by Fried, Jason
Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.
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?
A company is like software. It has to be usable, it has to be useful.
Running a calm company is, unfortunately, not the default way to run a company these days. You have to work against your instincts for a while. You have to put toxic industry norms aside. You have to recognize that “It’s crazy at work” isn’t right.
You can dare to be completely ordinary every now and then.
“Comparison is the death of joy.”
Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets.
worry less (or not at all!) about changing the world. Chances are, you won’t, and if you do, it’s not going to be because you said you would.
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.
A great work ethic isn’t about working whenever you’re called upon. It’s about doing what you say you’re going to do, putting in a fair day’s work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck.
Ask people where they go when they really need to get something done. One answer you’ll rarely hear: the office.
“But how do you know if someone’s working if you can’t see them?” Same answer as this question: “How do you know if someone’s working if you can see them?” You don’t. The only way to know if work is getting done is by looking at the actual work.
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.
All chat all the time conditions you to believe everything’s worth discussing quickly right now, except that hardly anything is. Almost everything can and should wait until someone has had a chance to think it through and properly write it up.
It’s when you try to fix both scope and time that you have a recipe for dread, overwork, and exhaustion.
Normal comes on quick. First it starts as an outlier. Some behavior you don’t love, but tolerate. Then someone else follows suit, but either you miss it or you let it slide. Then people pile on—repeating what they’ve seen because no one stepped in to course correct. Then it’s too late. It’s become the culture. The new normal.
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.
big-bang releases bundle the risk from every component, so if one thing falls behind, the whole thing can get held up. Which it always does.
Jeff Bezos put it well in his 2017 letter to shareholders: I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
The only way to get more done is to have less to do.
time isn’t something that can be managed. Time is time—it rolls along at the same pace regardless of how you try to wrestle with it. What you choose to spend it on is the only thing you have control over.
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.
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.
When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says “It’s no big deal” or the token that says “It’s the end of the world.” Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.