Jason Fried Quotes
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Since your company is the product that makes all of your other products, it should be the best product of all. When you begin to think of your company this way, you evaluate it differently. You ask different questions about it. You look at improving it constantly, rather than just accepting what it's become.
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Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It's a mark of stupidity.
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When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.
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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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A computer doesn't have a mind of its own - it needs someone else's to function.
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One of the secret benefits of using remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone's performance.
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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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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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Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that's rarely the case.
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Unlike a goldfish, a computer can't really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do.
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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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When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.
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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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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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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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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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Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
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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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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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Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they'll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they'll bring you down.
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A large user base helps shield us from things we can't control. You can spend years catering to a major corporation, for example, only to see your contact there move on.
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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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It's incredibly hard to get meaningful work done when your workday has been shredded into work moments.
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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.