Jason Fried Quotes & Sayings

It's simple until you make it complicated. — Jason Fried

Once you [work on your idea extra hours], you'll learn whether your excitement and interest is real or just a passing phase. — Jason Fried

If no one's upset by what you're saying, you're probably not pushing hard enough. (And you're probably boring, too.) — Jason Fried

It's better to have people be happy using someone else's product than disgruntled using yours. — Jason Fried

When you are new at something, you need to start creating. — Jason Fried

Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you're going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance. — Jason Fried

Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance. — Jason Fried

It won't be as easy, but lots of things that are worth doing aren't easy. It just takes commitment, discipline, and, most important, faith that it's all going to work out. — Jason Fried

The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they're imagining a hundred different things. — Jason Fried

There's nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team. — Jason Fried

Culture is action, not words. — Jason Fried

The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth. — Jason Fried

Has no prospects of being either, then you don't just need a remote position - you need a new job. Only the office can be secure Companies often go to great lengths to make employees — Jason Fried

Believe it or not, the bigger problem isn't scaling, it's getting to the point where you have to scale. Without the first problem you won't have the second. — Jason Fried

Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy - one scar - at a time. So don't scar on the first cut. Don't create a policy because one person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. — Jason Fried

Workaholics aren't heroes. They don't save the day, they just use it up. The real hero is home because she figured out a faster way — Jason Fried

To do great work, you need to feel that you're making a difference. That you're putting a meaningful dent in the universe. That you are part of something important. — Jason Fried

Trade the dream of overnight success for slow, measured growth. It's hard, but you have to be patient. You have to grind it out. You have to do it for a long time before the right people notice. — Jason Fried

Don't worry about design, if you listen to your code a good design will appear...Listen to the technical people. If they are complaining about the difficulty of making changes, then take such complaints seriously and give them time to fix things. -Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks (from Is Design Dead?) If — Jason Fried

Other people's failures are just that: other people's failures. If — Jason Fried

Limited resources force you to make do with what you've got. There's no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative. — Jason Fried

Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it. — Jason Fried

How long someone's been doing it is overrated. What matters is how well they've been doing it. — Jason Fried

All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortunate companies have audiences. — Jason Fried

Standing for something isn't just about writing it down. It's about believing it and living it. — Jason Fried

If you're solving someone else's problem, you're constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. — Jason Fried

Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need. — Jason Fried

Don't let yourself off the hook with excuses. — Jason Fried

You can't let your employees work from home out of fear they'll slack off without your supervision, you're a babysitter, not a manager. Remote work is very likely the least of your problems. — Jason Fried

Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier. — Jason Fried

If you are going to do something, do something that matters. — Jason Fried

There are four-letter words you should never use in business. They're not fuck or shit. They're need, must, can't, easy, just, only and fast. These words gets in the way of healthy communication — Jason Fried

The best feature of a product should really be the customer service. — Jason Fried

Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust. — Jason Fried

If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they'll never happen. — Jason Fried

People are creatures of habit. That's why they react to change in such a negative way. They're used to using something in a certain way and any change upsets the natural order of things. So they push back. They complain. They demand that you revert to the way things were. But that doesn't mean you should act. Sometimes you need to go ahead with a decision you believe in, even if it's unpopular at first. — Jason Fried

When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. "This is where we're going because, well, that's where we said we were going." And that's the problem: Plans are inconsistent with improvisation. — Jason Fried

That world may be real for them, but it doesn't mean you have to live in it. — Jason Fried

Track coach Bill Bowerman decided that his team needed better, lighter running shoes. So he went out to his workshop and poured rubber into the family waffle iron. That's how Nike's famous waffle sole was born. — Jason Fried

Pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity. — Jason Fried

Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out? — Jason Fried

If you've never given a speech before, do you want your first speech to be in front of ten thousand people or ten people? You don't want everyone to watch you starting your business. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you're not ready to be looked at yet. — Jason Fried

The owner actually tried the oil and chooses to carry it based on its taste. It's not about packaging, marketing, or price. It's about quality. He tried it and knew his store had to carry it. That's the approach you should take too. — Jason Fried

Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. — Jason Fried

A business without a path to profit isn't a business, it's a hobby. — Jason Fried

Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. — Jason Fried

Easy. Easy is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs. "That should be easy for you to do, right?" But notice how rarely people describe their own tasks as easy. For you, it's "Let me look into it" - but for others, it's "Get it done. — Jason Fried

[Facebook and Twitter] aren't the real problems in the office. The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings. — Jason Fried

When good enough gets the job done, go for it. It's way better than wasting resources or, even worse, doing nothing because you can't afford the complex solution. — Jason Fried

Motivation is pivotal to healthy lives and healthy companies. Make sure you're minding it. — Jason Fried

Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure. — Jason Fried

It's a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic. — Jason Fried

Grow slow and see what feels right - premature hiring is the death of many companies. And avoid huge growth spurts too - they can cause you to skip right over your appropriate size. — Jason Fried

You don't need an MBA, a certificate, a fancy suit, a briefcase, or an above-average tolerance for risk. You just need an idea, a touch of confidence, and a push to get started. — Jason Fried

So hire slowly. It's the only way to avoid winding up at a cocktail party of strangers. — Jason Fried

Don't be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that's sustainable and profitable, whether it's big or small, should be — Jason Fried

remote work has opened the door to a new era of freedom and luxury. A brave new world beyond the industrial-age belief in The Office. — Jason Fried

What you do is your legacy. — Jason Fried

We're willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely. That's our line in the sand. — Jason Fried

What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan. — Jason Fried

A busy office is like a food processor - it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there. Each segment is filled with a conference call, a meeting, another meeting, or some other institutionalized unnecessary interruption. — Jason Fried

