Quotes from Jason Fried

It was the discomfort of knowing two people doing the same work at the same level were being paid differently that led us to reform how we set salaries. That's how we ended up throwing out individual negotiations and differences in pay, and going with a simpler system.

Promises are easy and cheap to make, actual work is hard and expensive.

You'll often hear that people don't like change, but that's not quite right. People have no problem with change they asked for. What people don't like is forced change—change they didn't request on a timeline they didn't choose. Your "new and improved" can easily become their "what the fuck?" when it is dumped on them as a surprise.

Always keeping the door open to radical changes only invites chaos and second-guessing.

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.

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

Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.

They're need, must, can't, easy, just, only, and fast. These words get in the way of healthy communication. They are red flags that introduce animosity, torpedo good discussions, and cause projects to be late.

You can absolutely run a great business without a single goal. You don't need something fake to do something real. And if you must have a goal, how about just staying in business? Or serving your customers well? Or being a delightful place to work? Just because these goals are harder to quantify does not make them any less important.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

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

People can't get work done at work anymore. That turns life into work's leftovers. The doggie bag. What's worse is that long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it's a mark of stupidity.

Projections are just bullshit. They're just guesses.

We don't want reactions. We don't want first impressions. We don't want knee-jerks. We want considered feedback. Read it over. Read it twice, three times even. Sleep on it. Take your time to gather and present your thoughts—just like the person who pitched the original idea took their time to gather and present theirs.

If you want to make a product better, you have to keep tweaking, revising, and iterating. The same thing is true with a company.

The ability to be alone with your thoughts is, in fact, one of the key advantages of working remotely.

Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it. Competitors can never copy the you in your product.

Things get harder as you go, not easier. The easiest day is day one. That's the dirty little secret of business.

you can brainstorm, you can argue, you can survey, but only shipping will tell you whether you're going to sink or swim.

There's simply no getting around it: in hiring for remote-working positions, managers should be ruthless in filtering out poor writers.

Without a fixed, believable deadline, you can't work calmly. When you don't trust the date, or when you think it's impossible to do everything someone's telling you to do within a specific period of time, or when someone keeps piling on more work without giving you more time, you work frantically and maniacally. Few things are as demoralizing as working on projects with no end in sight.

Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they're either achieved or abandoned

So, coming into the office just means that people have to put on pants. There's no guarantee of productivity.

And between all those context switches and attempts at multitasking, you have to add buffer time. Time for your head to leave the last thing and get into the next thing. This is how you end up thinking "What did I actually do today?" when the clock turns to five and you supposedly spent eight hours at the office. You know you were there, but the hours had no weight, so they slipped away with nothing to show.