Top 160 Jason Fried Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Unless you are a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy.”

— Jason Fried

Featured in: Startup Quotes

2. “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

— Jason Fried

3. “What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.”

— Jason Fried

4. “A 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.”

— Jason Fried

5. “Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination itself.”

— Jason Fried

6. “There’s nothing wrong with staying small. You can do big things with a small team.”

— Jason Fried

7. “The most important thing is to begin.”

— Jason Fried

8. “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

9. “You don’t create a culture. It happens. This is why new companies don’t have a culture. Culture is the by-product of consistent behavior.”

— Jason Fried

10. “Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.”

— Jason Fried

11. “It’s entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come true.”

— Jason Fried

12. “Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.”

— Jason Fried

13. “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

14. “If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.”

— Jason Fried

15. “Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.”

— Jason Fried

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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.”

— Jason Fried

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “Any conversation with more than three people is typically a conversation with too many people.”

— Jason Fried

23. “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.”

— Jason Fried

24. “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.”

— Jason Fried

25. “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

26. “There are two fundamental ways not to be ignored at work. One is to make noise. The other is to make progress, to do exceptional work.”

— Jason Fried

27. “When everything constantly needs approval, you create a culture of nonthinkers.”

— Jason Fried

28. “It’s time for companies to stop asking their employees to breathlessly chase ever-higher, ever-more-artificial targets set by ego.”

— Jason Fried

29. “Don’t throw good time after bad work.”

— Jason Fried

30. “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.”

— Jason Fried

31. “When you want something bad enough, you make the time – regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don’t want it bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time. Don’t let yourself off the hook with excuses. It’s entirely your responsibility to make your dreams come true.”

— Jason Fried

32. “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

33. “No is easier to do, yes is easier to say. No is no to one thing. Yes is no to a thousand things. No is a precision instrument, a surgeon’s scalpel, a laser beam focused on one point. Yes is a blunt object, a club, a fisherman’s net that catches everything indiscriminately. No is specific. Yes is general.”

— Jason Fried

34. “Find a judo solution, one that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort. When good enough gets the job done, go for it.”

— Jason Fried

35. “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.”

— Jason Fried

36. “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.”

— Jason Fried

37. “Decisions are progress. Each one you make is a brick in your foundation. You can’t build on top of “We’ll decide later,” but you can build on top of.”

— Jason Fried

38. “Long projects zap morale. The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now – while you’ve got the motivation and momentum to do so.”

— Jason Fried

39. “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.”

— Jason Fried

40. “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.”

— Jason Fried

41. “No time is no excuse.”

— Jason Fried

42. “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

43. “Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment.”

— Jason Fried

44. “Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.”

— Jason Fried

45. “If you can’t fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don’t expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. There’s always time to add stuff later – later is eternal, now is fleeting.”

— Jason Fried

46. “Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.”

— Jason Fried

47. “Walk into a library anywhere in the world and you’ll notice the same thing: It’s quiet and calm. Everyone knows how to behave in a library. In fact, few things transcend cultures like library behavior. It’s a place where people go to read, think, study, focus, and work. And the hushed, respectful environment reflects that. Isn’t that what an office should be?”

— Jason Fried

48. “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.”

— Jason Fried

49. “Respect the work that you’ve never done before.”

— Jason Fried

50. “Ultimately, startups are easy, stayups are hard. Keeping the show running for the long term is a lot harder than walking onstage for the first time.”

— Jason Fried