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The Knowledge Project · 2 min instead of 1 h 5 m · Sep 15, 2026
The hard part is choosing among many good options
Tobi Lütke
Founder & CEO, Shopify
Shane ParrishHost · Founder, Farnam Street
Former intelligence agency employee; wrote the bestseller Clear Thinking.
About this segment
Tobi says business books obsess over making the right choice, but even weak teams do that well. The real difficulty is picking among several good choices when only one pays off this quarter.
From “Tobi Lütke: The Skills AI Makes More Valuable”, Sep 15, 2026. Watch the full episode
“choosing the right of valid solutions is actually the hard part, not finding a right solution.”
Takeaways
- Prune irrelevant options first, then judge the ones that remain
- Most teams can find a right answer; picking among valid ones is hard
- The quick-revenue option can crowd out the better long-term company
In this episode
Full episode- 36:35Intuition matters most when the best path has no feedback1:44
40:39The hard part is choosing among many good options1:55
- 14:02Machines can't take responsibility, so use an AI council2:03Up next
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 40:41
you can prune a lot of things to do um uh you know going to buy ice cream is not in the set of valuable things to do if you're considering an mna deal i suppose so you prune everything that's irrelevant easy now you try now you've left things that are sort of relevant and sound good you need to evaluate all these possibilities business books tend to be really really really uh obsessed with make the right choice um and what that does is it compresses everything into a right and wrong conundrum like i never think that's the hard thing truly um it's like making the right choice actually is most people can do it but this is like i think even even bad management teams have a pretty high um uh hit rate there the problem is there's a lot of good choices this is where things get really really hard for lack of better from like let's say there's five good choices again
- 41:36
one of them is going to lead to something observable in the current quarter some revenue quicker. It's a good choice. It does the thing. Well, but like the other four are like, they aren't. And that's a downside. But you might be a much, much better company, you might take like a snowboard store to be like an e-commerce platform, right? Like it's like, that was also not a locally good thing to do. Because the snowboard store I once had was actually profitable.
- 42:06
My incentives will continue doing that. But choosing the right of valid solutions is actually the hard part, not finding a right solution. And unfortunately, there's so much inks built on finding one of the right solutions that everyone stops at this point. And I just really don't think this is the hard part. I built an AI version of myself with Heijeng. What you're about to see in here is my digital avatar. I asked it why some professionals build