The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish - #54 Jason Fried: Doing the Enough Thing

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

Basecamp CEO and co-founder Jason Fried gives us a peek behind the scenes of his company and discusses his philosophy on doing great work, making a positive difference, and learning to breathe in the fast-paced culture of today’s workplace.   Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's just important, I think, to understand why you are leading someone in a certain direction. I'm not sure that it's always that well thought out. Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish, and this is another episode of the Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, mental models that help you learn from the best of what other people have already figured out. You can learn more and stay up to date on the podcast at FX. That's fs.blog slash podcast. Listen, I get emails all the time from people saying, I never knew you had a newsletter. So I'm going to put a little plug in here for the newsletter. We do. It's called brain food. And it comes out every Sunday. It's on point. contains our recommendations for articles we found online, books we're reading and liking, quotes, and more. It's become one of the most popular things we've ever done. And it's free. And you can learn more at fs. dot blog slash newsletter. That's fs.blog slash newsletter. Most of the guests on this show are subscribers to the weekly email, so make sure you check it out.

On the show today is Jason Freed, the co-founder and CEO of Basecamp, and the author of Rework, and it doesn't have to be crazy at work. When I look for examples around people running a business the way I want to run a business, Jason immediately comes to mind. In a world of VC Capital slashing around, Basecamp has bucked the trend and grown nonprofits. And a while ago, they changed their name to base camp. It used to be 37 signals. So if it sounds a little unfamiliar and you're familiar with 37 signals, it's now base camp.

We talk about everything, but we talk about why you shouldn't measure yourself against a number of goal, running a business, life, parenting, and like everything else under the sun. And I have to warn you, Jason's philosophy is infectious. It's time to listen and learn. What's one of the biggest lessons that you learned from your parents growing up? A number of them. But I would say always figure out what the right thing to do is in any given situation. It's not always that you're going to do the right thing, but know what the right thing is.

I think that's something that I've always taken away from my folks. My folks, I've always seen them do the right thing even when it's inconvenient. And I think that that's something that's really stuck with me. Now, again, like, we don't all live by that all the time, but we try. We try. So I'm always looking for like, you know, hey, it would be really nice if I didn't have to do this, but really the right thing to do is to do this or, you know, in a situation where you see something where it be more convenient to look away, you know, but like the right thing to do

is to stop and help, that kind of thing. Do any examples come to mind either through running base camp or growing up that you witnessed your parents do that? I saw it a lot. So one, so growing up, I had a friend named Freddie. and Freddy, Freddy's family didn't have a lot of money. My family was okay. We're doing pretty good.

And Freddie and I used to play basketball outside. We had a basketball hoop outside in our driveway. And it came time to play basketball, like to try out for basketball in junior high or whatever it was. Actually, this was not even a tryout. This was just like a junior high basketball team sort of thing. And Freddie couldn't afford to, it was like $100. bucks or something and couldn't afford to do it. And I remember my dad, um, just taking care of that

for him, um, because, uh, it was the right thing to do. Freddie love basketball. Uh, we used to play all the time. And, um, it'd be, you know, you could say like, well, his parents didn't want to do it or couldn't afford it like, oh well. But my dad's like, you know, that's just not right. Like he, he should, he wants to play. It's, it's not his fault. The kid's 15 or whatever. Like, um, if we can help him out, let's help him out. So that's like a one example. And that's a monetary example, but it wasn't really the money so much. It was the thought. And it was a recognition in the situation that this kid wanted to do something and he was being held back because his folks couldn't afford it. And if we can, so let's, let's help. So I think that was like one specific example I can

make of. That's an awesome example. Is that sort of like the impetus behind base camp and working shorter hours too, where it's trying to do the right thing versus what the easy thing is? I think it's doing the enough thing. So talk to me about that. This is sort of counterintuitive. right? Because we live in this cultural pressure, whether we sort of like, whether it's tangible or we just know it exists. And it's to work harder, to work longer. You're on a treadmill. And there's like nine people waiting to take your job sort of. And if you're not working hard, then somebody else will. Perhaps. We haven't created a situation. We made sure that we've created an environment where that's not the case, where it's not about people aren't looking around and say who's working the hardest. And as I wrote actually, in a in a blog post about this, like, look, we're making software. This isn't hard work, really. Like, hard work to me is manual labor, something your back is sore by the end of the day. You're really, really beat up.

We're fortunate to be able to do the things that we're doing here. We get to sit in an air-conditioned room. We get to work on the computer. There's very little risk involved with all this stuff. So I tend to reserve the word hard work for, like, really physical hard work. But that's just maybe an aside, but we just, we don't look at it that way. We look at essentially at output, kind of, which is, you know, is the work getting done? If the work gets done in five hours a day, and that's enough.

And frankly, like, you shouldn't need 10, 12 plus hours a day to get enough good work done. The reason why a lot of people are working those longer hours is not because there's 12 hours of work to do. it's because they can't find time within those 12 hours to actually get a few contiguous hours of time to actually do the work they need to do. So their work is spread out across so many different things and so many different places in a given day that they can't piece it together in a relatively short period of time. So it's spread out. And that's why people are working longer.

It's not that there's more work to do. I totally agree when I worked for the government. One of my observations was that I was actually only working like two hours a day, like everybody else. Everything else is meetings, it's context shifting, it's sort of like non-productive time, it's constant interruptions, and it really disrupts not only your flow, but the quality of your work. Absolutely. And there's more and more research coming out on this and studies on this and books about

this and people are paying more attention to it. And we've always tried to create an environment here at Basecamp where everybody gets a full eight hours a day to themselves, basically. Everyone's day is their own day. and how they spend it is up to them. And if someone wants some of your time, they have to ask you for it. We don't have, for example, we don't have shared calendars at Basecamp. So I can't see anyone else's schedule and they can't see mine.

