Top 160 Jason Fried Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Working 40 hours a week is plenty. Plenty of time to do great work, plenty of time to be competitive, plenty of time to get the important stuff done.”

— Jason Fried

102. “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.”

— Jason Fried

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Jason Fried

106. “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

107. “Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

110. “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

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

— Jason Fried

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

117. “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

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

— Jason Fried

119. “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

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

— Jason Fried

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Jason Fried

128. “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

129. “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

130. “These half-baked, right-in-the-middle-of-something-else new ideas lead to half-finished, abandoned projects that litter the landscape and zap morale.”

— 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. “Taking someone’s time should be a pain in the ass. Taking many people’s time should be so cumbersome that most people won’t even bother to try it unless it’s REALLY IMPORTANT! Meetings should be a last resort, especially big ones.”

— Jason Fried

135. “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

136. “The quickest way to disappointment is to set unreasonable expectations.”

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Jason Fried

141. “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

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

— Jason Fried

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

— Jason Fried

144. “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

145. “You can’t credibly promote the virtues of reasonable hours, plentiful rest, and a healthy lifestyle to employees if you’re doing the opposite as the boss.”

— Jason Fried

146. “Calm is protecting people’s time and attention. Calm is about 40 hours of work a week. Calm is reasonable expectations. Calm is ample time off. Calm is smaller. Calm is a visible horizon. Calm is meetings as a last resort. Calm is asynchronous first, real-time second. Calm is more independence, less interdependence. Calm is sustainable practices for the long term. Calm is profitability.”

— Jason Fried

147. “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.”

— Jason Fried

148. “Rather than demand whatever it takes, we ask, What will it take?”

— Jason Fried

149. “The person making the pitch has presumably put a lot of time, thought, and energy into gathering their thoughts and presenting them clearly to an audience. But the rest of the people in the room are asked to react. Not absorb, not think it over, not consider – just react. Knee-jerk it. That’s no way to treat fragile new ideas.”

— Jason Fried

150. “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.”

— Jason Fried