Tobi Lutke: Books are a cheat code for life

January 20, 2026

Shopify founder Tobi Lutke explains why he reads so many books:

“If you don’t read books, you live a lifetime. If you read books, you live 1,000 lifetimes.”

David Senra reads a quote of Tobi’s back to him:

“Books are the closest thing you’ll ever come to finding cheat codes for real life. You can access the entire learnings of someone else’s career in a few hours.”

Tobi comments:

“I really think we need to shout this point from a rooftop. The one weird trick seems to be: read books. It kind of doesn’t matter [what you read], just make a habit of reading books and ideally change genre every three books or so. That alone will give you a range that you can draw on for basically everything you will ever do.”

However for business books, there is an important caveat:

“When I went from programmer to business and had to learn business really quick, I got really dismayed with the quality of business books pretty quickly. Frankly, business books are largely written by the people who have time — not the people who actually build companies. So you read between the lines as well. If the person who started the company or the person writing the book is a salesperson, every problem can be solved with sales. If the person is a marketer, every problem can be solved with marketing. At least that I can takeaway as a trap to not fall into. I was determined to not be the engineering-type founder who was going to see everything as an engineering problem.”