Top 160 Jason Fried Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “What do you gain if you ban employees from, say, visiting a social-networking site or watching YouTube while at work? You gain nothing. That time doesn’t magically convert to work. They’ll just find some other diversion.”

— Jason Fried

52. “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.”

— Jason Fried

53. “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?”

— Jason Fried

54. “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?”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

56. “That’s because offices have become interruption factories. A busy office is like a food processor – it chops your day into tiny bits. Fifteen minutes here, ten minutes there, twenty here, five there.”

— Jason Fried

57. “Stress is passed from organization to employee, from employee to employee, and then from employee to customer. Stress never stops at the border of work, either. It bleeds into life. It infects your relationships with your friends, your family, your kids.”

— Jason Fried

58. “The big transition with a distributed workforce is going from synchronous to asynchronous collaboration.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

60. “When someone copies you, they are copying a moment in time. They don’t know the thinking that went into getting you to that moment in time, and they won’t know the thinking that’ll help you have a million more moments in time. They’re stuck with what you left behind.”

— Jason Fried

61. “Starting a business on the side while keeping your day job can provide all the cash flow you need.”

— Jason Fried

62. “All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortunate companies have audiences.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

64. “If you build software, every error message is marketing.”

— Jason Fried

65. “You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room. That’s a warehouse.”

— Jason Fried

66. “Chaos should not be the natural state at work.”

— Jason Fried

67. “WE ALL HAVE ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date.”

— Jason Fried

68. “Later is where excuses live. Later is where good intentions go to die. Later is a broken back and a bent spirit. Later says “all-nighters are temporary until we’ve got this figured out.” Unlikely. Make the change now.”

— Jason Fried

69. “When someone wants to demonstrate a new feature they’re working on at 37signals, often the easiest way is to record a screencast and narrate the experience. A screencast is basically just a recording of your screen that others can play back later as a movie. It can be used in several ways, including for presenting the latest sales figures or elaborating on a new marketing strategy.”

— Jason Fried

70. “Everyone should be encouraged to start his own business, not just some rare breed that self-identifies as entrepreneurs.”

— Jason Fried

71. “Ever try to cancel an account with your cell phone company? It’s not an inherently complicated act. But many phone companies make it so difficult to do because they have retention goals to hit. They want to make it hard for you to cancel so it’s easier for them to hit their numbers.”

— Jason Fried

72. “If you want to know the truth about what you’ve built, you have to ship it. You can test, you can brainstorm, you can argue, you can survey, but only shipping will tell you whether you’re going to sink or swim.”

— Jason Fried

73. “It’s like when you’re on hold and a recorded voice comes on telling you how much the company values you as a customer. Really? Then maybe you should hire some more support people so I don’t have to wait thirty minutes to get help.”

— Jason Fried

74. “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.”

— Jason Fried

75. “Whenever executives talk about how their company is really like a big ol’ family, beware. They’re usually not referring to how the company is going to protect you no matter what or love you unconditionally. You know, like healthy families would. Their motive is rather more likely to be a unidirectional form of sacrifice: yours.”

— Jason Fried

76. “Failure is not a pre-requisite for success. Already successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again than who failed.”

— Jason Fried

77. “What do you call a generic pitch sent out to hundreds of strangers hgoping that one will bite? Spam.”

— Jason Fried

78. “When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention – they give it to you. This is a huge advantage. So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos – whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience.”

— Jason Fried

79. “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?”

— Jason Fried

80. “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.”

— Jason Fried

81. “If you’re pitching your boss to let you work from home a few days a week, a common rebuff is how envious your coworkers would be if you were granted this special privilege. Why, it simply wouldn’t be fair! We all need to be equally, miserably unproductive at the office and suffer in unity!”

— Jason Fried

82. “It’s OK if it’s not perfect. You might not seem as professional, but you will seem a lot more genuine.”

— Jason Fried

83. “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.”

— Jason Fried

84. “If the only way you can inspire the troops is by a regimen of exhaustion, it’s time to look for some deeper substance. Because what trickles down is less likely to be admiration but dread and fear instead. A leader who sets an example of self-sacrifice can’t help but ask self-sacrifice of others.”

— Jason Fried

85. “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.”

— Jason Fried

86. “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.”

— Jason Fried

87. “As Sir Richard Branson commented in his ode to working remotely: “To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision.”fn3.”

— Jason Fried

88. “It’s better to have people be happy using someone else’s product than disgruntled using yours.”

— Jason Fried

89. “It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.”

— Jason Fried

90. “Most people should miss out on most things most of the time.”

— Jason Fried

91. “The idea that you’ll instantly move needles because you’ve never tried to move them until now is, well, delusional. Sometimes you get lucky and things are as easy as you had imagined, but that’s rarely the case. Most conversion work, most business-development work, most sales work is a grind – a lot of effort for a little movement. You pile those little movements into a big one eventually, but that fruit is way up at the top of the tree.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

94. “Once every year we review market rates and issue raises automatically. Our target is to pay everyone at the company at the top 10 percent of the market regardless of their role. So whether you work in customer support or ops or programming or design, you’ll be paid in the top 10 percent for that position.”

— Jason Fried

95. “Don’t fill your day with five more just to stay busy or feel productive. Not doing something that isn’t worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.”

— Jason Fried

96. “You have to keep asking yourself if the way you’re working today is the way you’d want to work in 10, 20, or 30 years. If not, now is the time to make a change, not “later.”

— Jason Fried

97. “You just can’t bring your A game to every situation. Knowing when to embrace Good Enough is what gives you the opportunity to be truly excellent when you need to be.”

— Jason Fried

98. “The scarcity of such face time in remote working situations makes it seem that much more valuable. And as a result, something interesting happens: people don’t waste the time. An awareness of scarcity makes them use it wisely.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

100. “What’s our market share? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.”

— Jason Fried