Jason Fried on the type of company he’s trying to build, from a recent interview with Fast Company:
Our magazine is called Fast Company, but it sounds like you want to build a slow company.
I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. I think that rapid growth is typically of symptom of… there’s a sickness there. There’s a great quote by a guy named Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. We have 35 employees at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to—our revenues and profits support that—but I think we’d be worse off.
I like this call to slow down. I’m reminded of Jack Cheng’s recent article on The Slow Web:
Timeliness. Rhythm. Moderation. These things dovetail into what I consider the biggest difference between Slow Web and Fast Web. Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge. Information passes through you; knowledge dissolves into you. And timeliness, rhythm, and moderation are all essential for memory and learning.
We aren’t building things—companies, apps, art, relationships—for speed, for the quick result, the right now, because we can. Let’s build slowly, like we’re in it for the long haul. Let it dissolve into us, enriching us all along the way.
“Once you’ve truly begun, slow down. The difference between publishing two good books and forty mediocre books is terribly large. Don’t expend energy in writing and publishing that would be better used in your family or community. Become tempered by life. Make compromises for love. Provide a service to the world. These experiences form the adult mind. Without them both you and your work will remain juvenile.”
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I tend to get obsessed with certain topics and write about and link to a lot about them. One thing that’s been on my mind since the beginning of the year is the idea of Sabbath, and this site is the perfect companion to what I’ve been focusing on.
The Sabbath Manifesto is “is a creative project designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world. This is so great, I wish I’d thought of it.
An interesting perspective on boredom:
It’s about a certain mindset. Perfect boredom is the enjoyment of the moment of stasis that comes between slowing down and speeding up — like sitting at a traffic light for a particularly long time. It’s at the cusp of action, because however enjoyable it may be, boredom is really not a long-term aspiration. It’s for an afternoon before a sociable evening. It marks that point in a holiday when you’ve shrugged off all the concerns of work and home, explored the hotel and got used to the swimming pool, and everything has become totally familiar. ‘I’m bored’ just pops into your mind one morning as you’re laying your towel over the sunlounger before breakfast, and then you think ‘How lovely.’ It’s about the stillness and familiarity of that precise moment before the inevitable anxiety about packing up and heading back to God-knows-what.
Sounds an awful lot like Sabbath to me. I’ve become increasingly interested in this idea of just slowing down. I just came out of one of the busiest weeks of my life and this upcoming week doesn’t look much better. I was up early and to bed late working on school projects, freelance projects, and a few personal projects and by the end of the week I was just worn out so on Friday, I took a Sabbath and didn’t do a thing. I emerged incredibly refreshed ready to tackle this week.
Okay, so sometimes you might wrap your bathrobe around you and snuggle into the sofa and think, I’ll tackle the future just as soon as I’ve caught up with these old episodes of The West Wing. But that’s how boredom works. Eventually you will step out into the brave new world. You have to move. That’s what boredom is for; and perhaps why God invented cramp and bed sores.
That’s the idea behind Sabbath: “On the Sabbath we live as if all of our work is done—even if it isn’t.”
