Jason Fried Quotes
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We don't want to bank all our risk on a small collection of big companies. We don't want to lose 20 percent of our business if one big account goes away.
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Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It's a mark of stupidity.
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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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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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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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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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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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When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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.
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You have to live with your decisions every day. Why live with one you're uneasy with? 'Because it'll make you money' is a common reply. But I don't think that's good enough.
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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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Deadlines are great for customers because having one means they get a product, not just a promise that someday they'll get a product.
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I've seen small businesses turn into terrible midsize or big ones because they let their desire to achieve some arbitrary metric get the best of them. Whatever is compromised as a result doesn't matter anymore, as long as the company is growing.