Top 160 Jason Fried Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Jason Fried

102. “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

103. “Companies love to declare “We’re all family here.” No, you’re not.”

— Jason Fried

104. “Without profit, something is always on fire. When companies talk about burn rates, two things are burning: money and people. One you’re burning up, one you’re burning out.”

— Jason Fried

105. “Following group chat at work is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda.”

— Jason Fried

106. “In almost every situation, the expectation of an immediate response is an unreasonable expectation. Yet with more and more real-time communication tools creeping into daily work – especially instant-messaging tools and group chat – the expectation of an immediate response has become the new normal.”

— Jason Fried

107. “Companies that live in such a zero-sum world don’t “earn market share” from a competitor, they “conquer the market.” They don’t just serve their customers, they “capture” them. They “target” customers, employ a sales “force,” hire “headhunters” to find new talent, pick their “battles,” and make a “killing.”

— Jason Fried

108. “When companies are in the red, employees worry about their jobs. People aren’t stupid – they know that burning cash means the good times won’t last. The possibility of layoffs is always nagging. CVs are always at the ready.”

— Jason Fried

109. “What’s worse is when management holds up certain people as having a great “work ethic” because they’re always around, always available, always working. That’s a terrible example of a work ethic and a great example of someone who’s overworked.”

— Jason Fried

110. “We’ve frequently been trapped by things that used to work well but no longer do.”

— Jason Fried

111. “Not doing something that isn’t worth doing is a wonderful way to spend your time.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

113. “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.”

— Jason Fried

114. “Stress is passed from organization to employee, from employee to employee, and then from employee to customer.”

— Jason Fried

115. “But 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?”

— Jason Fried

116. “It’s not worth trading sleep for a few extra hours at the office. Not only will it make you exhausted, it’ll literally make you stupid.”

— Jason Fried

117. “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.”

— Jason Fried

118. “It’s almost impossible to work on something and not be tempted to chase all the exciting new what-if and we-could-also ideas that come up. There’s always one more thing it could do, one more improvement it should have. But if you actually want to make progress, you have to narrow as you go.”

— Jason Fried

119. “If you can’t fit everything you want to do within 40 hours per week, you need to get better at picking what to do, not work longer hours.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

121. “Stop equating work ethic with excessive work hours. Neither is going to get you ahead or help you find calm.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

123. “Release yourself from the 9am-to-5pm mentality. It might take a bit of time and practice to get the hang of working asynchronously with your team, but soon you’ll see that it’s the work – not the clock – that matters.”

— Jason Fried

124. “Much corporate anxiety comes from the realization that the company has been doing the wrong thing, but it’s too late to change direction because of the “Plan.” “We’ve got to see it through!” Seeing a bad idea through just because at one point it sounded like a good idea is a tragic waste of energy and talent.”

— Jason Fried

125. “Because let’s face it: 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. And when that happens, you’re supposed to pick new ones and start stressing again. Nothing ever stops at the quarterly win. There are four quarters to a year. Forty to a decade. Every one of them has to produce, exceed, and beat EXPECTATIONS.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

129. “The person with the question needed something and they got it. The person with the answer was doing something else and had to stop. That’s rarely a fair trade.”

— Jason Fried

130. “The best companies aren’t families. They’re supporters of families. Allies of families. They’re there to provide healthy, fulfilling work environments so that when workers shut their laptops at a reasonable hour, they’re the best husbands, wives, parents, siblings, and children they can be.”

— Jason Fried

131. “The further away you are from something, the fuzzier it becomes.”

— Jason Fried

132. “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.”

— Jason Fried

133. “If you spend 20 percent each on getting five things to 80 percent, well, then, you’ve done five things!”

— Jason Fried

134. “Waiting it out is just fine. The sky won’t fall, the company won’t fold. It’ll just be a calmer, cooler, more comfortable place to work. For everyone.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

136. “The fear of missing out. It’s the affliction that drives obsessive checking of Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Instagram stories, WhatsApp groups, and news apps.”

— Jason Fried

137. “But the thing is, there’s not more work to be done all of a sudden. The problem is that there’s hardly any uninterrupted, dedicated time to do it.”

— Jason Fried

138. “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.”

— Jason Fried

139. “Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm.”

— Jason Fried

140. “So take a step toward calm, and relieve people from needing to broadcast their whereabouts and status. Everyone’s status should be implicit: I’m trying to do my job, please respect my time and attention.”

— Jason Fried

141. “When someone takes your time, it doesn’t cost them anything, but it costs you everything.”

— Jason Fried

142. “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.”

— Jason Fried

143. “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.”

— Jason Fried

144. “Whoever managed to rebrand the typical open-plan office – with all its noise, lack of privacy, and resulting interruptions – as something hip and modern deserves a damn medal from the Committee of Irritating Distractions.”

— Jason Fried

145. “You can only work exactly the same way, at the same pace, doing the same work for so long before monotony bites.”

— Jason Fried

146. “The expectation of an immediate response is the ember that ignites so many fires at work.”

— Jason Fried

147. “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.”

— Jason Fried

148. “You can only do great work if you have adequate quality time to do it.”

— Jason Fried

149. “Ask yourself: When was the last time you had three or even four completely uninterrupted hours to yourself and your work?”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried