Jason Fried Quotes

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Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is home because she figured out a faster way

Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need.

"Simple" is a tricky word, it can mean a lot of things. To us, it just means clear. That doesn't always mean total reduction, or minimalism - sometimes, to make things clearer, you have to add a step.

Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance.

It won't be as easy, but lots of things that are worth doing aren't easy. It just takes commitment, discipline, and, most important, faith that it's all going to work out.

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.

The best feature of a product should really be the customer service.

What do you gain if you ban employees from, say, visiting a social-networking site or watching YouTube while at work? You gain nothing. That time doesn't magically convert to work. They'll just find some other diversion.

No one is as smart as all of us. -Seth Godin, author/entrepreneur

People automatically associate quitting with failure, but sometimes that's exactly what you should do. If you already spent too much time on something that wasn't worth it, walk away. You can't get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.

Has no prospects of being either, then you don't just need a remote position - you need a new job. Only the office can be secure Companies often go to great lengths to make employees

We're willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely. That's our line in the sand.

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy

The best are everywhere

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it's almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute.

Culture is action, not words.

Don't worry about design, if you listen to your code a good design will appear...Listen to the technical people. If they are complaining about the difficulty of making changes, then take such complaints seriously and give them time to fix things. -Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks (from Is Design Dead?) If

It's OK if it's not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.

You don't need to win every medal to be successful.

Long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness.

Teach and you'll form a bond you just don't get from traditional marketing tactics. Buying people's attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection. They'll trust you more. They'll respect you more. Even if they don't use your product, they can still be your fans.

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.

Even short commutes stab at your happiness. According to the research,* commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress-related ills such as heart attacks and depression, and even divorce. But let's say we ignore the overwhelming evidence that commuting doesn't do a body good. Pretend it isn't bad for the environment either. Let

The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth.

Everyone should be encouraged to start his own business, not just some rare breed that self-identifies as entrepreneurs.

If you've never given a speech before, do you want your first speech to be in front of ten thousand people or ten people? You don't want everyone to watch you starting your business. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you're not ready to be looked at yet.

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

You'd be amazed how much quality collective thought can be captured using two simple tools: a voice connection and a shared screen.

If you build software, every error message is marketing

It's better to have people be happy using someone else's product than disgruntled using yours.

No is easier to do. Yes is easier to say.

If you run your ship with the conviction that everyone's a slacker, your employees will put all their ingenuity into proving you right.

Motivation is pivotal to healthy lives and healthy companies. Make sure you're minding it.

If you're just going to be like everyone else, why are you even doing this? If you merely replicate competitors, there's no point for your existence. Even if you wind up losing, it's better to go down fighting for what you believe in instead of just imitating others.

Firing people, damaging morale, and changing the entire way you do business. Ramping up doesn't have to be your goal. And we're not talking just about the number of employees you have either. It's also true for expenses, rent, IT infrastructure, furniture, etc. These things don't just happen to you. You decide whether or not to take them on. And if you do take them on, you'll be taking on new headaches, too. Lock in lots of expenses and you force yourself into building a complex business - one that's a lot more difficult and stressful to run. Don't be insecure about aiming to be a small business.

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.

The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they're imagining a hundred different things.

If no one's upset by what you're saying, you're probably not pushing hard enough. (And you're probably boring, too.)

If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.

Pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

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

Once you [work on your idea extra hours], you'll learn whether your excitement and interest is real or just a passing phase.

Ever find yourself working on something without knowing exactly why? Someone just told you to do it. It's pretty common, actually. That's why it's important to ask why you're working on _____. What is this for? Who benefits? What's the motivation behind it? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you better understand the work itself.

How can you expect someone to get a good day's work if they are interrupted all day?

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

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

You have to revisit anyway The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. -Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft

Don't let yourself off the hook with excuses.

When good enough gets the job done, go for it. It's way better than wasting resources or, even worse, doing nothing because you can't afford the complex solution.

Details reveal themselves as you use what you're building. You'll see what needs more attention. You'll feel what's missing. You'll know which potholes to pave over because you'll keep hitting them. That's when you need to pay attention, not sooner. The

Ironically, you'll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team. Instead of spending the entire day dealing with Urgent!!! emails and disruptive phone calls, you'll have the entire start (or end) of the day to yourself.

Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers.

Every time something slips through the cracks, the cracks get bigger.

Problems can usually be solved with simple, mundane solutions. That means there's no glamorous work. You don't get to show off your amazing skills. You just build something that gets the job done and then move on. This approach may not earn you oohs and aahs, but it lets you get on with it.

Walk into a library anywhere in the world and you'll notice the same thing: It's quiet and calm. Everyone knows how to behave in a library. In fact, few things transcend cultures like library behavior. It's a place where people go to read, think, study, focus, and work. And the hushed, respectful environment reflects that. Isn't that what an office should be?

Track coach Bill Bowerman decided that his team needed better, lighter running shoes. So he went out to his workshop and poured rubber into the family waffle iron. That's how Nike's famous waffle sole was born.

Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination itself

Which features you choose to include or omit have a lot to do with less software too. Don't be afraid to say no to feature requests that are hard to do. Unless they're absolutely essential, save time/effort/confusion by leaving them out. Slow down too. Don't take action on an idea for a week and see if it still seems like a great idea after the initial buzz wears off. The extra marinading time will often help your brain come up with an easier solution.

What do you call a generic pitch sent out to hundreds of strangers hgoping that one will bite? Spam.

Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out?

The owner actually tried the oil and chooses to carry it based on its taste. It's not about packaging, marketing, or price. It's about quality. He tried it and knew his store had to carry it. That's the approach you should take too.

Whenever you can, swap "Let's think about it" for "Let's decide on it." Commit to making decisions. Don't wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.

If you are going to do something, do something that matters.

Say you spend thirty minutes driving in rush hour every morning and another fifteen getting to your car and into the office. That's 1.5 hours a day, 7.5 hours per week, or somewhere between 300 and 400 hours per year, give or take holidays and vacation. Four hundred hours is exactly the amount of programmer time we spent building Basecamp, our most popular product. Imagine what you could do with 400 extra hours a year. Commuting isn't just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment - it's bad for business.

So hire slowly. It's the only way to avoid winding up at a cocktail party of strangers.

Don't be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that's sustainable and profitable, whether it's big or small, should be

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

Would you go into a relationship planning the breakup? Would you write the prenup on a first date? Would you meet with a divorce lawyer the morning of your wedding? That would be ridiculous, right?

We also get thousands of suggestions. The default answer is always no.

Workaholism

Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all- nighters and sleep at the office. It's considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work. Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. They even create crises. They don't look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working overtime. They enjoy feeling like heroes. They create problems (often unwittingly) just so they can get off on working more.

Workaholics make the people who don't stay late feel inadequate for "merely" working reasonable hours. That leads to guilt and poor morale all around. Plus, it leads to an ass- in- seat mentality - people stay late out of obligation, even if they aren't really being productive. If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra eff

The best designers and the best programmers aren't the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn't matter. That's where the real gains are made.

It's a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.

Projections are just bullshit. They're just guesses.

If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.

There are four-letter words you should never use in business. They're not fuck or shit. They're need, must, can't, easy, just, only and fast. These words gets in the way of healthy communication

Failure is not a pre-requisite for success. Already successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again than who failed

If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they'll never happen.

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.

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

Focus on reaping the great benefits and mitigating the drawbacks

Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.

When you build an audience, you don't have to buy people's attention - they give it to you. This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos - whatever. Share information that's valuable and you'll slowly but surely build a loyal audience.

The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.

Before you dismiss a beginner's work, remember how much you sucked when you started. You probably sucked worse, actually.

Hire great writers If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.

Grow slow and see what feels right - premature hiring is the death of many companies. And avoid huge growth spurts too - they can cause you to skip right over your appropriate size.

Easy. Easy is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs. "That should be easy for you to do, right?" But notice how rarely people describe their own tasks as easy. For you, it's "Let me look into it" - but for others, it's "Get it done.

So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don't act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.

The real world isn't a place, it's an excuse. It's a justification for not trying.

Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.

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.

Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea.

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.

What you do is your legacy.

It's simple until you make it complicated.

Don't throw good time after bad work.

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.