You're walking down the sidewalk and you trip. You might feel foolish and you might look back and go, what the hell was that? But what you don't do is walk backwards and re-walk. You just go. You just keep going. And I think that it doesn't need to be more complicated than that. Hey, listeners, welcome to the high performance episode for today. We are chatting with Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, which is one of the largest and most successful software platforms in the world.
And I love this clip. I actually love everything Jason has to say. If you follow Jason and you listen to his advice, he has a blog, he has a newsletter. It's really, I think, some of the most insightful but simplistic and some of the best business advice that I've seen out there in the world because he questions everything. He questions taking investments. He questions what is FU money. He questions, why are we building small teams versus large teams?
And he really hones in on what's effective and simplistic and, to be honest, easy. And he has a great quote here in this clip that I'm sharing, because he talks about the silliness of...
Moving backwards or spending too much time lingering backwards and you heard in hook just now he mentioned like when you're walking and you stumble you don't go back and re-walk and it's very similar to that in business so listen to what jason has to say and then i've got a couple questions on the back end that i'll ask you guys let's hop into it with jason freed you're walking down the sidewalk and you trip on there's like the next the next sidewalk is like you know a couple millimeters
high and you stub your toe and you kind of trip, you might like feel foolish and you might look back and go, what the hell was that? But what you don't do is walk backwards and re-walk. You just go, oh, that was stupid. Maybe I'll pay more attention next time and look down more. I don't know, whatever, right? There's an uneven thing coming up. Maybe I'll just know that you just go, you just keep going. And I think that it doesn't need to be more complicated than that.
You can't just study the mistakes and think you're going to get better. You've got to to keep doing the thing. And there's so limited time to do anything. I don't want to spend it looking back. I want to spend it pointed forward and just making something again, you know? So I also think, I know I'm kind of being abstract here, but really it is that I just think in general, the ideal place to put yourself in a position where most mistakes don't matter anyway.
Like if the decisions are relatively small and the cycles are relatively tight, if you just blew four weeks because you just made something that didn't work it's not that big of a deal what sucks is if you spent four years on something that didn't work yeah that's a problem so like we don't that's why we only spend a maximum of six weeks on any feature that we build and most are shorter than that because if we just if we blow it because we just blow it we
don't even know why like you just move on and you just you put that time and it's in the past just move on do something else and try and do a better job next time i don't know that i think that's how how most things are. I mean, I attribute this in some ways to this experience I had many years ago. I was in a Navajo rug gallery. And I noticed that on these rugs, there was clearly these errors. Like there's a lot of patterns. They're very patterned typically, or they're striped.
And I noticed that some of the stripes were kind of wavier than others. And there's some patterns that like geometrically weren't clearly like they were aiming for some sort of triangle that was sort of out of proportion and whatever and i i asked the gallery owner i'm like why. Why are these full of errors, is what I said. And he goes, the Navajo, and this is his interpretation. I've heard other people talk about this too, because I looked it up a little
bit. But who knows, really. But they don't see these as mistakes. They're just moments in time. And they said, just like if you were walking, trying to go up a mountain, and you took sort of a little bit of a wrong path, but you could find your way forward from that path. You wouldn't, because when you realize you took the wrong path, you wouldn't always backtrack right to the place where you took the wrong step and then went the right way.
You'd be like, okay, I think we went the wrong way. Like we can find our way back to where we need to go. And you do that by going forward. You don't do that by going backwards. Now, in some cases, you can definitely find yourself in a dead end where you have to back out. But like, he's like, when you weave the rug, it's not a dead end. You just keep going. Like you just kind of keep going. You just keep moving forward and you fix what you can, but you don't linger too much.
There you have it, you guys. a little high-performance tip with Jason Fried on the importance of staying the path and keep moving forward. I really liked a couple things that he mentioned here, putting yourself in a position where most mistakes don't matter anyways, and minimizing those mistakes.
For example, the difference between being committed to something and then burning four years of your life where it doesn't work out, which kind of sucks, versus spending four weeks of your life really testing something and testing it truly. And the question I want to leave you guys with is where are you lingering in your life? Where are you walking forward, stumbling, and then going back and re-walking instead of just staying the path and continue to walk?
This could be in business and relationships and your personal life and your spiritual life, whatever it may be. Where are you lingering and not moving forward. If you want to check out the full episode, it's episode number 559, No Goals, No Outside Money, and Small Teams of Two Built This Billion Dollar Company with Jason Fried. If you like what you're hearing and want to make sure you don't miss any of these tips, please subscribe, leave us a review, and share with your friends.
See you on the next episode.