Lower the Courage Required
The scarcest resource is courage, not genius — so design products and decisions to need less of it.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 87%
Lütke argues the rarest thing in the world isn't creativity or genius but courage. Whether it's an entrepreneur too scared to launch, or a user stunned by complexity who closes the browser, progress dies when the courage bar is too high. The design move is to systematically lower the courage needed — via dry runs, out-of-network 'try runs,' lowered stakes, and complexity that the software silently absorbs — so more people act.
Origin
Tobi Lütke; he cites Instagram's out-of-network 'try run' reel feature as the exemplar and repeatedly names courage as the true bottleneck to entrepreneurship.
Core principles
- 01Courage is rarer than IQ, creativity, or genius
- 02Every stunning moment of complexity is a point where a scared person quits
- 03Lowering complexity via great UX literally causes more businesses to exist
- 04A low-stakes framing ('just an experiment') removes the courage barrier to starting
- 05Out-of-network dry runs let people test before committing their identity
How to run it
- 1
Locate the courage cliffs
Map the moments where someone must summon courage or hits stunning complexity — the API jargon, the confusing tax screen, the public launch — because those are where people close the browser and quit.
Pro tip When software goes bad it makes people feel dumb; treat that as a moral failure, not a minor UX bug.
- 2
Absorb the complexity for them
Where possible, make the hard thing simply correct and invisible (e.g. calculate taxes automatically) so no courage or expertise is required to proceed.
Pro tip Every time you make a complex thing simpler, measurably more businesses exist on the platform.
- 3
Add a dry run / out-of-network try run
Let people test an action safely before it's attached to their identity — show a post to a few hundred out-of-network people first, or ship as 'just an experiment.'
Pro tip Ask 'what else in the world should have try runs that run out of network?' — the answer is basically everything.
- 4
Lower the stakes of the first step
Frame the launch as reversible and low-commitment ('I might blog once in a while, we'll see') so the person gets over the hump and starts.
In the wild
Instagram offered Lütke a 'try run' of a reel — showing it to a few hundred out-of-network people, and only posting to his profile if they liked it. He closed the app stunned, calling it a step-function upgrade to the A/B test because it lowers the courage needed to post.
→ He frames it as an idea you could 'run an entire career on' — reducing the net courage required unlocks enormous value.
Where other software confronts an unsophisticated entrepreneur with a tax-configuration screen they can't understand, Shopify simply has (almost) no such screen — it knows the taxes and does it for them.
→ Removing that stunning-complexity moment stops entrepreneurs from quitting in their tracks, so more businesses survive to exist.
Common mistakes
Adding features instead of removing courage barriers
The RFP view says you need every feature; but for scared, unsophisticated users, more surface area raises the courage/complexity bar and makes them quit.
Letting bad software make users feel dumb
When software makes people feel dumb they blame themselves and abandon their venture — an inversion of the tool-serving-human hierarchy that kills real businesses.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product designers and founders building for non-experts (entrepreneurs, first-time users) where adoption is bottlenecked by fear and complexity, not capability.
Not ideal for
Expert/professional tools where users want full control and 'training wheels' or dry-run scaffolding would get in their way.
From the transcript
“the rarest thing in the world is not even creative creativity or genius it's it's it's courage so let's lower the net amount of Courage…”
“it allowed me to run a try run of of a reel”
“I'm like what else in the world should have try runs that run out of network basically everything”
From the episode
Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify)