Jason Fried Quotes
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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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Most work is not coming up with The Next Big Thing. Rather, it's improving the thing you already thought of six months - or six years - ago. It's the work of work.
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It feels good to be productive.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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A company gets better at the things it practices.
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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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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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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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By rationing in-person meetings, their stature is elevated to that of a rare treat. They become something to be savored, something special.
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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.