YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason Fried

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132

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2018-07-23

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2018-07-23

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1

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1. “You're in Austin. Okay. Well, at some point, yeah, we'll run into each other again, but I'd love to do it again. And if we want to do it in person, that'd be even better. So let me know. I'm around.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Try to be a good Jason Fried never had a goal. One to read, and then I also wrote one about not having expectations, which might be another interesting thing to look at. If there's any other ones, I mean, there are some other ones, but I'm not sure if they'd be good places to start. But those might be a good place to start.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Well, speaking based on our conversation today, there was the article I wrote about, I've never had a goal, which would be a good thing to start reading, I think, or a good place to read. I think probably it's on our blog, Signal Versus Noise, which is on medium. If you search for my name on Google and say never had a goal, you'll probably land on that.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Blank sheet. I kind of just write, and then I was sort of doing the director's cut as I went and editing live as I went. And it was sort of a fun sort of thing. So I'm doing some of that, which would be kind of fun to follow if people are interested in that. Other than that, I don't have anything else to share.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Nope, I don't have any actually. I like answering questions, so I don't have any proclamations or anything to share. So I don't. If anyone wants to get in touch, I think you'll have some of that stuff. So feel free to hit me up on Twitter or wherever. Oh, the other thing, actually, I will mention David and I, DHH and I are doing this new YouTube channel, which is kind of something people have been asking for for a while. We're calling it Getting Real. And we're basically showing what our, like, kind of like you asked me, like, what's your day like? People always like, what's your morning like? And what do you do? I'm like, well, why don't I just show you? So we're doing these videos of actually walking through code samples, walking through design decisions, walking through design reviews and making them all public. So I think it's kind of a neat thing to check out if you're interested in sort of how we look at design, how we look at code and how we look at writing. One of the things I actually did was I wrote an article for Inc. recently, and I just recorded my screen and sort of talked out loud as I was writing it to sort of show like, here's how I read an article. I don't start with an outline.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Thanks for having me. This is super fun. It's always fun to talk to you, and thanks for giving me so much time to do that.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “He's a lovely man. I think he's still around. I'm sure from what I understand, he's a Japanese garden expert. He has an amazing Japanese garden apparently in his backyard somewhere in Northern California. And he's also like a wine connoisseur and supposed to be a really fascinating guy. I never really caught up with him afterwards. I always meant to and I missed that opportunity and I should probably figure out how to get touch with him. But wonderful man, really interesting person. And I appreciate the lesson he taught me there.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Thing which is, you know, especially today where everyone's rushing all over the place trying to get somewhere, and you're like, where are you actually going? And what are you actually missing? And I thought that that moment of this guy actually stopping and physically explained that to me and looking down and pointing out some things was a really poignant thing and something I always have always remembered since then.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “By the way, I noticed as he was walking, he was looking down as well. So he's walking slowly and looking down. And he kind of took this square foot of land and pointed out some flowers and some insects and some shapes and some stuff and says, this is beautiful. People feel like they have to go all over the world to see something new. All they have to do is look down. And if you walk slowly and look down, like there's a world under your feet all the time, an interesting world. And he goes, these people ahead of me They're younger. Yeah, maybe they can walk a bit faster, but look at everything they're missing. And that really just kind of totally smacked me in the face. I love this point. Like, yeah, they're going faster and they look like they're going somewhere, but look at everything they're missing along the way. And so that point about that other quote that you just brought up about going to the moon, missing the flowers, like that's sort of similar.”

