Jason Fried Quotes

There’s a beauty to imperfection. This is the essence of the Japanese principle of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi values character and uniqueness over a shiny facade. It teaches that cracks and scratches in things should be embraced. It’s also about simplicity. You strip things down and then use what you have.

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.

Culture is action, not words.

Ever try to cancel an account with your cell phone company? It’s not an inherently complicated act. But many phone companies make it so difficult to do because they have retention goals to hit. They want to make it hard for you to cancel so it’s easier for them to hit their numbers.

Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.

new customers today expect something different than new customers did a decade ago.

So take a step toward calm, and relieve people from needing to broadcast their whereabouts and status. Everyone’s status should be implicit: I’m trying to do my job, please respect my time and attention.

Don’t make up problems you don’t have yet. It’s not a problem until it’s a real problem. Most of the things you worry about never happen anyway.

Respect the work that you’ve never done before.

NEVER HIRE ANYONE to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself first.

There's nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.

Pass on hiring people you don't need, even if you think that person's a great catch.

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.

The person with the question needed something and they got it. The person with the answer was doing something else and had to stop. That’s rarely a fair trade.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.