Quotes from Jason Fried

Emulate drug dealers. Make your product so good, so addictive, so "can't miss" that giving customers a small, free taste makes them come back with cash in hand.

Once ego and pride are on the line, you can't change your mind without looking bad. The desire to save face trumps the desire to make the right call.

It's a beautiful way to put it: Leave the poetry in what you make. When something becomes too polished, it loses its soul. It seems robotic.

Any conversation with more than three people is typically a conversation with too many people.

If you are going to do something, do something that matters.

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.

Southwest—unlike most other airlines, which fly multiple aircraft models—flies only Boeing 737s. As a result, every Southwest pilot, flight attendant, and ground-crew member can work any flight. Plus, all of Southwest's parts fit all of its planes. All that means lower costs and a business that's easier to run. They made it easy on themselves.

If you can't fit everything in within the time and budget allotted then don't expand the time and budget. Instead, pull back the scope. There's always time to add stuff later — later is eternal, now is fleeting.

Don't make up problems you don't have yet. It's not a problem until it's a real problem.

The solution: Break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller it is, the easier it is to estimate. You're probably still going to get it wrong, but you'll be a lot less wrong than if you estimated a big project. If something takes twice as long as you expected, better to have it be a small project that's a couple weeks over rather than a long one that's a couple months over. Keep breaking your time frames down into

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.

Give your employees a shot at showing the company a new way, and provide the room for them to chalk up a few small victories. Once they've proved that their idea can work on a limited basis, they can begin to scale it up.