   2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “That it's actually one building, and the hallways are just outside, which is kind of a cool thought. But really, it's like 12 different buildings. Like, for example, he has an office, which was a separate building, which doesn't have a bathroom, doesn't have plumbing, because he didn't need it because it's like it's still part of the house that has plumbing. You just have to walk outside to get there. Anyway, we were walking between these houses and you have a 50 acre site, so there's quite a bit of distance between these buildings. And I noticed that this guy was always last in the line to walk. And I kind of sat back with him on one of the walks. And he was also like, it wasn't because he was old. That would be the first thing you would think that he's just older, so he's going to walk slower. But actually, he's like, no, I could tell that he was physically able to walk as fast as everybody else. It wasn't that. He goes, no, everyone's just walking too fast and they're missing things as they go. So he just kneeled down and he looked, he took like this square foot of ground.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Get into it. Sure. I don't know a number of years ago, I was invited to go to this John Meda invited me to go to this thing at the glasshouse in New Canaan, Connecticut, I think it is, the Philip Johnson Glasshouse. And it was like a summit on simplicity. And there was, I think, 10 or 15 people invited. One of the people invited was this older man's Japanese man. I think he was in his 80s or close to it. Almost everyone else was much younger, much, much younger, 20s and 30s, 40s maybe. And like I said earlier, I love older people. So I sort of gravitated to him. He was really well dressed and just seemed interesting. And I noticed that he was, whenever we were going, so the Philip Johnson Glass House, the whole campus, I think is about 50 acres and there's maybe a dozen different buildings. And it's kind of a neat idea because Philip Johnson had this idea.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Unfortunately, but they would be the fairest if no one knew who they applied to. And it's just a good reminder on a lot of different levels. It's one of my favorite quotes, and I think that's probably something I would put up on a billboard. It'd be hard to read at 70 miles an hour as you speed by it, which is why I still like billboard. But as a quote, I think it's the most meaningful, one of the most meaningful quotes and most important quotes to keep in mind whatever it is that you do.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Yeah, that to me is at the root of so many things. We've been dealing with a little bit of this in our own business. It's a little bit slightly different, but just like information asymmetry and recognizing that not everybody has the same information, so they look at things through different lenses. And it's very important to recognize the fact that you can't just come at something one way because you know it. If someone else doesn't know it, you can't assume that they knew that. It's the same sort of idea, which is, you can't be upset when someone has a reaction to something, when they just have a different set of information. And similarly, the rules are based on who has the power to make them. Basically, today, that's kind of how it is in almost everything. And so it's a good reminder that rules basically are the fairest to those who make them.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “That would be kind of fun, but also a gag. I like that John Rawls quote so much, which is the fairest rules are the ones you would, I forget.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “Yeah, well, I think it'd be fun just to say the word billboard on a billboard and just leave. Pay for it for 100 years, and there it is. It's called Billboard.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “Of other things and sort of shows you in many ways how sort of silly speed is in a lot of other things where it's injected unnecessarily in sort of the damage that it does.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “To make sure certain things do happen. And I think if you can prevent a lot of things from happening by thinking about what you don't want, you do create the conditions then for other things to come in, which are the things that you actually do want. I think there's a lot of similarities here between nature and business and gut health as nature as well, of course, and conditions and letting things sort of thrive and preventing other things from happening. And it's cool. Like, for example, we have hundreds over 100 species of birds now on the property. We didn't put birds seed out. Like, you know, you don't put bird seed out. What you do is you put seed out that grows in the ground that then creates the conditions or actually it grows seed. So it does actually grow bird seed, right? It grows birdseed. It just takes five years and then birds find it. And like everything just happens the way it naturally should at the right pace and the right scale. And it's just very rewarding to see that happening. And I think it does color your...”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Because a fund is coming due and like they need their money out of it. Or I also don't have to build something that grows at a certain rate because you need to grow at a certain rate for a certain return. We don't care about returns. The conditions we've set are not to have returns thrive and generate returns for others. But actually what we've tried to set up is conditions for profitability and for sustainability because as long as we make more money than we spend, we can exist for as long as we want. There's no external pressures, artificial pressures that we've set up or conditions that we've created that will force us to make a decision about when we have to sell the business at some point. So it's not only about creating conditions for thriving. It's about like, in fact, putting up barriers for certain things not to happen. And I've been thinking a lot personally about putting a lot of, I've been putting a lot of energy into making sure certain things don't happen versus putting energy”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “Related to that, I mean, I love this idea that you're bringing up about probiotics versus prebiotics and creating the conditions for growth or creating the conditions for desired outcomes or whatever. And I'm going to tie it all back. I mean, we're tying this like, let me tie like prayer restoration to business building, which is and gut building, basically, and that gut health and the whole thing, which is that part of it too is not only creating the conditions for things to thrive, but also not creating conditions for certain things to thrive. So something, for example, our business is self-funded. Yeah, we did take money from Bezos in 2006, but that was a personal founder shares. None of that is money ever went to our business. David and I took some money off the table. So we've been 100% bootstrapped and funded by customers ever since day one, which means we've created a situation where we don't have to answer to anybody. We don't have to be in anyone else's time scale. I don't have to build something that I know is going to have to be sold in seven years.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “Waiting, first of all, it's not waiting, it's everywhere, but like if you restore a property, you restore some land and give it some space and let it do what it does, nature is so, so resilient and just wants to thrive and it's so cool to watch it happen on its own schedule and say nature is never, it's never in a hurry. That's the thing that I love so much about it is that it's never in a hurry, but it accomplishes everything. And that's a quote that I read somewhere and I don't know where I read it and who said it, but I love it and I always think about it, which is that it'll take its time and it'll get wherever it needs to get done done and however long it takes it takes, which is such an analog or such an opposite non-analog, an opposite to humanity, which is always rushing, which is actually typically destroying, and which is getting faster and faster and faster. And I don't think it's the right path, but it is what it is.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “But anyway, real quick, what's cool about it too is not only do the plants, like new plants come up and all sorts of species bloom, but you start to see new insects. And new insects come a few years later and they somehow you're like, where'd they come from? And they're still out there, but they find it. And they're wired to proliferate in these environments. And then you see new birds and new bird species. There's like 100 and something bird species now on my property when originally there weren't. There was like 40. And you're like, where did they come from? And they just come from. They find it somehow and they come in. And then like the other thing I've been learning is if you build a pond, for example, I don't have any pond, but I have a river. But if there's a pond, if you just fill a pond with water, within a few years, you will have fish. And you're like, what? How does that happen? Like, how could that possibly be? And it turns out like fish are, you know, a bird might be eating a fish and drop it before it's dead. And it pops into there. And that could have been a pregnant fish and before you know it. Like the whole thing is like life.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “No doubt. And the other thing about that I'll say is that you can't even speed this process up if you wanted to. And that's what's so awesome about it. And by the way, the process is multi-layer, multi-layered and multi-tiered, and probably by this point, you're like, I should never have asked him this question.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “You know, I want to basically, whenever land comes up next to my land, I want to buy it because most of it's corn. And corn is sort of at the root of a lot of different problems. And I just want to like get rid of the corn and return the land the way it was and sort of create this patchwork of land and then eventually put it in some sort of trust so it can never be touched and there can always be these beautiful tracks of land forever. Of course, it'd have to be maintained and that would have to be how the trust would have to be able to figure that out. Maybe part of it is farm to fund that. But anyway, that's something that I would probably love to talk about, although I don't know enough about it to give a TED talk, but I can certainly talk someone's ear off for about an hour on all the little details that I've learned.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Really slow amazing thing, then you seed it, and then it might take five or six years for a prairie to grow because prairie plants typically invest all their energy in the first few years in the roots. So you don't see anything growing. It's really frustrating. It looks like shit for a long time. And all of a sudden it starts to come up. And then it's just so rewarding and so wonderful to walk through. So that's something that I'm really into in a deep way. And probably most people don't know about it in general. I didn't know about it until a few years ago, but I love it so much. And I'm kind of on this crusade now to like this anti-corn crusade.