Quotes from 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.

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.

Everyone wants to be heard and respected. It usually doesn't cost much to do, either. And it doesn't really matter all that much whether you ultimately think you're right and they're wrong. Arguing with heated feelings will just increase the burn.

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.

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

Modern-day offices have become interruption factories. Merely walking in the door makes you a target for anyone else's conversation, question, or irritation. When you're on the inside, you're a resource who can be polled, interrogated, or pulled into a meeting. And another meeting about that other meeting. How can you expect anyone to get work done in an environment like that?

We don't throw more people at problems, we chop problems down until they can be carried across the finish line by teams of three

An owner unknowingly scattering people's attention is a common cause of the question "Why's everyone working so much but nothing's getting done?

soon you'll see that it's the work—not the clock—that matters.

When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. 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. You know exactly what the right answer is.

Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF.

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.

WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY APP! I LIKED IT JUST HOW IT WAS! CHANGE IT BACK!" The standard playbook in software is to dismiss users like that. Hey, this is the price of progress, and progress is always good, always better. That's myopic and condescending. For many customers, better doesn't matter when comfort, consistency, and familiarity are higher up on their value chain.

Chaos should not be the natural state at work.

Management scholar Peter Drucker nailed it decades ago when he said "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

The problem, as we've learned over time, is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks. Once you get up close, you see it's quite a bit higher than you thought. We assume that picking it will be easy only because we've never tried to do it before.

Commuting isn't just bad for you, your relationships, and the environment—it's bad for business. And it doesn't have to be that way.

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.

Rather than demand whatever it takes, we ask, What will it take?

The only way to get more done is to have less to do.

great work ethic isn't about working whenever you're called upon. It's about doing what you say you're going to do, putting in a fair day's work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.

It's not uncommon for people to pick up their phones dozens of times a day when some push notification makes it buzz, because WHAT IF IT WAS SOMETHING SUPER IMPORTANT! (It just about never is.)

But when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use

If the boss is constantly pulling people off one project to chase another, nobody's going to get anything done.