So I can't take their time and they can't take mine. If they want some of mine or I want some of theirs, we have to ask each other for it. Like physically ask, like, hey, Jason, are you free? Or, hey, Jonas, are you free? Or, hey, Ann, are you free at 3 o'clock for, you know, 20 minutes to talk about something? And she could say yes or no or whatever. But it's a negotiation because it's valuable. Time is very valuable.

And so you negotiate. And versus a calendaring system where you click an empty box and you basically send an invitation through a system. And it's very rare that people decline invitations unless they truly can't make it. But the spirit is someone asked for my time, so I'll give it to them. But it's this inhumane system that's doing it. So we just want to make sure that people are talking to each other. if they need each other's time because time is incredibly valuable.

And to ask for someone else's time, you should have a good reason for it. And it shouldn't be just something you can fill into a field, you know, in a form. Can we geek out on that a little bit? Like, talk to me a little bit more about the internals of how base camp is run, how things are allocated, how teams come together, what the process is like on the inside. What does that look like? And how many people are you now, just to start out of it? Sure, we have 55 people in the company.

And different teams work slightly different ways. So I'll talk about like product development, which is primarily my responsibility. I guess everything's my responsibility. I run the place. But I mean, that's kind of where I spend most of my time. On product development, we basically choose work to do every six weeks. And we do work over a six week period of time.

I mean, I can get into how we choose that. But let me kind of set the framework here. So what we call six week cycles. And during those six weeks, we pick off three to five-ish projects. And each cycle of six weeks, there's usually two to three different product teams working on the features we've decided to work on. And those teams are three people or less. Oftentimes, it's two people.

And we basically decide that there's six weeks is enough time. A big fundamental thing about base camp is this idea of enough. And I've already talked about that like enough time during the day. And six weeks is enough time to make substantial, progress on something that's important, and it also forces us to make sure that we understand exactly what it is that is important in any feature that we're building. Because if you give it three months, it'll take three months. You give it six months. It'll take six months. And the exciting thing to me is to figure out what's the six-week version of this idea, and that we can really

boil it down into its essence. So we pick work every six weeks, assign it or throw it up for grabs to different product teams, and they can decide who wants to work on it. And then they get to work, and these teams are autonomous. They're not checking in with anybody automatically. They check in when they feel like they need to check in or they have questions or if I want to look at something, we'll look at something. But they're given the full responsibility

to complete that work in that amount of time. And 90 plus percent of the time they do. And so that's at a high level, how we work on product. How we come up with these ideas every six weeks is a different process. That's typically three of us thinking, about what we want to do next. So we don't have a roadmap.

So we don't have a, I don't know what we're going to do. Actually, I have no idea what we're going to do eight weeks from now. I just don't know. Nobody knows. But as a cycle is coming to an end, maybe a few weeks before that, a few of us begin to get together and think about what do we think we should do next. And we start to think about the things that we wanted to do and things we should do and how things are going currently and new ideas that have come up through customer requests

and throw a bunch of stuff on the table. And over the next few weeks, we bat it around, think about it, sketch it out, write it up, play with it and figure out if we think there's enough of an idea here that's solid enough, that's well-formed enough, that we're confident it can be done in six weeks that we can then hand it off to a team versus throwing teams ideas that are really barely baked, and then they have to take a lot of their time to actually think them through, and then there's not enough time actually to do the work. So before we hand work over to a team, we feel like we've got it 90% of the way

figured out and then exactly how the team does it is up to them but we can see a path to the end there and then i'll kind of stop there because maybe there's a bunch of details talk about no no man i want to geek out on this stuff this is really interesting if you're okay with that how are the teams sort of like so you give autonomy to the teams the two or three person teams how is success or failure judged and then in in your mind what is the difference between average and astonishing in terms of deliverables? Like what makes somebody above average one of those teams versus sort of like average? And then what are the metrics that you sort of like, do you outline this is what success

looks like beforehand? Or is it kind of like, hey, here's an idea. It's a little bit fleshed out, go implement it. Yeah, we're different in that we don't have any goals or any metrics for success. we have an idea for a feature, let's say, or a way to improve the product. And because we use the product every day, we are the number one customer of the product and because we know our customers who use the product, we have a pretty good sense at the end if it was an improvement or not.

It's not a matter of how many people use it. It's not a matter of like this is now used 18,000 times, but we're aiming for 22,000 so it's now a failure or like we're aiming for 17,000 unique uses a day or whatever, and it's 18, so it's a huge success. It's like, how do we feel about how this turned out? How do we feel about how the project also went? It's not just about the output and outcome. It's about how did it feel as we went?

Like, are people burned out? Do people hate each other now who liked each other six weeks ago? You know, what did this make our company stronger or weaker? Did this improve personal relationships or damage personal relationships? Like, it's a more holistic viewpoint or outlook, I should say, on how this thing turned out. You could technically end up with a great feature that customers love, but it could have completely destroyed morale internally.

To me, that's not a good outcome. It might be a good outcome on the customer's side, but if you're damaging your company internally, you can't do that very long until it actually ends up really damaging things on the outside, too. So we look at the whole thing, and this includes like individuals too. So, for example, if somebody's been working on three really hard things in a row, essentially. I'm using the word hard here, but let's just say like three challenging projects in a row.

