Jason Fried Quotes

Workaholics aren’t heroes. They don’t save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.

Teach and you'll form a bond you just don't get from traditional marketing tactics. Buying people's attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection. They'll trust you more. They'll respect you more. Even if they don't use your product, they can still be your fans.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it’s almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.

Focus on reaping the great benefits and mitigating the drawbacks

It’s not worth trading sleep for a few extra hours at the office. Not only will it make you exhausted, it’ll literally make you stupid

Don’t fill your day with five more just to stay busy or feel productive. Not doing something that isn’t worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.

Everyone should be encouraged to start his own business, not just some rare breed that self-identifies as entrepreneurs.

Easy. Easy is a word that’s used to describe other people’s jobs. “That should be easy for you to do, right?” But notice how rarely people describe their own tasks as easy. For you, it’s “Let me look into it” — but for others, it’s “Get it done.

It’s time for companies to stop asking their employees to breathlessly chase ever-higher, ever-more-artificial targets set by ego.

If you've never given a speech before, do you want your first speech to be in front of ten thousand people or ten people? You don't want everyone to watch you starting your business. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you're not ready to be looked at yet.

Questions you can wait hours to learn the answers to are fine to put in an email. Questions that require answers in the next few minutes can go into an instant message. For crises that truly merit a sky-is-falling designation, you can use that old-fashioned invention called the telephone.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says “It’s no big deal” or the token that says “It’s the end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.

All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortunate companies have audiences.

You need less than you think

Time-management hacks, life hacks, sleep hacks, work hacks. These all reflect an obsession with trying to squeeze more time out of the day, but rearranging your daily patterns to find more time for work isn’t the problem. Too much shit to do is the problem.