Hey - one of my goals here is to make sure our community has access to the best. Tobi Lutke, Shopify's CEO decide to share an internal memo that was likely to be leaked anyway and I thought it was a great read and would love to know your thoughts on it. Team, We are entering a time where more merchants and entrepreneurs could be created than any other in history. We often talk about bringing down the complexity curve to allow more people to choose this as a career. Each step along the entrepreneurial path is rife with decisions requiring skill, judgement and knowledge. Having AI alongside the journey and increasingly doing not just the consultation, but also doing the work for our merchants is a mindblowing step function change here. Our task here at Shopify is to make our software unquestionably the best canvas on which to develop the best businesses of the future. We do this by keeping everyone cutting edge and bringing all the best tools to bear so our merchants can be more successful than they themselves used to imagine. For that we need to be absolutely ahead. Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify Maybe you are already there and find this memo puzzling. In that case you already use AI as a thought partner, deep researcher, critic, tutor, or pair programmer. I use it all the time, but even I feel I'm only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it: you've heard me talk about AI in weekly videos, podcasts, town halls, and… Summit! Last summer I used agents to create my talk, and presented about that. I did this as a call to action and invitation for everyone to tinker with AI, to dispel any scepticism or confusion that this matters at all levels. Many of you took up the call, and all of us who did have been in absolute awe of the new capabilities and tools that AI can deliver to augment our skills, crafts, and fill in our gaps.

Early in my time at Google I realized that most of the company was 99th percentile talent, especially the software engineers. I later discovered there was a wider than normal disparity in salaries at each level of software engineer. I got a chance to chat with the vp of engineering about this and asked them what was the difference between the worst and the best google engineer. Their answer shocked me: 300x I've thought about this in the almost 20 years since - what makes a 300x performer. Most people focus on being skilled and being seen - and all the great are both. The three things all 300x performance additionally have in common are: Self awareness Self confidence Secure in their place in the world Additionally - their life design relative to their goals and dreams is pristine. So if you want to produce more - assess those three areas as a starting point

So my LinkedIn outreach process led me to receive this book for free and I am so happy about it. Here are keys from the introduction: Every system is designed to get the results that it currently gets. So if you want different results, change is necessary and challenging. So what can we do to make it less challenging? We need to find: - Leverage points: actions that have outsized rewards - Resource stacks: Load up resources on the leverage to get max impact fast - because progress is the most important aspect of a good work day for a person It turns out that there is a system to find leverage points and a system to resource stacking - that’s what the rest of the book is about.

Someone asked me: If you had unlimited time and resources, what would your ultimate vision look like for the impact you want to make? I didn’t like my answer which was: That’s a really good question. I think I would want to try to redesign education, work, and communities so that more people had a chance to be successful and fulfilled. Have no desire to be a politician and I’ve already held elected office so I know how hard systemic change is from that seat. I want to make the real rules of the game of life accessible to everyone equally. I’m going to work to add specificity to this answer so that I can get it done.

First, I’m impressed that a book written 9 years ago is still so relevant today. Since a big part of learning is working for the knowledge, reflecting, and retrieving - here are some things I have learned so far The exception to the hypothesis that we should all invest in deep work is surprisingly the CEO of a company (not to be confused with an owner/operator founder type). A CEO is described as a human decision making machine that’s difficult to replicate. But even they should get their information to decide from those experts who spend the required time in deep work. It gets problematic when CEOs expect everyone to work like they work. Value comes from leverage and rarity - both are important and you can normally only get them from a deep work base. When combined with the idea that humans pursue the part of least resistance and that most things are very hard to measure in the knowledge work arena, and it’s no wonder that people opt to look visibly busy as a proxy of productivity. One final note - the three worker types that will continue to succeed are those good at using intelligent machines, the 10x superstar at their cadet, and those with a capital advantage to make a series of high leverage, outsized reward bets. While we can’t control when we join the capital group - the path seems to be in the first 2 groups. I had fun reading 100 pages at 2am and it really didn’t feel like work. That’s a learning for me.