The next project might be like we might throw them something that's a lot simpler just so they can decompress a bit. So I'm thinking about like who's been working on what, how have they been doing, what are the string of products they've been working on look like? And where do I think that this next batch of work would fit in with them as a human? So we kind of look at things that way. We also do post-mortems or whatever. It's always a weird word. to use. But projects are done. We look back on them a few months later and just get a sense of like after we have a little bit of distance, like how do we feel about it? What do we think went right? What went wrong? What could we have done better? We do get feedback from customers,

obviously. And so like we incorporate some of that in the review as well. And then if of course there's like a glaring mistake, like a major, we made a major mistake, then when we go back and fix it immediately, otherwise we let it ride for a while and kind of just revisit it a few months later and see how it all felt. There's two things I want to sort of like tease apart in that response. The first is use the word feel. And I thought that was really interesting because we're in this sort of age of machine learning and sort of algorithmic driven insight. Can you talk to me a little bit or expand upon your thoughts around that? Yeah. I know I put a lot of value on on feel and intuition and gut in these things.

We're not a data-driven company in terms of product development. We use data a lot for improving performance in terms of our infrastructure, making sure that we get back to customers in a reasonable amount of time, which is currently about 10 minutes. If you email us, you'll get a response in about 10 minutes. And we look at data in those ways. But in terms of how does something feel to work on? How does it feel to develop it, to deliver it?

How do we feel about it when it's done? I think that that's sort of a, it's a difficult thing to measure with numbers. It's more of a, again, like this, the problem is, is that, again, like I said, if you deliver a product, a feature or a product that hits it out of the park on certain metrics, perhaps, but it damages the people who worked on it together. And that can easily happen. It happens a lot. Not here necessarily, but I hear about it.

I read stories about it. We're like, the product was great, but, man, like, three product managers quit along the way, and someone else is like, this is the last project I'm ever doing here. And, like, there's shrapnel from these things. And there's, there's side effects. So, like, if you're only measuring the output and the outcome in terms of, like, how customers felt about it, but you're not really thinking about how people, actually humans felt about it, I think you're missing a big, big picture.

Now, of course, if you don't really care about the people in the company, and you're like, I'll just replace them if they leave because there's a million people knocking at the door who want jobs here. I mean, you can do it that way. I don't think that that's a really great way to run a company, but you can do it that way, too. And then you maybe don't care about the feel so much. But we care a lot about how things feel here and how people feel about the work they're doing and who they're working with and how things went down.

So, yeah, we're in maybe approaching a different age in a sense. But I think the personal touch and the human touch and the understanding between people, is a specific intangible that's actually very valuable, especially as a manager or someone who's running a company. I think you have to understand how people feel on a day-to-day basis about a bunch of different things to figure out if you're going in the right direction. What are some of the lessons that you've learned in the last decade running a business, but not only running a business, but running a business the way that you want to? You don't seem like you're very influenced by sort of outside factors.

I try not to be. I try to be quite ignorant, actually, about the trends in the industry and who's doing what and competitors and what their products are doing. I find that the more I pay attention to that, the less free I'm able to, or the less free my mind is, essentially, because you're just colored by what everyone else is doing and then you don't have as much space for your own thoughts, I think. So I just like to kind of, you know, I'm aware of what's going on, but I don't like to look at those things in detail. I much prefer to pay attention. to things outside my industry. Like, I get a lot of inspiration from architecture, from art, from nature, from going on long walks, like that kind of stuff versus like looking at the hottest new app or the new collaboration thing that just came out or whatever. I think you're much better off looking broadly, looking outside of your own walls,

than looking too close at the things that are really close to you. So I just, to me, like I've always tried to run things like, way in a way that makes sense to me. And hopefully there's enough people around here who would also make sense to. Hopefully there's enough customers out there who would also make sense to. We've never been a company that's interested in dominating an industry or taking market share from anybody or trying to have millions and millions of customers. We only need to find a small number technically of customers who really believe in what we're doing. And we see the world the same way. And we found many of them. Over 100,000 people pay us for base camp every month.

So, like, it's a great business. But like a lot of people would look at that and go, that's not enough. You need millions of customers. And you say, well, you do if your costs are out of control and you have thousands and thousands of people, but we have 55 people. So we can build a really wonderful business with a lot of impact doing it our way without having to pay attention to whatever else is doing. I like that a lot. It sounds a lot like one of your investors when you were saying that it sounds like Jeff Bezos a little bit, is that where he doesn't seem overly focused on what other people are doing. He seems to be doing his own thing, but generally aware of things. And he's an investor with you guys, correct? Yeah, kind of. So he bought, he owns a piece of Basecamp.

He bought those shares from David and I. So, like, he never invested in Basecamp, the company, essentially. Like, his money was never put into the business to run the business. We've always for 20 years as we've been, as long as we've been to business, we've always been 100% funded by customer revenues. But he did buy a piece. We did sell him a piece of the business in 2006. Yeah, he's been someone who's forever been interested or publicly been interested in being misunderstood.

And I've always admired that about him, which is he's just going to do it his own way. And he has different ideas in the rest of the industry. And I'm sure he pays attention to things. And sometimes he does, he will follow. the industry and other times he'll create a new industry. But I don't think he's overly concerned with what other people think about how he approaches his business. We definitely a very different perspective on how to run a business. We're going to keep our business as small as possible. He wants to build the biggest business in the world. He's the richest man in the world. I am not.

Not yet. Never will be. But different points of view, and never would want to be either, by the way. But different points of view on how to treat people and run businesses and whatever. But fundamentally, yeah, I think we share that point of view, which is like, just because other people are doing it this way does not mean that that's how you should do it. Who are some of the people that you admire that are running businesses that you maybe don't look to for inspiration, but sort of like keep tabs on and then why? Well, I admire anybody who stays in business for, let's say, more than five years. So I, like, for example, a friend of mine runs a small grocery store down the street from where I live. And I admire him because he has something we don't have,

which is that he gets to know every one of his customers by name. I can't know 100,000 customers by name. But when people walk into his shop, he knows who they are. Or he could get to know them. And he gets to know their preferences. And he gets to know them. And he gets to know their family. and he can say, hey, Jim, hey Bill, hey Sally, whatever. And that's something that I think is really cool. He can also experiment much faster. It's funny, like, you think in technology, you can experiment really quickly with A-B tests and stuff,

but he can experiment even faster. He can just, like, put something on the counter where you check out and see if it sells faster than it did when it was on the shelf. Like, you can play around, I think, in the physical world a lot better, a lot faster, in fact, than in the technical world, and you can also pick up on things.

