Quotes from Jason Fried

We've rejected the per-seat business model from day one. It's not because we don't like money, but because we like our freedom more! The problem with per-seat pricing is that it makes your biggest customers your best customers. With money comes influence, if not outright power.

If you're not trusted to work remotely, why are you trusted to do anything at all? If you're held in such low regard, why are you able to talk to customers, write copy for an ad, design the next product, assess insurance claims, or do tax returns?

It was amazing that it could be done, but we had forgotten to ask whether it should be done.

If a worker's motivation is slumping, it's probably because the work is weakly defined or appears pointless, or because others on the team are acting like tools.

If you stop thinking that you must change the world, you lift a tremendous burden off yourself and the people around you. There's no longer this convenient excuse for why it has to be all work all the time. The opportunity to do another good day's work will come again tomorrow, even if you go home at a reasonable time.

The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you'll know what it's really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.

When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ballpoint pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They're too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn't worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus.

In thirty years' time, as technology moves forward even further, people are going to look back and wonder why offices ever existed. —RICHARD BRANSON, FOUNDER OF VIRGIN GROUP

when you think of the company as a product, you ask different questions: Do people who work here know how to use the company? Is it simple? Complex? Is it obvious how it works? What's fast about it? What's slow about it? Are there bugs? What's broken that we can fix quickly and what's going to take a long time?

Besides, the perfect time never arrives. You're always too young or old or busy or broke or something else. If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they'll never happen.

Sleep is for the weak! Real A players only need four to five hours! Great accomplishments require great sacrifice! Bull. Shit.

Remember, there's no such thing as a one-hour meeting. If you're in a room with five people for an hour, it's a five-hour meeting.

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.

If it's constantly crazy at work, we have two words for you: Fuck that. And two more: Enough already.

Yet somehow it's still frequently seen as heroic to sacrifice yourself, your health, and even your ability to do your job just to prove your loyalty to THE MISSION. Fuck the mission. No mission (in business, anyway) is worthy of such dire personal straits.

What we do repeatedly hardens into habits. The longer you carry on, the tougher it is to change. All your best intentions about doing the right thing "later" are no match for the power of habits.

With great power comes great ignorance.

In the long run, work is not more important than sleep.

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.

business battles serve as financial-page porn.

The shared work calendar is one of the most destructive inventions of modern times. So much orbits around it, so much hinges on it, and so much is wrong because of it.

If it's constantly crazy at work, we have two words for you: Fuck that.

pulling seven people away from their work for an hour is worth seven hours of lost productivity.

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely. When you work on your own, far away from the buzzing swarm at headquarters, you can settle into your own productive zone. You can actually get work done—the same work that you couldn't get done at work! Yes