Jason Fried Quotes
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Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It's a mark of stupidity.
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We've never much liked the idea of charging a participation tax, a phrase we coined to represent what it feels like when a software company charges you more money for each additional user. Participation taxes discourage usage across a company.
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In my mind, declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you're setting out to do.
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Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.
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As the number of people who work at Basecamp has grown, I've noticed places where we could use more features, like management, structure, and guidelines. I've also noticed places where we've overengineered ourselves and should pull back.
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It may be irrational, but if you're local, the client often feels that, if worse comes to worst, they can knock on your door. They 'know where you live.' But when you're remote, they're going to be more suspicious when phone calls go unreturned or emails keep getting 'lost.' Stay on top of communications, and you'll reap the benefits.
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I believe if you start a business with the intent of making it huge, you're already prioritizing the wrong thing. Size is important, but it's a byproduct of a whole bunch of other things that are worth way more of your mental energy - customers, service, quality.
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When you're short on sleep, you're short on patience. You're ruder to people, less tolerant, less understanding. It's harder to relate and to pay attention for sustained periods of time.
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When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.
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People pulling 16-hour days on a regular basis are exhausted. They're just too tired to notice that their work has suffered because of it.
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If you ask people where they go when they really need to get work done, very few will respond 'the office.' If they do say the office, they'll include a qualifier such as 'super-early in the morning before anyone gets in,' or 'I stay late at night after everyone's left,' or 'I sneak in on the weekend.'
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When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.
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Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
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Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that's important - speed.
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A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.
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Nearly every boss has said it. And just about every employee has heard it. Yet it's one of the most meaningless lines ever spoken in the office: 'My door is always open.'
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To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.
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The owner of a company with supertight margins - say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods - would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.
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Like many entrepreneurs, I started out in sales. I began at 14, when I got a job selling shoes and tennis rackets at a pro shop, and I've been selling one thing or another ever since.
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Whenever you need something from someone else before you can move forward, it's a dependency. We believe dependencies slow people down. We want people to be more independent, because that will keep them moving forward.
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When you can't see someone all day long, the only thing you have to evaluate is the work. A lot of the petty evaluation stats just melt away.
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If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.
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As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.
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You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.