing at Shopify doesn't look like this. Titles are largely backwards-facing, documenting things about people who have already accomplished a certain thing rather than obtaining a new responsibility. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5n7s843cev297r5negwex5)) ^518005080 - They really taught everyone that, regardless of your gender, creed, or background, you should basically emulate the same sixty-year-old lawyer in persona. Effectively, your career was dependent on whether you got this right, and to me, that just seemed insane. This is infantilization, but the funny thing is that they call this professionalism. To me it is the exact opposite. It's infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don't trust people to dress. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5ncddepk19amwer59y7c9c)) ^518005450 - But the failure we were most afraid of was that the company would work, and then ten or twenty years down the road, it would be a company that we would no longer want to be hired by. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5nfqq1awwc8ws6622a4hpz)) ^518005682 - Hey, the reason why you've got this job is not because of everything you know, but because you seem like the kind of person who can figure it out when you need to know something. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5nwp65mvpssqhtdg0j610g)) ^518007243 - For instance, I had the source code for Linux, I signed up for the Linux kernel mailing list, and I listened to how they talked about computer architecture. I then spent all my time trying to figure out what these terms meant. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5s4t9cgwk7jj02bvjn2q7h)) ^518019857 - Parkinson's Law, the title, is not even the most interesting thing! It talks about something really important: work expands to the time allocated to it, which has huge implications for organizational building. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5s5t9deyfgd91bvqdten7x)) ^518019883 - There are lots of ways to talk about this, but it is really, really important that if you are anything other than a solo founder, you have to be a student of how groups of people making decisions together fail to create world class products. You need to study the very few instances of when this was actually done well. Again, open source ends up being one of the best examples of this. The two best examples of spontaneous organization that led to world class results are Wikipedia and Linux kernel. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01gz5s8q2vp4h88nh76y4b4yhv)) ^518020658