Jason Fried Quotes

People are creatures of habit. That’s why they react to change in such a negative way. They’re used to using something in a certain way and any change upsets the natural order of things. So they push back. They complain. They demand that you revert to the way things were. But that doesn’t mean you should act. Sometimes you need to go ahead with a decision you believe in, even if it’s unpopular at first.

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.

As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: “To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.”fn3

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?

The thing is, most people just don’t enjoy haggling, period.

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.

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

Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing.

Yet somehow it’s still frequently seen as heroic to sacrifice yourself, your health, and even your ability to do your job just to prove your loyalty to THE MISSION. Fuck the mission. No mission (in business, anyway) is worthy of such dire personal straits.

It’s not worth trading sleep for a few extra hours at the office. Not only will it make you exhausted, it’ll literally make you stupid

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.

If you don’t clearly communicate to everyone else why someone was let go, the people who remain at the company will come up with their own story to explain it.

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.

Waiting it out is just fine. The sky won’t fall, the company won’t fold. It’ll just be a calmer, cooler, more comfortable place to work. For everyone.

People have no problem with change they asked for. What people don’t like is forced change — change they didn’t request on a timeline they didn’t choose. Your “new and improved” can easily become their “what the fuck?” when it is dumped on them as a surprise.