Workaholics don’t accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They fixate on inconsequential details, burn through goodwill, and make hasty decisions from exhaustion. Efficiency beats hours — always.

Build fewer features and build them well. A kick-ass half beats a mediocre whole. Constraints aren’t a handicap — they force creativity and reveal what actually matters.

When people say “that would never work in the real world,” they’re protecting the status quo. The real world is where great ideas go to die from pessimism. The only way to know is to try.

Build something you yourself need. The most powerful products come from solving a real problem the founder feels personally. Basecamp was built because 37signals needed it.

If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Stop treating every choice like it’s written in stone. This liberates you to move faster and adapt more honestly.

Most workplace “busyness” is manufactured urgency, performative presence, and unnecessary meetings. Remove the noise and 40 hours is genuinely enough to do exceptional work.

A calm company protects employee attention, schedules meetings as a last resort, and defaults to asynchronous communication. The market rewards quality work — not hours logged.

Sleep deprivation lowers IQ, kills creativity, and shortens patience. It is not a badge of honor — it’s a mark of poor planning. Protecting sleep is protecting the quality of your work.

Nearly all growth targets are artificial numbers set for the sake of setting numbers. Building a calm, profitable, sustainable business beats chasing arbitrary milestones that serve no one.

How you work, the culture you build, the policies you set — these are design decisions. Treat the company itself with the same care you give to the products it ships.

Requiring in-office presence limits you to a geographic radius. Remote work unlocks the full global talent pool and benefits employees who can work from anywhere they thrive.

Most things are not ASAP. Most questions are better answered after a day of thought. Write it down. Read it tomorrow. Responses are more considerate, communication is richer.

“Workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task.”

“You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.”

“Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.” — (Jason Fried, co-author)

“Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that has no relationship with reality is even scarier.”

“If I can put in 5 percent of the effort and get a C minus, that’s amazing. Then I can take the other 95 percent of my time and invest it in something I really care about.”

“The real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose.”

DHH is one of the most vocal critics of Silicon Valley’s worship of 80-hour weeks, “move fast and break things,” and vanity growth metrics. He argues that calm, focused 40-hour weeks produce better work, better products, and better lives.

37signals has never taken venture capital and has been profitable for over 20 years. DHH argues VC funding misaligns incentives toward hyper-growth at the expense of sustainability, profitability, and employee wellbeing.

DHH discovered William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life in 2014 and found it validated principles he’d already arrived at independently — negative visualization, detachment, the dichotomy of control. He recommends starting with Irvine, then Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, then Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

DHH is an active antitrust advocate, particularly against Apple’s App Store monopoly (a battle sparked by HEY’s 2020 launch). He believes big tech platforms have become extractive toll-collectors, and he has invested time and capital in fighting for a more open, competitive internet.

In 2023, 37signals made the bold decision to exit cloud services entirely and run its own hardware — saving millions annually. DHH documented the process publicly, arguing that cloud dependency is a trap for most mature companies.

DHH is a prolific blogger and essayist. He believes clear writing is a symptom of clear thinking — and that writing forces you to commit to ideas rather than hiding behind vague verbal agreement. His company runs on writing over meetings.