Jason Fried Quotes

Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone. You need to know what you’re willing to fight for. And then you need to show the world.

If you're solving someone else's problem, you're constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on.

Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.

Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn’t cost much to do, either. And it doesn’t really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you’re right and they’re wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.

It’s almost impossible to work on something and not be tempted to chase all the exciting new what-if and we-could-also ideas that come up. There’s always one more thing it could do, one more improvement it should have. But if you actually want to make progress, you have to narrow as you go.

When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ballpoint pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They’re too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn’t worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus.

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work — this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can’t be found. Instead, it’s just one interruption after another.

A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person

A business without a path to profit isn't a business, it's a hobby.

But the thing is, there’s not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there’s hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it.

When you don't know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.

Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a delegator’s best friend. That’s where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile, everyone else who attends is pulled away from getting real work done.

You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it.

Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it.

If you build software, every error message is marketing