ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever

by Jason Fried

make choices that are small enough that they’re effectively temporary. When you make tiny decisions, you can’t make big mistakes. These small decisions mean you can afford to change. There’s no big penalty if you mess up. You just fix it.

You have to understand why something works or why something is the way it is. When you just copy and paste, you miss that.

Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.

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.

Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition.

Every little move becomes something to be analyzed. And that’s a terrible mind-set.

When you spend time worrying about someone else, you can’t spend that time improving yourself.

Your chances of coming up with something fresh go way down when you keep feeding your brain other people’s ideas. You become reactionary instead of visionary.

you can’t beat someone who’s making the rules. You need to redefine the rules, not just build something slightly better.

Say no by default If I’d listened to customers, I’d have given them a faster horse. —HENRY FORD

People avoid saying no because confrontation makes them uncomfortable.

Deal with the brief discomfort of confrontation up front and avoid the long-term regret.

The enthusiasm you have for a new idea is not an accurate indicator of its true worth.

Obscurity helps protect your ego and preserve your confidence.

You don’t want everyone to watch you starting your business.

When you’re a success, the pressure to maintain predictability and consistency builds. You get more conservative.

These early days of obscurity are something you’ll miss later on, when you’re really under the microscope. Now’s the time to take risks without worrying about embarrassing yourself.

When you build an audience, you don’t have to buy people’s attention—they give it to you.

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. Then when you need to get the word out, the right people will already be listening.

Teaching is something individuals and small companies can do that bigger competitors can’t.

People are curious about how things are made.

Don’t be afraid to show your flaws. Imperfections are real and people respond to real.

When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.

You are not so special that everyone else will instantly pay attention. No one cares about you. At least not yet. Get used to it.

Trade the dream of overnight success for slow, measured growth. It’s hard, but you have to be patient.

Start building your audience today. Start getting people interested in what you have to say. And then keep at it. In a few years, you too will get to chuckle when people discuss your “overnight” success.

NEVER HIRE ANYONE to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself first.

Don’t hire for pleasure; hire to kill pain.

The right time to hire is when there’s more work than you can handle for a sustained period of time. There should be things you can’t do anymore. You should notice the quality level slipping. That’s when you’re hurting. And that’s when it’s time to hire, not earlier.

Problems start when you have more people than you need.

appeasement is what gets companies into trouble. You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap.

You need an environment where everyone feels safe enough to be honest when things get tough. You need to know how far you can push someone. You need to know what people really mean when they say something.

They don’t care about landing your job; they just care about landing any job.

There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years. The real difference comes from the individual’s dedication, personality, and intelligence.

How long someone’s been doing it is overrated. What matters is how well they’ve been doing it.

The pool of great candidates is far bigger than just people who completed college with a stellar GPA.

With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate work. Everyone’s got to be producing. No one can be above the work.

Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a delegator’s best friend.

Managers of one are people who come up with their own goals and execute them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do—set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc.—but they do it by themselves and for themselves.

You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through.

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off. That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand.

Writing is today’s currency for good ideas.

Geography just doesn’t matter anymore. Hire the best talent, regardless of where it is.

Hire them for a miniproject, even if it’s for just twenty or forty hours. You’ll see how they make decisions. You’ll see if you get along. You’ll see what kind of questions they ask. You’ll get to judge them by their actions instead of just their words.

when you get into a real work environment, the truth comes out.

WHEN SOMETHING GOES wrong, someone is going to tell the story. You’ll be better off if it’s you. Otherwise, you create an opportunity for rumors, hearsay, and false information to spread.

People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public, and responsive during a crisis.

Getting back to people quickly is probably the most important thing you can do when it comes to customer service.

Everything you do before things go wrong matters far more than the actual words you use to apologize.

Listening to customers is the best way to get in tune with a product’s strengths and weaknesses.