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “Of the other trees and letting the oaks be the way they were, and then returning the forest floor the way it was. And it's just such a incredibly rewarding but super slow process. It takes like you seed these prairies. First of all, you have to like kind of get rid of everything that's there and then weeds pop up and you have to get rid of everything that's there because there's what's called a seed bank in the soil. So the seed bank is basically hundreds of years worth of seeds that have just been waiting to sprout. And so you have to kind of like you clear out all the living stuff and then like there's all these seeds that are then now exposed to sunlight. And then they sprout and you have to basically just kind of nuke it all for a while until there's nothing basically left in the soil or invasive species left in the soil. And then you can go and get native species by actually doing seed gathering. You can gather seeds at certain prairies or you can buy seeds, native seeds. You can also find individual prairie plants in what's called prairie remnants, which are like small vestiges of old prairies that might still be on your property and harvest the seeds from those. So it's this really”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “Yeah, basically farming. Yeah, like all the land has been tilled basically for farmland. And I visited some of these prairies and they just are the most beautiful thing. Hundreds of species of plants and flowers and shrubs and insects and birds. And it's just this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing. And so I have this land that's quite a bit of acreage. And I started hiring this guy to help me restore it. We've been doing it for seven, eight years now or something, bringing the land back to the way it was like five acres at a time and planting native species and getting rid of all the invasives and also doing the same thing. There's some force on the property and I'm doing oak savannah restoration. So a lot of invasive trees have grown up around these big, huge, beautiful oak trees that are hundreds of years old, but they've been crowded by these other trees who are getting rid of.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “Restoration where you could sort of bring the land back to the way it was to prairie in this particular part of the country. And that prairie is in fact the most endangered natural habitat in the United States. There's only like something like a thousand or something acres left of it. In the entire United States. So people talk about old-growth forests being gone and stuff. There's actually more old-growth forests in the United States than there's prairie. Prairies are like gone, basically. But I visited some actual prairies that have been restored and also some that are still around.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “Maybe 10 years ago, I bought a farm up in rural Wisconsin, about three hours from Chicago where I live. It's like 50 miles west of Madison, Wisconsin, for those who kind of know the geography. And it's very rural land. It's kind of hilly. It's very beautiful. I bought it. I'd always wanted some land. I love nature. I love just getting out and walking in nature. This is me the most refreshing thing you could ever do. So I bought this land and I looked at it and I thought it was just beautiful and amazing. And it was, but I learned a couple years in that was full of weeds and invasive species and like not really the way it should be or should or was, but modern farming and the fact the land's been tilled a bunch of times and there's invasive species and stuff it sort of took over the land. So I got on this kick to find a prairie restoration specialist, which I learned that there's this thing called prairie.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “I guess I didn't finish the sentence. I said, maybe I wouldn't be able to talk about it with authority, let's say. So let's say One of the things that I'm really into, strangely, is prairie restoration. Let me fill you in on this.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “Anyway, it's called the Polaris from 1968. It's a dive watch built for divers, and it has an alarm on it, a mechanical alarm, which is really cool and really unique and rare, especially at the time, which I think is really beautiful and just a really neat complication for a mechanical wash to have an alarm on it. So you could say like, for example, at five o'clock, I want this thing to buzz very loudly so I would know that it's five o'clock, which of course is so silly and easy to do with an iPhone or any digital thing, but mechanically it's actually it was quite a challenge and very few watches have ever had a mechanical alarm. I also like the way it looks. So anyway, there's some of that stuff that I'm into. There's a bunch of other things. But those are the kind of the three that initially come to mind as ones that I'm really into.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “To make a product for scientists in the 50s, like how cool, kind of, if you can imagine scientists in the 50s with their white coats and like learning all sorts of new things about physics in the world and biology and all sorts of really cool stuff happened back then, those are the two watches that immediately come to mind that I really, really dig. There's another one actually which is I'm going to get this name wrong too. So I'm just going to call it a It's Jeger Le Cult or Geger Le Colte or something like that. I can never I never exactly know what it is”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “I'll send it to you. Exactly. It's also an anti-magnetic watch. And it was sort of their answer to the Mill Gouse. So it's funny that the two things I come to mind immediately are watches for scientists, which is just what a cool niche.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “That's definitely one keeper. I have an old Patek Philippe blanking on the reference right now. It was built for similar to this Mill Gauss that I was talking about. By the way, Millgouse means 1,000 Gauss. So it was a watch built for scientists who worked in high magnetic environments and watches typically vintage one, especially now modern ones are a little bit different. They don't work well in magnetic environments.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

