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Even if you manage to calculate how many apples equal one pair of shoes, barter is not always possible. After all, a trade requires that each side want what the other has to offer. What happens if the shoemaker doesn’t like apples and, if at the moment in question, what he really wants is a divorce? True, the farmer could look for a lawyer who likes apples and set up a three-way deal. But what if the lawyer is full up on apples but really needs a haircut?
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they? As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist and capitalist meanings modern people find. The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
In my first week at Shopify, I had a bunch of meet-and-greet conversations with people around the org and one of them really stuck with me. It was a conversation with a GM for somewhere else in the company, and I asked him, hey, what advice do you have for me in my first year? Here’s what he told me:
“In your first 6 months here, here is your number one job. Familiarize yourself with the dozen senior people at Shopify who have the final call on really important decisions, from Tobi and Harley on down. You need to familiarize yourself with their operating philosophy around business and around how Shopify works. Go consume every written memo and every podcast episode (we have a great internal podcast called Context) they’ve ever done, get inside their heads, learn their perspectives and their preferences, and learn what gets them to say Yes to things.
“Here’s why this is your most important job. In your first six months, you’re gonna be useless anyways. You’re going to be drowning in new information and context and it’ll take you a few months to learn how to swim. But then once you do, you need to become effective. And in order to be effective, you need to know how to get those people to say Yes to things, and how they would think through a decision down to a detailed level. If you can do that, then you can get basically anything you want done. If you can’t do that, then you’re never going to get anything done. Therefore, this is your most important job right now.”
I remember thinking at the time, wow, that sounds like really important advice, I should listen. And I did put in some effort; not nearly enough, in retrospect, but more than zero. Now, six months in, I’m not nearly at a point where I would consider myself “effective” yet - I still have a long way to go in that department. But that advice is paying huge dividends already; not only with my own initiatives but actually more so with helping other groups with theirs.
When you’re in a company full of smart people, like Shopify, it can often be quite tricky to resolve disagreements and impasses with, say, product decisions - because the conflicting opinions all have a lot of merit. So I’ve found it very helpful to be able to bring to the table: “Here is how I think ____ would look at this problem, from their perspective and their philosophy. It’s a pretty different POV from how we’ve been talking about it so far, so hopefully that added perspective helps us get unstuck, since they’re ultimately the person who has to say Yes here.”
Moreover, it’s not like we only care about their opinions because they are decision-makers; this isn't really advice about relationship-building. It's advice about how to think better. Great leaders are right, a lot. They know things. So having their operating philosophy available on-demand, or even a rough approximation of it, can be really useful in moving the ball forward and getting teams aligned around the best possible decision.
Six Lessons From Six Months at Shopify
Alex Danco
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