It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

Discomfort is the human response to a questionable or bad situation, whether that’s working long hours with no end in sight, exaggerating your business numbers to impress investors, or selling intimate user data to advertisers.

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.

Respect the work that you’ve never done before. Remind yourself that other people’s jobs aren’t so simple. Results rarely come without effort. If momentum and experience are on your side, what is hard can masquerade as easy, but never forget that not having done something before doesn’t make it easy. It usually makes it hard.

Managers need double the empathy, not half a ration.

When you force yourself to focus on just the person and their work, not their glorified past, you also end up giving more people a chance.

We’ve found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who’s already at their peak. We hired many of our best people not because of who they were but because of who they could become.

Important topics need time, traction, and separation from the rest of the chatter. If something is being discussed in a chat room and it’s clearly too important to process one line at a time, we ask people to “write it up” instead.

Culture is what culture does. Culture isn’t what you intend it to be. It’s not what you hope or aspire for it to be. It’s what you do. So do better.

Are you building your company to last, or are you starting with an exit strategy in mind?

You can do big things with small teams, but it’s a whole hell of a lot harder to do small things with big teams. And small things are often all that’s necessary.

Happiness is shipping: finishing good work, sending it off, and then moving on to the next idea.

It’s taken us a long time and a number of missteps to learn this core truth about selling: Sell new customers on the new thing and let old customers keep whatever they already have. This is the way to keep the peace and maintain the calm.

A business is a collection of choices. Every day is a new chance to make a new choice, a different choice.