34. “Yes. So I have a, it's called a Rolex Milgaus 6541 is the model number, what they would call the reference number in the watch world. It's from 1958, and I just think it's the coolest fucking thing ever. So I just love the way it looks. It's so cool looking. It's awesome. So anyway, Rolex Milgau 6541 from 1958.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

35. “Just age poorly and they show their age in a way that's not flattering, but in fact, it detracts from the quality of the object. So it's cool to see. The other thing is I'll say about vintage watches is that it's really cool to be able to look down on your wrist and go, this thing I have my wrist has been working for 50 years. And if someone looks after it five more times over the next 50 years or next hundred years, it'll still work. basically nothing that is being created today where that is true anymore except really watches mechanical watches most other things these days are disposable and so it's kind of a great reminder that you can actually build things that last and you can look down your wrist and go someone else 50 years ago was looking down at the wrist seeing the exact same thing and it worked just as well and 50 years from now my kid can look down on his wrist or her wrist and see the same thing i looked at to tell the same amount of time and it's going to work as well and i i just kind of love that idea so anyway that's sort of why”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

36. “Material science, and some really fascinating stuff. And the idea that mankind can capture time and tell it this way using springs and gears, it's kind of an amazing thing and be that accurate. So I've always sort of, I haven't always been into them, but my dad was into them, still maybe still is. I don't know if he collects stuff anymore, but he used to when I was younger, and I got into them. And the vintage thing, I'm actually kind of into vintage and modern these days, but more so I found vintage interest more interesting because there's more character in the objects because they have time on them. They actually have, you know, age on them. And that's kind of cool to see how things age. And that's one of the reasons why, like, I like a lot of natural materials in general. Now, like I'm branching into architecture discussion here, but I like brick. I like wood. I like things that pick up age over time versus like a lot of modern materials. I feel like they don't age very well. They look great when you do the photo shoot right after it's built and then they”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

37. “But watches are similar in that like a watch basically like look, it's there to tell the time some watches can do more than others, but basically it's there to tell the time and like, okay, there's, you've got to, especially if you look at analog watches, which is why one of the reasons I like vintage stuff is it's like, you know, a couple hands, three hands maybe, or two hands. But there's so many different designs and so many different styles and so many different elements and so many different approaches to it that there's an endless amount of curiosity in it for me. And plus, the cool thing about mechanical watches is that it's a combination of all the things I like. So it's design, it's engineering, it's materials, it's like patina and like seeing age on things. I love things that age well. It's art. It's science. Like if you crack open one of these watches and look at the movement, there's serious engineering going on in there.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

38. “I like a lot of stuff that his name is French, so I'll probably get it wrong. But Jean Prov ⁇, if I'm getting that right, I love his designs, his styles. There's a bunch of others. Maybe I'll send you an email afterwards to some of my favorite chairs. Perhaps I'll send you some links”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

39. “I'm into that vintage watches. Let's see why. Well, first of all, I'm into watches. I'm into a lot of things that seem like there can only be one way to do it, but there turns out there's a lot of ways. So for example, I love chair, like designing chairs. I don't design them myself, but I love looking at chairs, which are very simple things. It's like, you know, you sit on them and that's what they do. And you're like, well, there can only be a few ways to do a chair. But it turns out there's so many different ways to do a chair. It's really interesting. And watches are the same thing.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

40. “It is something that I would also encourage people to do is to read Tom Petty lyrics. But if you read Tom Petty has such a wonderful efficiency in his storytelling, in his lyrics, and every word really counts, and there's no filler. And he paints these really broad pictures with four or five words per phrase and really, truly is, I thought one of the best, I mean, one of the best songwriters, of course, but really a great, just a great writer in general when you read the lyrics. So I would look at that and go, look at the pictures he can paint and the emotions he can evoke and the story he can tell with very few words. He's extremely economical with his language or was. And it's a great thing to read. So just go at some of his albums, go look, go look up the lyrics online and don't even listen to the songs, but just read them and you go, I see where he's going with this. And I always enjoy doing that from time to time. He's just such a, he was so good at that.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

41. “In some ways, of course, there's a lot of other reasons why this probably isn't necessarily a good thing for kids. But to get a chance to do it all over again, maybe you see it better the second time. So anyway, I would love to see revision and iteration built into education and this sort of writing assignment is sort of a way to get at that.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

42. “Term version of revisioning in a sense. Perhaps the better way of doing that would be you first hand in the five page version, you get it back with notes, then you're required to write the one-page version of that. But anyway, the point is that being able to revisit something that you did and make it better and hand it in and revise it again and hand it in and revise it again is something that you don't see often. Sometimes you see that with drafts in a document, but it's not really quite the same as being able to come back to the idea. So for example, if you're doing something in school and you're building something or you're doing a science project or whatever and you do it and you're done, you present it and it's over, like maybe a month later you're going to have a better idea for something that you did. And you go, I want to do that again, but school doesn't give you a chance to do anything again, really, unless you like, unless you're stupid and you're held back. And they say, you can't go for further. You know, of course, not stupid. That's the wrong word. But like the school's like, you're, you know, you didn't hit the criteria. So we're going to let you do it again.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

