Jason Fried Quotes
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These two staples of work life - meetings and managers - are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office. In fact, the further away you are from both meetings and managers, the more work gets done.
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Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale - the single, massive, brand-name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous.
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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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We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.
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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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I've found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who has already peaked.
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If you tell your story well, it can help attract customers; it can help people understand your business better, and you are more approachable as a business and a company.
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It feels good to be productive.
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Who you work with is even more important than who you hang out with because you spend a lot more time with your workmates than your friends.
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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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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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Bottom line: If you can't spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you'll never get the best from them.
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I think that sleep and work are very closely related - not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events.
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I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren't the complicated things. They're the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.
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I'm not sure a lot of companies know their story, or can explain why they exist and who they are, without just spewing just corporate speech.
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I like to think of myself as a leader whose door is always open. But I recently learned that an open door isn't enough.
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When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.
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Meetings should be great - they're opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.
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The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you're at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer's specific needs.
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The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done. In fact, offices have become interruption factories.
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It's like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do.
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A company gets better at the things it practices.
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I'm a designer, but I rely on programmers to bring my ideas to life. By learning to code myself, I think I can make things easier for all of us. Similarly, I want to be able to build things on my own without having to bother a programmer.
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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.