You can see things that you can't necessarily see the technical world. We all, again, like, I think there's so much data available to us as far as customer preferences and whatnot. But, like, I don't think very few, I would say very few things beat just paying attention, just looking and picking up all the subtle nuances of how someone picks something up and looks at it. Do they turn it around? Do they hold it? Do they, like, why do they put it down? How long do they think about it? All those things. So, like, I used to work in a grocery store when I was growing up, and I used to work in the produce section. And I used to love to watch how people would choose fruit and vegetables.

Like some people take a cantaloupe and they like knock it and they listen to it. Some people smell a candleloat. Some people look at the colors of the candlelop. Like I don't know what the right way is, but I've always, I was always fascinated just to watch people make their own decisions about why this one. And I think he has that. So I love that. There's a shop down the street also for me that sewing machine repair shop. It's been a business for like 80 years, which just blows my mind, you know. Then there's technical businesses that I pay attention to. I really admire what Stripe is doing and kind of how they're doing it. And then there's people like Charlie Munger who I don't know, but who I admire greatly for his clarity of thought, his steadfast commitment to

value and to being straightforward and common sense and in all that stuff. So I take inspiration from a whole bunch of different people. A good friend of mine runs a gym, personal trainer, he's down the street from me. And it's just him. And I'm jealous of the fact that he gets to run of business and it's just him. Like, I love my employees, but it's kind of nice not to have any, too, to be honest, right? Like, if we're just being honest about business, it's like, it's nice to truly do your own thing, your own way. Right. And so I really admire that too. But of course, at the same time, like, if he's sick, he's out of business for three or four days. Like, I don't admire that. So, of course, having employees and having a process in a company, there's huge value in

that too. But I just like to look at all sorts of different businesses. But as long as you're staying in business and you're making more money than you spend, I respect you. I have a hard times though sometimes with tech businesses that are quote successful or held up as successful examples of businesses that are actually fundamentally terrible businesses. I think like things like companies like Uber as an example, of course they have some maybe some more moral issues perhaps too, but like for a while at least. But I don't, I think they're losing, they continue to lose my last kind of billions of dollars. Talk to me a little bit about that. I mean, just in the sense of, so you've been effectively bootstrapped from cash flows since day one.

Yes. How do you feel about competing against people that seemingly can take unlimited losses because they're funded by people willing to gamble a lot of money on an ultimate outcome? Yeah, I mean, I don't care, basically, because their performance or their lack of performance or their success doesn't really necessarily affect mine. In the fact that, like I said earlier, I only need some customers. They need all customers.

And so they can take as much as they want, and there's probably going to be plenty enough left over for me anyway. And not only that, like at some point, they will go away. One of the great ways to, quote, win in business is to just to stick around. And the best way I found to stick around is to be profitable because that if you're profitable, you get to stick around as long as you want. Of course, that's not to say that we couldn't be beat one day or something could go

catastrophically wrong. Like, of course, every business dies, every single one of them die. Often they kill themselves, though. They don't change. They don't do something right. They don't pay attention to customers. They get cocky. They get greedy.

Whatever it might be. It's usually those things. It's not that a competitor has more money than you and outspends you. it might be true in a in a specific market where it is really win or take all but i don't think it is in our industry and that's why there's hundreds of companies roughly doing kind of similar things that we're doing and many of them are going to do quite well and some of them won't but it's not that there's no customers left to take it's it's not that it's just like that some people's products don't fit the market or some people's prices don't fit the market or they give things away for free

and they run out of money because they can't pay their employees or whatever it might be so um i never I've never looked at like how much money someone has raised as like a thing to be afraid of or anything like that. In fact, I always think like, man, I don't envy the position you're in. You have, you've raised $50 million. The expectations on your shoulders are enormous. There are no expectations on my shoulders other than to continue to develop a good product and take care of our customers and take care of our employees. But those are expectations I can manage versus a billionaire who put a bunch of money into your company who wants to make more billions off of you and you're on a certain schedule of growth that has to be

sharply up and to the right. Otherwise, like, you're not going to be fulfilling the investment requirements and criteria and therefore they could choose to push you out or take you public when you're not ready or sell the company when you don't want to. Like, I would never, ever want to have those expectations on my shoulders. So I don't envy those kind of companies and I'd much rather be in my position. I would frankly, honestly, not trade my position with anyone else in the world as far as anyone else running a company. What are your expectations of yourself? I just want to do the right thing and do the best work I can on balance. Not every day is going to be that day. And not every decision I make is going to be the right one. I'm going to make mistakes and

screw some stuff up, whatever. But on balance, I want to make sure that I'm, I'm trying to, trying to do the right thing as often as I possibly can and making sure that that I create an environment where other people who work here can do the best work of their careers. I think if someone decides to work here, they're saying no to a million other opportunities. And so I feel like it's, I have to respect that and to create a place where they can do their best work. Because that's, that's their career. Like, they should be able to do their best work and flex their muscles as best they can and flex their mind as best they can, you know? And part of the, of that again is getting back to the point where I want to make sure everyone has a full amount

of time to themselves to do their best work. And I also want to be supportive and provide enough autonomy and all those things. So those are the expectations I have for myself. But I don't have expectations around growth. I don't have personal goals. I don't want to be seen in a certain way. Like I don't need to be in the media. I don't have that kind of stuff. I also don't have any interest or desire to change the world or anything like that. I just want to make a good product. I want to work with great people. I want to be intellectually challenged. I want to be able to put my ideas out there and see if they stick or not. And then also, of course, have a good life outside of that, certainly family and the whole thing.