43. “Long things, and then not actually editing. This is the other thing that blows me away about education. This one I was talking to my sons in preschool, and I was talking to the head of the school about this. And the thing that's not taught in schools is iteration. And iteration is everything outside of school, where you do something and then you launch it or ship it or whatever. And then you're on to making a better version of that thing pretty quickly. In school, we would always do something and sort of hand it in and that assignment would be done. And then you go on and do another assignment. You never get to revisit things. In the professional world, you're revisiting things all the time. And I would love to see, you know, you hand something in. This one page to five page to one page to five paragraphs, whatever, that's a version of a short.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

44. “That's the assignment. And we would do that over and over and over and over with different topics. I don't care the topic, it doesn't matter. I just want you to be able to write at different levels of resolution and continue to clarify it as you cut things out to the point where you can write it in one sentence. And of course, there'll be more detail in the five paragraph version. Maybe it was three pages, one page, three paragraphs, one sentence, whatever it is. But this idea of going from writing the long piece and then cutting it down and editing, editing is something that's rarely taught. and really getting trying to hone in on what it is and realize the big idea here is that you can realize that so much of the stuff that you put in the five-page version just doesn't really matter that much and actually the one page version is probably better and maybe the the three paragraph version is much better than the one page version and you there's probably a point where you you begin to lose it but it's still the great exercise so i i'd love to see that kind of writing instruction versus length which sends”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

45. “And a lot of it's based on length, like right a 10 page thing or, you know, or whatever. So the class I always wanted to teach if I was ever to teach would be a writing class. I don't care what the subject is. It doesn't matter. Pick a subject. I want you to write like a five-page version of that article. I want you to write a one-page version of it. I want you to write a five paragraph version, a five-sentence version, and a one-sentence version.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

46. “Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, right. But what's cool about it is that, and I forget the author, you know, you can look it up and put it in the notes, but is that he dissects things one sentence at a time. And his ability to take a sentence and cut it up and explain it and simplify it, I think it's a wonderful skill and a great, great book. So it's not really even about writing paragraphs or stories or how to organize and outline stuff. It's like a sentence at a time and figuring out how to structure things. Love it. Great book. It's actually, you know, there's this class I've talked about before I've written a blog post about this. This class that I'd want to teach. If I ever taught a college class, I think one of the biggest disservices that college does actually is that it doesn't teach people to write well. In fact, it teaches a lot of people, especially in MBA programs, to write very poorly.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

47. “Maybe they've revised it since, but I think it's that bad still. It's so horrible. Anyway, revising prose. Thank God the title is.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

48. “Is one of my favorite books? It's called Revising Prose, and the cover is horrible. It's like a... That's how you can spot it. Yes. It's like a CD-ROM and a pencil or something. It's like, what? I don't even understand how that happened.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

49. “And what are we doing wrong? And what are our blind spots? It's all that stuff. And a lot of that comes down to having a conversation with the customer and all of our customer service has done via email or Twitter or chat or something. So we don't have a phone, although we do do some phone support, but we don't have a phone number that you can call in, for example. So it's all written. So we want to make sure that if we're going to put someone in front of customers, they know how to write as well. So that is a big part of it too. I didn't know that automatic did that as part of their part of their hiring process, but I love the idea.”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

50. “Yeah, and actually at our company, everybody works customer service also. So no matter what position you're in, every single person rotates one day through customer service every number of days. Like we have 54 employees in the company, about 15 or 16 on customer support. So about 30 of us every 30 days we rotate through into one day of customer service. And that's another reason why it's important for you to be able to write is because on that one day a month or one day every 40 days or whatever, you are on the front lines speaking with customers and empathizing with them, understanding what they're dealing with, helping them understand what they don't understand, helping us understand what we don't understand, all of that stuff, which is what customer services are really all about. Of course, it's also about like troubleshooting and solving immediate problems, but a lot of it too is getting to the real, like, what do they really asking for and why?”

    2018-07-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #329: Jason Fried — How to Live Life on Your Own Terms · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT