Read on Twitter
Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify and one of my favourite leaders, gave an interview recently to "The observer effect" on a range of topics including time management 
, creativity 
, culture 
, books 
, growth 
and much more!
A thread
of some incredible learnings.
, creativity , culture , books , growth and much more!A thread
of some incredible learnings.
1. He doesn't believe in typical days.Believes attention is the most liquid and valuable resource he has. Promotes decision logs, priority lists and themed weeks. Themes aligned to decisions and priorities. Zuckerberg is similar!
2. Calendar is a strategy. Read on!! For instance, Colour coding calendar so that we can categorise 1-1s, product focused things, sales and marketing, external etc. This should match the theme of the week (e.g. Blue week focused on product)
. 3. No recurring meetings and scheduled no schedule days 
Recurring meetings are too easy to setup and too much drain, he prefers need based schedule instead. No schedule days promote mindful work.
4. Personality is about knowing people are different Talks of enneagrams. Suggests not good all by itself but useful tool to highlight the differences in people. As
5. On learning - "Creativity generally is people using lessons from one field in another field in different ways. Because of this, I find learning fascinating". Talks of going from 90 to 91% in programming to going from 0-80% in UX.. second choice is better!
6. On determinism - "Engineers love determinism. However complex systems are hardly deterministic anymore including a network of computers. Most interesting things come from non deterministic behaviours."
7. On determinism - "There is value in building things that can absorb anything you throw at them and still have good outcomes"I find this fascinating
as we are often obsessed with predictability but this suggests there is value in building something that can handle both.
8. On culture.. calls out nuances for instance says while shopfiy couldn't have been built without Canadian optimism, Canadian too people are unbelievably nice and therefore he needs to emphasize on importance of feedback.
9. Recommends books called Range and Antifragile, Design of everyday things Already on my reading list, Range is top as highly recommended by lots of great folks.
10. On incentives "I find it amazing how often I come across people who just miss incentive systems entirely. For us, it’s obvious. The best way for us to make merchants & customers more successful, is to do that. The best way to build business is to make others successful"
10. Contd. This is an incredibly valuable lesson. The success of your ecosystem is your success even if it means your success comes later. We have to design your incentives accordingly. @heymadrey had an interesting thread / question on a similar topic.
11. On executive leadership and growth, "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 
.
12. On personal growth, "Personal growth has no real speed limit. It's more dependent on how often a student is ready, and that often depends on the environment and the norms of a culture around the student".
12 contd. The key takeaway here is, one can go from zero to pro in 18 months, if you are serious about learning and applying.
Finally a big thanks to @tobi @sriramk and @ObserverOrg for sharing with us this learning filled interview. I am a huge fan!
If you like this thread, head over to my website, and check out my newsletters. You will find inspiration, mindfulness learnings for your personal growth and much more. Thank you for reading 
https://abhinandanshah.com/newsletters
https://abhinandanshah.com/newsletters