So that's kind of it for me. I think that's a really sound philosophy. I hope so. It's what I've got. So I hope it's sound. But it's less common than you would want, right? Like maybe or less common than I would like to believe that sort of people, you seem to have a very inner scorecard and take a lot of satisfaction out of just doing good work and craftsmanship.

And it sort of like harkens to a different era almost than the one that we're in. I try to just understand what enough is. And I've told this story before, but I think it's a good one to bring up here, which is like, I remember once I was trying to run, I used to run a lot outside or I ran track and stuff. And after college, I couldn't, I wasn't good enough to go to the Olympics, right? So like, anywhere, close, good enough to, but I've always enjoyed running. I remember, like, trying to, to run a certain time, like, I don't know what a six minute mile or whatever it was at the time.

Because I was more of a sprinter. I was never a good long distance run. Anyway, I remember, like, running, going for run and not getting that. And I remember, like, feeling like I was disappointed. I ran a 610 instead of a 6. And then you think about, like, why would I be disappointed with that? like quite different questions like did i enjoy the run yes did i get fresh air yes did i feel like i worked my body my heart my mind yes did i see things as i ran that i was excited about yes

did i just breathe some fresh air yes like how are any of these outcomes negative but if you measure yourself against a number or a goal like six minutes and you don't hit that then you can feel disappointed or you feel like i got to work harder next time but like why do you actually have to work harder next time. Like, what was wrong with this time? And I just kind of came to these conclusions. And I continued to come to these conclusions. In business, there was a time when we tried to set some goals. Like, can we hit this number? And we started doing things that weren't us. Like, we started advertising. We don't advertise. We started buying ads on Facebook, try and move the needle. And we feel like, you know what? We don't like Facebook. I don't like their company.

Why are we giving them money? So we can hit some number that we made up? Why? Why? Again, why? We don't have to do this and we just kind of realized like we're going for something that we thought we were supposed to do and try to do and whatever and we eventually realized we don't need to do this so we stop doing it and everything's just fine still so I just think that my experience with setting goals and hitting numbers and hitting targets um you either you either do it and then you do it then you set another one um so it's like this never-ending quest to keep setting numbers or you don't do it and you're disappointed like how about just not doing it at all and just doing the best you can like I'm going to try to do the best work I can every day, regardless of if there's a target or not.

If you need a target to do your best work, it feels a bit artificial to me. That's just me. I don't think it's just to you. I mean, I have a couple of friends who run sort of fairly large software companies. And it's really interesting for me to watch their sort of psyche year over year. And it's a constant state of failure. And then the moment where they hit an objective, usually a revenue target or something, it lasts for like a day and then it's always like oh well next year we have to do 30% more

and it's like this perpetual state of stress and you can see it in terms of like how they age and sort of how they feel about themselves and their self-talk changes and it's just a really interesting sort of way to live right where you're perpetually not achieving something that you you've convinced yourself perhaps that you want to achieve but maybe wrongly well yeah I see it And our industry is sick with that, I think. Primarily, I would guess, because it's a high growth industry, first of all. So there's this expectation you're supposed to live up to. And when you look at all the, let's say, the great companies in the industry that people

consider great on the outside, they're all growing rapidly. So I want to be one of those. So you kind of aim for that. There's that. There's also investor pressure. I don't know if these folks that you know have taken investment, outside investment. But if they have, they have to deliver. and they have to deliver for someone else.

They're not really delivering for themselves. I mean, you could say they are in some respects because maybe one day they'll make a lot of money off the deal or whatever. Fine. That's totally cool. But for the most part, you're trying to deliver for someone else. And I just, for me, it's just not a satisfying way to go through life. I don't think that aiming for things is really, like we, like, we, like, aim to do a good job because that's like the satisfaction of putting in a good day's work

and then you line up a bunch of good days in a row and you have something there and you're excited about the work and sometimes you think you're really on to something and you're motivated by that. But that's all intrinsic motivation. It's not like some number or some target you're supposed to hit for someone else or for some other reason. I just, I've never been driven by that really. I don't think it's really healthy and I do see a lot of people who if they were to take a step back and look at what they actually have, they should be really proud of it. But instead, they're disappointed because they, or they're disappointed or like always teetering on disappointment because they're setting these really difficult targets to hit. And it's like, why are you being so hard

in yourself? I don't see the reason for it. Right. I don't think a lot of those people look back favorably on this period of life. It's kind of like the, you know, Ebenezer Scrooge, right? You want to be the most successful, widely known person. And then you get what you want. But then the end of your life you just want to redo yeah that's true i mean there's certainly things i'll want to redo in my life i'm sure too as you get to the end you you maybe you know you reflect and whatnot you're like i should spend more time here should have done this or should have been nicer this person or whatever it might be right but i wouldn't want to regret my career you know that kind of thing because you're how you treat people your relationship yeah of course yeah of course and like you're going to do that for

40 years of 50 years of your life maybe if something like i want to look back and that and go i i did my best versus like I didn't do well enough for someone else and that that's not how I want to measure and by the way I don't even think of measuring like I don't think I'll look back on my career I just don't think I would actually look back on my career and evaluate it in that sense I how do I feel on a day-to-day basis is kind of what I look at how do you uh switching gears just a little bit here like how do you feed your brain what sort of books do you read do you read magazines do you sort of like keep your eyes open to what's around you. Like, how does that, how do things crop up in there?

Yeah, it depends right now. The last four years have been more challenging. We have two kids who just had another baby a few months ago. So like, I don't have a lot of, thank you. I don't have a lot of personal time at the moment. Like I do go home at 5.30, but like, you know, family dinner, kid in bed at 7, kid gets up at 5.30. So I got to go to bed by 830 or 9, so I'm not a complete waste, you know.

So I haven't had a lot of free time. time lately. I do enjoy reading books, but because I don't have as much time, I find I'm listening to books more frequently because I can, I find like I can listen for 20 minutes in the car on the way into work, you know, and like kind of with audiobooks or podcasts or that sort of thing. So I'm consuming that. I hate that I use the word consuming. Consuming content is like the worst thing I can imagine. I listen and try to learn and pay attention to things that are interesting to me so um mostly non-fiction stuff um i like autobiographies i like learning about people i like learning about history i like nature so i pay a lot attention to that and then there's also things i'll do

like i have um i i like to go on walks i like to pay attention to nature i like to you know like said pay attention to architecture and that kind of stuff and so in any given experience i'm trying just to look around and pay attention to the details of like how something came together and why it is the way it is. And so it's sort of that perpetual low grade paying attention. And then when I have those moments of downtime or whatever, I'll listen to something or read something occasionally. I wish I had more time to dig into a number of books. And hopefully in a few years I'll have a little bit more of that. But right now it's been a little bit challenging. Are you like a one X audio guy or are you like 2X? How does that? I've experimented with speeding things up. And

And I've decided to come back to 1X. So I used to be, I would do like one and a half or two, mostly on podcasts, sometimes on audiobooks. And it kind of depends. Some reads are, some authors who read books, they seem like at 2x speed, it's fine. For others, it's so fast. But anyway, the point was is that I'm like, what am I rushing? Why am I trying to pack everything into my head?

Like, there's time to get to these things. And if I don't get to them, I don't get to them. So I've gone back to 1X. I also think it's, I don't think it's necessarily a good thing to have information come at you that fast because you're in a hurry to get it. I think it kind of creates this expectation of everything coming at you fast. I don't think that that's necessarily that healthy either. So I've just gone back to one ago. It takes nine hours to listen to this book instead of five or whatever.

Like, oh, well, that's fine. I'll get to, you know, yeah, I could have saved five hours, but like over the course of my life, like big deal. I'd rather just listen to it in the author's actual voice and just take it at that speed. It's always interesting when I meet people who've listened to the podcast and they think my voice sounds weird because it's not at 1.5 or 2x and I always find that interesting. Yeah, I can imagine like training your mind to be able to listen even to 3x speeds or people down the road reading books at a slower, at a different cadence or something to like, but again, it all comes down to like, what's the rush?

Why are we, why do we need to pack all the stuff in? Is it because we don't have enough time? Well, that's maybe, okay, then maybe, maybe because there's external circumstances, but still like, so if you just don't get to everything in life, then you don't get to everything in life. And by the way, like that book you're speeding up reading, like you have enough time for that.

Yeah. So anyway, that's my current thing. I've gone back to 1X, but I had experimented with faster reading. What sort of things that you do that are maybe counterintuitive or not, widely done amongst your peers in terms of how you raise your kids or how you think about raising your kids? I've decided not to ask people about like parenting so much because I don't like I don't know it's hard to evaluate right so it's like I don't know how to compare basically

I'll just can say like for the most part we've um with our four year olds are three month old I can't do anything yet of course but like our four month old our four year old sorry um kind of really believe in child-led learning. And he's in Monosori school. He really seems to enjoy that. We kind of let him get into whatever he wants to get into. And I'm actually a fan of a book called the self, I think it's called the self-driven child. And that's sort of our style. But it's not for everybody. And I don't want to be preachy about it or anything like that. But for us, it works pretty well, like our particular kid. He seems to want to go into a bunch of different things. And we just sort of let him go where he wants to go and let him play a lot.

I'm not like someone who's academically focused. I was never been of, here, there's my English is not so good there. I've never been someone who's been academically focused in terms of like, it's so important that you learn these things by these times and these topics or whatever. So, you know, I think it's important for kids to play and to just explore and be creative and whatever. And if he gets into this or our daughter gets into that, like whatever they get into who's fine with me, I'm not into pushing anything on anybody.

I think I want to dive into this academic focus a little bit, maybe with a, I'm going to think a little bit out loud here, but it seems like there's increasingly a system whereby we're driven to pass a test to demonstrate knowledge. But that success is often pushed by parents as well who view their success as a parent tied up to their child's sort of like academic success, but it seems to be missing the broader point about what really makes for a successful life. I'm wondering, can you expand on that with some of your thoughts? I've seen sort of two groups of parents around that. Like there's the parent who

was very academically successful growing up, went to maybe an Ivy League school, you know, and feels like their kid needs to do that too because they understandably like that's how they went through life and they've been successful, you know, in terms of someone's a doctor now or someone's a lawyer now or someone's a whatever now. And like, that's their path. And I get that. And I'm bringing my path to the picture because like, I was basically a C student. And so like I'm like, it doesn't really matter that much. And that's my perspective and not theirs. And their perspective is not mine. So there's also, of course, the situation where someone's, um, someone's parents maybe didn't go to school ever. And, um, and they want their child to, to, to, to be educated and, and to,

to have a better life than they did, and then they see education as the path for that, and I totally get that too. So there's just different approaches. I think it's more about what I try, what I don't want to do, I guess, is to apply unnecessary pressure. Saying like, you have to be this way,

or you have to learn this thing, or you have to do this, or else you won't X, Y, Z. I don't like the or else you won't X, Y, Z angle, right? And if you don't go to school, and don't get good grades. You won't X, Y, Z. I don't like that part of it. I think education's important. I think it's important to be creative and to pay attention and to be curious and all those things. But you can not enjoy school and be very smart. You can not enjoy school and and do something

new that no one's done before. I mean, school is a means to certain ends, but it's not the means to any end. So I just don't want to apply that kind of pressure. I think what's more important perhaps is just like seeing things through, knowing why you're doing what you're doing, finding the things that you're really interested in, and learning about those things, and just building some self-awareness and knowing yourself, I think, is maybe the most important lesson ultimately, which is, of course, like a lifelong lesson because your self-changes over time. If I was to maybe encourage or instill something in our kids, hopefully it would be like, find your path, figure out what you like, find out what drives you,

what you're really curious about and go into that. And there's a lot of depth in anything. So I think that's my take on it. And I think as far as, by the way, I think getting to your original point about like parents wanting to do something, or parents wanting to see their kids do something to make them, to make the parent feel better, I think we all do that in one way or another.

You know, it's a matter of pride in some cases. It's a matter of, you know, maybe I didn't do well, life but my kid can and so like you know that makes me feel better that kind of stuff so i i wouldn't criticize any of that it's just um oh yeah there's no no judgment on my part of all yeah no me neither but it's more about like at the end of the day like why are you it's just important i think to understand why you are leading someone in a certain direction and i'm not sure that it's always that well thought out what are some of the things that you see as the CEO of people coming out of school who might have good grades but ultimately are ill positioned for successful

in the workforce versus people who might have had mediocre like both you and i were c students i was a d student too i mean like different grades but they're well positioned for not only a long career but for much success however they wanted to find that yeah the thing that surprises me most about people coming out of school um is how poorly school teaches people how to write and communicate actually I read cover letters and whatnot, and I'm just surprised that you can graduate college and not really know how to explain yourself well, not really know how to get to the point, not really understand what it's like to make your case or to make a case. And that just surprises me. And I think it's unfortunate. And I don't know if it's a matter of writing not being taught properly or the type of

writing that's being taught in school being very academic based versus like actually communication um you know you write a lot of papers in school you're not really communicating to other people you're kind of writing something to a teacher yeah that's another person but it's more about like trying to show your subject your awareness or knowledge of a particular subject versus like trying to persuade a number of people to to listen to what you have to say or um try to make a point or share an idea or put something in a certain light where people go yeah that's a good idea let's go that way you just don't see a lot of that. So I'm surprised by that.

I think when I look at people and consider hiring people, looking at the writing is the first thing I actually look at. Right. And then I kind of look at just their general curiosity. You can look at it in different ways, depending on the person and the role and stuff. But are they really curious about what they do? Or are they just trained in it?

How do you tease that out? Well, in some cases, like, if you're a programmer, you could say like, and this isn't always the only way to do it, but someone might contribute to open source in their spare time because they just kind of like that. But that's not always fair because not everyone has time to do that and everyone's been exposed to that. But that's one way. If someone's into design, like for example, one of our designers, a guy named Jonas, I remember when I was looking at his application, this is, I don't know, seven years ago, whenever we hired him or however long it's been, I was was impressed because he was a tinkerer. He was a designer, but played with, like, just played with design in his projects that he showed. He had like a lot of personal products. They weren't just client products. They're personal projects. And they were sort of creative and interesting and abstract and like experimental and that kind of stuff. And like, this guy just likes to play with design. And I like that, you know. Another designer we hired, she, she's not with us anymore, but she, She, uh, one of the things I liked about her is when she, we were looking at her work together,

she would say, you know, I'm not so sure I like what I did here. And to get the job, we were like looking at her, her body of work basically. And she's like, uh, I don't know if I like this that I made. And I like that's a certain sense of like introspection and like self critique that I think's really valuable. So there's a curiosity there too. Is that like, here's my best work. People put their best work forward and like, this is my best work. And she's like, this is good. but like, I don't know if I would have done it this way, if I had another chance. Like, I liked that. So it depends on the person and depends on the situation,

but you can usually tell who has just like work to throw on the table and say, my work speaks for itself and other people who say, like, I just like to do this stuff. And so I tend to gravitate towards the people who just like to do this stuff. Of course, they have to be capable and they have to do great work also, but that they would kind of do this anyway. I like that in somebody. I like that a lot. You've written two books now.

What did you learn from writing the first book and then what was the need for the second book? I'm assuming you're referring to rework and perhaps it doesn't have to be crazy at work. Yeah, was there more books than that? I only knew. A couple others also just one called remote. That's okay. No, no, totally fine. I just want to make sure I'm talking about the right thing for you.

Remote and then Getting Real was another book that we did a while back. But rework and it doesn't have to be crazy at work are the two big things. books that we've written. Rework, which we wrote almost 10 years ago now, was a book that was about how we run our business at the highest levels, like how we think about marketing, how we think about product development, how we think about hiring, how we think about the industry, how we think about press, all the like the sort of, you could say it's our cookbook, essentially. It's like these are our recipes on how we make our dish, so our business essentially. And then it doesn't have to be crazy at work, which is our most recent book, is really more about

pushing back hard on some current trends, which we don't think are very healthy, which is this idea of people working, you know, 80-hour weeks. Always available. Always available. Instant everything. Everyone's saying they're super busy. Everyone's super busy all the time. Like, I'm not busy.

I don't want to be busy. But everyone's super busy all the time. People are working weekends, like, whatever, right? That it's okay to respond to an email. a work email on Sunday at 3 o'clock. I don't know if it's actually okay to do that, but a lot of people do it. So pushing back hard on this trend of like overwork,

the hustle mania, like this, all this stuff that's going on out there. We don't run a company that way. We run what we call a calm company, C-A-L-M, Calm Company. We wanted to kind of talk about how we do it. And it felt like this is the right time to do that because I feel like things are going really in the wrong direction quickly,

actually. So it felt like the right time. But we write books because we have something, to say and there's no reason to keep it to ourselves a lot of businesses seem to be they're afraid to share they think they they have a special formula a secret the secret formula and you know why tell everyone our internal and proprietary ways we work it's like whatever you know I've always been inspired by chefs in this regard so chefs great chefs will write cookbooks and they're putting their recipes in a cookbook. And they're not afraid of someone taking that cookbook,

reading all their recipes and opening a restaurant next to them and putting them out of business. That's just not how it works. They want to share the recipes, get the word out about them. Maybe when someone comes to town, they try their cookbook, you know what, but XYZ has a restaurant in town. I'll try his restaurant or her restaurant and try that because I really like making their recipes. And so for us, like our books are our recipes. It's how we do things, how we think about things. And we don't have a marketing budget. We don't spend any money in advertising. So for us, the books, in a sense, are a way to get the word out about our points of view and our ideas. And indirectly, they promote our company, but we really do it just to share

the ideas. Two thoughts on sort of the constant state of work these days. One, I was with my kids, I think it was a couple weekends ago, and we were in a coffee shop, and we just, they were reading, and I was just sort of observing somebody next to me, like, quote unquote, working. And it was just like a constant tab change slash slack slash like it just it looked from my point of view and i wasn't trying to read the screen or anything like that i was just sort of like watching like how other people work because it's so rare that we get to see other people actually you know in their in their environment doing work and i was just amazed i was like oh my god like do i work like that because if i do i'm not really doing anything and it was this sort of like this realization for me that i was like oh man

And I've got to be more conscious about, like, how that looks like, and now I pay a lot of attention to myself. And the other is, like, the state of, you know, your BlackBerry goes off or your cell phone goes off at five and you're eating dinner with your family and you're, like, texting and you're responding. I have a thought, which is that it's signaling. And it's signaling in the sense that you're signaling to your family

that you're important by, like, taking yourself out of that moment with them, which is almost inversely. signaling when you think about it, right? And you're saying, oh, well, somebody at work needs me, so I must be important. And that's sort of like the message that people want to convey with that. And I find it really interesting because I always, whenever I had demanding jobs that were sort of like more than outside of the regular hours, people would send messages. And often it was the people who are unhappiest in their relationships outside of work that were sending messages at like 11 p.m. or 2 a.m. or, and you were expected to respond.

So it almost creates like this, this virus of unhappiness because the more you respond, the more you get taken out of your moment with your family or your life, and it gets interrupted. So the less happy you get, and then, you know, if you have people who are working with you, you do the same thing. Yeah, well, it's funny. The first part, especially about watching people work, because I do the same thing when I go to a coffee shop, whatever, and it's manic. it's like switching and tabs and this app and that app and like I'm like in my head I'm like

what are you actually doing like what do you what do you actually what do you do all day because it looks like you skip like you skip you just skip around and maybe maybe by the way maybe it's unfair because maybe they're just having coffee and that's what they do on their break or maybe it you know like it's hard to know but but I do see that behavior all the time this is actually one of the reasons why I use a laptop I don't have external screen. So I have a 13-inch laptop, and that's my only screen. Because I think screen real estate is actually, like, you don't want a lot of it. I think you want a little of it. Otherwise, you end up like, you'll walk by people in offices and there's like seven screens

up. Yeah. Yeah. They can watch their chat all day. And like, this is not good. You don't, you don't, this is not like a NASA mission control or you need to like to pay attention to like critical systems, you know. I'm like a one screen at a time kind of. person and I try to stay as focus I can and I find that to be valuable but that's just the way I work but I do see a lot of manic switching and in attention deficit disorder essentially when it comes to work as far as signaling I think that's a really interesting point and I think you might be on to something there I think also sadly I think it might signal like I'd rather be at work right yeah that might be the other thing and you know like look there are moments in everyone's life like I'd rather be here

I'd rather be there, like, whatever. But, I mean, essentially, it's like, I'd rather be there. Yeah. And that's, it's probably a subconscious thing, but it's unfortunate, I think. And as far as, like, the expectation of immediate response, like, to me, this is a cultural issue, like, broadly cultural issue, which is really unhealthy, which is this idea that because communication is speeding up faster and faster and faster, the expectation is that someone's response should be faster and faster and faster. The fact that I can text someone, just because I happen to have a second right now to text someone does not mean that they should be able to get back to me in the same amount of time that it took me to write them.

They should be able to get back to me whenever they're ready to get back to me. And so, like, at our company, in Basecamp, we try to think, you know, the expectation is of eventual response, not of immediate response. And if someone doesn't get back to you quickly, it's because they're working. They're doing something more important than what you had to say. And if someone gets back to me in three hours, then that's how long it takes. They get back to you tomorrow or two days later, and that's how long it takes. If it's an emergency, different story, but there shouldn't be many emergencies.

And if I'm really waiting on something from somebody, maybe I'll ask them one more time, and then I'll just back off. And that's fine. And there's other things to do in the meantime. There have to be. If you're always waiting, work is so delicate and so practical that you need that one thing right now or you can't do anything else, like something else is wrong too. So the other thing I like about the idea of eventual response versus immediate response

is that in many ways it forces you to go figure it out yourself. I need this answer from this person. Well, if they're not going to get back to me, I just got to figure it out on my own. And that's a better outcome ultimately, I think. That's a great place to end this conversation. I know the time is up. So I want to thank you. Hopefully we can do it again.

I have a million more questions for you. This has been a phenomenal conversation. Thanks so much, Jason. You bet, Shane, thanks any time and happy to do it again. Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at FarnhamstreetBlog.com slash podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com slash podcast.

You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to Farnhamstreetblog.com slash newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening. Thank you.