Top 100 Jason Fried Quotes
#1. It's like when you're on hold and a recorded voice comes on telling you how much the company values you as a customer. Really? Then maybe you should hire some more support people so I don't have to wait thirty minutes to get help.
Jason Fried
#2. When you are new at something, you need to start creating.
Jason Fried
#3. Everyone should be encouraged to start his own business, not just some rare breed that self-identifies as entrepreneurs.
Jason Fried
#4. Long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes stab at your happiness.
Jason Fried
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. The real world isn't a place, it's an excuse. It's a justification for not trying.
Jason Fried
#9. The design is done when the problem goes away.
Jason Fried
#10. 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
#11. Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need.
Jason Fried
#12. Working more doesn't mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.
Jason Fried
#13. 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
#14. There's nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.
Jason Fried
#15. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.
Jason Fried
#16. We also get thousands of suggestions. The default answer is always no.
Jason Fried
#17. If you're opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry aout is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary.
Jason Fried
#18. Too much time in academia can actually do you harm. There are a lot of skills that are useful in academia that aren't worth much outside of it.
Jason Fried
#19. How long someone's been doing it is overrated. What matters is how well they've been doing it.
Jason Fried
#20. 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
#21. If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.
Jason Fried
#22. The best designers and the best programmers aren't the ones with the best skills, or the nimblest fingers, or the ones who can rock and roll with Photoshop or their environment of choice, they are the ones that can determine what just doesn't matter. That's where the real gains are made.
Jason Fried
#23. Most fears that have to do with people working remotely stem from a lack of trust.
Jason Fried
#24. When you don't know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.
Jason Fried
#26. No is easier to do. Yes is easier to say.
Jason Fried
#27. Projections are just bullshit. They're just guesses.
Jason Fried
#28. Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out?
Jason Fried
#29. 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
#30. Pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.
Jason Fried
#31. Pass on hiring people you don't need, even if you think that person's a great catch.
Jason Fried
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Obscurity is a good thing. You can fail in obscurity. It removes the fear of failure.
Jason Fried
#35. "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
#36. 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
#38. If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.
Jason Fried
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. You have to revisit anyway The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. -Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft
Jason Fried
#43. 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
#44. Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.
Jason Fried
#45. If you're just going to be like everyone else, why are you even doing this? If you merely replicate competitors, there's no point for your existence. Even if you wind up losing, it's better to go down fighting for what you believe in instead of just imitating others.
Jason Fried
#46. 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
#47. The only two people who can give you real feedback about your product are people who just purchased it and people who have just canceled.
Jason Fried
#48. Ironically, you'll probably get far more done when only half of your workday overlaps with the rest of your team. Instead of spending the entire day dealing with Urgent!!! emails and disruptive phone calls, you'll have the entire start (or end) of the day to yourself.
Jason Fried
#49. Every time something slips through the cracks, the cracks get bigger.
Jason Fried
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they'll never happen.
Jason Fried
#55. 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
#56. If you are going to do something, do something that matters.
Jason Fried
#58. So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don't act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.
Jason Fried
#59. 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
#60. Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy
Jason Fried
#61. It's OK if it's not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.
Jason Fried
#62. Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it.
Jason Fried
#63. You don't need to win every medal to be successful.
Jason Fried
#64. Don't let yourself off the hook with excuses.
Jason Fried
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. No one is as smart as all of us. -Seth Godin, author/entrepreneur
Jason Fried
#68. It's better to have people be happy using someone else's product than disgruntled using yours.
Jason Fried
#69. When you treat people like children, you get children's work.
Jason Fried
#71. The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth.
Jason Fried
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Failure is not a pre-requisite for success. Already successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again than who failed
Jason Fried
#77. Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers.
Jason Fried
#78. People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public, and responsive during a crisis. Don't hide behind spin or try to keep your bad news on the down low. You
Jason Fried
#79. Before you dismiss a beginner's work, remember how much you sucked when you started. You probably sucked worse, actually.
Jason Fried
#80. If you build software, every error message is marketing
Jason Fried
#81. 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
#82. The best feature of a product should really be the customer service.
Jason Fried
#83. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea.
Jason Fried
#84. Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination itself
Jason Fried
#85. That world may be real for them, but it doesn't mean you have to live in it.
Jason Fried
#86. 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
#87. Motivation is pivotal to healthy lives and healthy companies. Make sure you're minding it.
Jason Fried
#88. The longer something takes, the less likely it is that you're going to finish it.
Jason Fried
#89. What do you gain if you ban employees from, say, visiting a social-networking site or watching YouTube while at work? You gain nothing. That time doesn't magically convert to work. They'll just find some other diversion.
Jason Fried
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use.
Jason Fried
#93. 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
#94. Meetings: "They often include at least one moron who inevitably
gets his turn to waste everyone's time
with nonsense".
Jason Fried
#95. 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
#96. Standing for something isn't just about writing it down. It's about believing it and living it.
Jason Fried
#97. 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
#98. All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortunate companies have audiences.
Jason Fried
#99. 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
#100. 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
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