Jason Fried Quotes

What’s worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.

Plus, if you’re a copycat, you can never keep up. You’re always in a passive position. You never lead; you always follow. You give birth to something that’s already behind the times — just a knockoff, an inferior version of the original. That’s no way to live.

Meetings should be great — they’re opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.

Modern-day offices have become interruption factories. Merely walking in the door makes you a target for anyone else’s conversation, question, or irritation. When you’re on the inside, you’re a resource who can be polled, interrogated, or pulled into a meeting. And another meeting about that other meeting. How can you expect anyone to get work done in an environment like that?

Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned

If you’re pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn’t be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!

Comparison is the death of joy.

It was the discomfort of knowing two people doing the same work at the same level were being paid differently that led us to reform how we set salaries. That’s how we ended up throwing out individual negotiations and differences in pay, and going with a simpler system.

Calm is protecting people’s time and attention. Calm is about 40 hours of work a week. Calm is reasonable expectations. Calm is ample time off. Calm is smaller. Calm is a visible horizon. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second. Calm is more independence, less interdependence. Calm is sustainable practices for the long term. Calm is profitability.

The answer isn’t more hours, it’s less bullshit. Less waste, not more production. And far fewer distractions, less always-on anxiety, and avoiding stress.

"So ask yourself, "What can we do in two weeks?" And then do it. Get out there and let people use it, taste it, play it, or whatever. The quicker it's in the hands of customers, the better off you'll be."

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

With great power comes great ignorance.

But when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use the company? Is it simple? Complex? Is it obvious how it works? What’s fast about it? What’s slow about it? Are there bugs? What’s broken that we can fix quickly and what’s going to take a long time?

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.