Jason Fried Quotes

Anyone who creates a new business is a starter. You don’t need an MBA, a certificate, a fancy suit, a briefcase, or an above-average tolerance for risk. You just need an idea, a touch of confidence, and a push to get started.

You can only work exactly the same way, at the same pace, doing the same work for so long before monotony bites.

Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.

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. Most of what we think we have to do, we don’t have to do at all. It’s a choice, and often it’s a poor one.

remote work has opened the door to a new era of freedom and luxury. A brave new world beyond the industrial-age belief in The Office.

If a worker’s motivation is slumping, it’s probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools.

The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families. Allies of families. They’re there to provide healthy, fulfilling work environments so that when workers shut their laptops at a reasonable hour, they’re the best husbands, wives, parents, siblings, and children they can be.

Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance.

Culture is the byproduct of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.

How long someone’s been doing it is overrated. What matters is how well they’ve been doing it.

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.

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

You don’t create a culture. It happens. This is why new companies don’t have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior.

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.

When calm starts early, calm becomes the habit. But if you start crazy, it’ll define you. You have to keep asking yourself if the way you’re working today is the way you’d want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not “later.