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it's stupid. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more. Workaholics wind up creating more problems than they solve. First off, working like that just isn't sustainable over time. When the burnout crash comes - and it will - it'll hit that much harder. Workaholics miss the point, too. They try to fix problems by throwing sheer hours at them. They try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions. — Jason Fried

Whenever you can, swap "Let's think about it" for "Let's decide on it." Commit to making decisions. Don't wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward. — Jason Fried

Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy — Jason Fried

The best are everywhere — Jason Fried

Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a delegator's best friend. That's where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile, everyone else who attends is pulled away from getting real work done. — Jason Fried

If you run your ship with the conviction that everyone's a slacker, your employees will put all their ingenuity into proving you right. — Jason Fried

Projections are just bullshit. They're just guesses. — Jason Fried

Everyone on your team should be connected to your customers - maybe not every day, but at least a few times throughout the year. That's the only way your team is going to feel the hurt your customers are experiencing. It's feeling the hurt that really motivates people to fix the problem. And the flip side is true too: The joy of happy customers or ones who have had a problem solved can also be wildly motivating. So — Jason Fried

Before you dismiss a beginner's work, remember how much you sucked when you started. You probably sucked worse, actually. — Jason Fried

Teach and you'll form a bond you just don't get from traditional marketing tactics. Buying people's attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection. They'll trust you more. They'll respect you more. Even if they don't use your product, they can still be your fans. — Jason Fried

The longer something takes, the less likely it is that you're going to finish it. — Jason Fried

Plus, if you're a copycat, you can never keep up. You're always in a passive position. You never lead; you always follow. You give birth to something that's already behind the times - just a knockoff, an inferior version of the original. That's no way to live. — Jason Fried

Problems can usually be solved with simple, mundane solutions. That means there's no glamorous work. You don't get to show off your amazing skills. You just build something that gets the job done and then move on. This approach may not earn you oohs and aahs, but it lets you get on with it. — Jason Fried

Even short commutes stab at your happiness. According to the research,* commuting is associated with an increased risk of obesity, insomnia, stress, neck and back pain, high blood pressure, and other stress-related ills such as heart attacks and depression, and even divorce. But let's say we ignore the overwhelming evidence that commuting doesn't do a body good. Pretend it isn't bad for the environment either. Let — Jason Fried

The real world isn't a place, it's an excuse. It's a justification for not trying. — Jason Fried

Failure is not a pre-requisite for success. Already successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again than who failed — Jason Fried

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it's almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute. — Jason Fried

"Simple" is a tricky word, it can mean a lot of things. To us, it just means clear. That doesn't always mean total reduction, or minimalism - sometimes, to make things clearer, you have to add a step. — Jason Fried

Meaningful work, creative work, thoughtful work, important work - this type of effort takes stretches of uninterrupted time to get into the zone. But in the modern office such long stretches just can't be found. Instead, it's just one interruption after another. — Jason Fried

Every time something slips through the cracks, the cracks get bigger. — Jason Fried

No one is as smart as all of us. -Seth Godin, author/entrepreneur — Jason Fried

The most important thing is to begin. — Jason Fried

"Easy" is a word that's used to describe other people's jobs. — Jason Fried

Press Releases are spam — Jason Fried

How can you expect someone to get a good day's work if they are interrupted all day? — Jason Fried

Would you go into a relationship planning the breakup? Would you write the prenup on a first date? Would you meet with a divorce lawyer the morning of your wedding? That would be ridiculous, right? — Jason Fried

Hire great writers If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That's because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate. — Jason Fried

Details reveal themselves as you use what you're building. You'll see what needs more attention. You'll feel what's missing. You'll know which potholes to pave over because you'll keep hitting them. That's when you need to pay attention, not sooner. The — Jason Fried

Don't sit around and wait for someone else to make the change you want to see. And don't think it takes a huge team to make that difference either. — Jason Fried

Say you spend thirty minutes driving in rush hour every morning and another fifteen getting to your car and into the office. That's 1.5 hours a day, 7.5 hours per week, or somewhere between 300 and 400 hours per year, give or take holidays and vacation. Four hundred hours is exactly the amount of programmer time we spent building Basecamp, our most popular product. Imagine what you could do with 400 extra hours a year. Commuting isn't just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment - it's bad for business. — Jason Fried

People automatically associate quitting with failure, but sometimes that's exactly what you should do. If you already spent too much time on something that wasn't worth it, walk away. You can't get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time. — Jason Fried

Questions you can wait hours to learn the answers to are fine to put in an email. Questions that require answers in the next few minutes can go into an instant message. For crises that truly merit a sky-is-falling designation, you can use that old-fashioned invention called the telephone. With — Jason Fried

Ever find yourself working on something without knowing exactly why? Someone just told you to do it. It's pretty common, actually. That's why it's important to ask why you're working on _. What is this for? Who benefits? What's the motivation behind it? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you better understand the work itself. — Jason Fried

When you treat people like children, you get children's work. — Jason Fried

It doesn't matter how much you plan, you'll still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don't make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going. — Jason Fried

When you build what you need, you can also assess the quality of what you make quickly and directly, instead of by proxy. Mary — Jason Fried

When you build an audience, you don't have to buy people's attention - they give it to you. This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos - whatever. Share information that's valuable and you'll slowly but surely build a loyal audience. — Jason Fried

Don't make up problems you don't have yet. It's not a problem until it's a real problem. Most of the things you worry about never happen anyway. — Jason Fried

Customers don't just buy a product - they switch from something else. And customers don't just leave a product - they switch to something else — Jason Fried