Jason Fried Quotes

Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That’s the dirty little secret of business.

Set out to do good work. Set out to be fair in your dealings with customers, employees, and reality. Leave a lasting impression with the people you touch and worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.

If you are going to do something, do something that matters.

It’s a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.

What you do is your legacy. Don't sit around and wait for someone else to make the change you want to see. And don't think it takes a huge team to make that difference either.

Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination itself

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

If you can’t fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours.

Sleep is for the weak! Real A players only need four to five hours! Great accomplishments require great sacrifice! Bull. Shit.

You just can’t bring your A game to every situation. Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be. We’re not suggesting you put shit work out there. You need to be able to be proud of it, even if it’s only “okay.” But attempting to be indiscriminately great at everything is a foolish waste of energy.

Besides, the perfect time never arrives. You’re always too young or old or busy or broke or something else. If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they’ll never happen.

We come in peace. We don’t have imperial ambitions. We aren’t trying to dominate an industry or a market. We wish everyone well. To get ours, we don’t need to take theirs. What’s our market share? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

There are two primary reasons: (1) The workday is being sliced into tiny, fleeting work moments by an onslaught of physical and virtual distractions. And (2) an unhealthy obsession with growth at any cost sets towering, unrealistic expectations that stress people out.

The faster people can get to something 80% done and unstable, the more they are going to crave stuff that's already 100% done and reliable.