Quotes from Jason Fried

Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person.

Your employees have lots of opinions about everything - your strategy and vision; the state of the competition; the quality of your products; the vibe in the workplace. There are tons of things you can learn from them.

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.

That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.

Meetings should be like salt - a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.

When meetings are the norm - the first resort, the go-to tool to discuss, debate, and solve every problem - they no longer work.

I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.

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.

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.

Remind yourself that other people's jobs aren't so simple.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the secret benefits of using remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone's performance.

Success isn't about being the biggest. It's about letting the right size find you.

If yesterday was a good day's work, chances are you'll stay on a roll. And if you can stay on a roll, everything else will probably take care of itself - including not working from the moment you get up in the morning until you nod off to sleep.

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.

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.

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.

Selling to small businesses and selling to enterprises take two very different approaches with two very different kinds of people.

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.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter.