Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson wrote Rework to demolish the myths and conventional wisdom that make starting and running a business harder than it needs to be. Drawing from their experience building Basecamp (formerly 37signals) into a profitable, sustainable company without outside funding or traditional corporate structure, they argue that most business advice is not just wrong but actively harmful. The book reads like a manifesto for doing business differently, challenging everything from growth obsession to meeting culture to the supposed necessity of venture capital.
Ignore the Real World
People love to dismiss new ideas by saying “That would never work in the real world.” But this so-called real world is actually just an excuse for not trying. It’s a way to shield yourself from the consequences of taking action. The real world isn’t a place where nothing works. It’s where people who do things make progress while those who talk about the real world stay stuck.
When people invoke the real world, they’re really saying “That’s not how we do things.” But how things have been done before doesn’t determine how they should be done going forward. Every innovation, every business that succeeded by doing things differently, had to ignore the real world and its supposed limitations.
The real world is an excuse for inaction. It lets you avoid testing whether your idea might actually work. Instead of hiding behind the real world, go out and test your assumptions. You might fail, but at least you’ll know based on actual experience rather than hypothetical objections from people who never tried.
Learning from Mistakes is Overrated
The business world celebrates learning from failure. Entrepreneurs are told they must fail fast and fail often. But this emphasis on failure is misguided. What you really learn from mistakes is what not to do. What you want to learn is what works, and you learn that from success, not failure.
Evolution works through successful mutations, not failed ones. Your business should evolve by building on what works. When something succeeds, figure out why and do more of it. When something fails, move on quickly rather than dwelling on lessons learned.
This doesn’t mean you should fear failure or never take risks. It means you shouldn’t fetishize failure or seek it out as a learning experience. Success teaches you far more valuable lessons than failure. Pay attention to what’s working and double down on it.
Planning is Guessing
Long-term business plans are really just guesses about the distant future. You’re guessing about competitors, customers, the economy, and technology years from now. These guesses masquerade as facts when you write them in detailed plans with spreadsheets and projections.
Plans let the past drive the future. You make decisions based on what you predicted months or years ago rather than what you know now. Unless you’re a fortune teller, you can’t know what the future holds. So why let outdated guesses constrain current decisions?
The problem gets worse the longer your planning horizon. A one-year plan is bad. A five-year plan is absurd. Things change too quickly for these plans to remain relevant. By the time you execute later phases of the plan, the assumptions underlying them have usually changed dramatically.
Instead of planning, decide what you’re doing this week. Figure out the next most important thing and do it. Then reassess and do the next thing. Working in short cycles lets you respond to reality as it unfolds rather than following a script written when you knew less.
This doesn’t mean having no vision or direction. It means distinguishing between direction and specific plans. You can know where you want to go without plotting every step of the journey in advance. The path reveals itself as you walk it.
Why Grow?
The business world is obsessed with growth. Every company is supposed to get bigger, hire more people, expand to new markets, and scale aggressively. But why? What’s wrong with staying small if small works?
Growth has real costs. It increases complexity, slows decision making, demands more management, and often dilutes culture. Many businesses are better small. They’re more agile, more personal, more focused. Growth for its own sake often destroys what made the business good in the first place.
Some businesses need scale to work. But many don’t. If you’re profitable and sustainable at your current size, you don’t need to grow. You can grow if you want to, but treating growth as an imperative rather than an option creates unnecessary pressure and often leads to bad decisions.
The right size for your business is whatever lets you do your best work and live the life you want. For some people that’s 5 employees. For others it’s 500. Neither is inherently better. The business world’s obsession with constant growth pushes everyone toward the same model regardless of whether it fits.
Workaholism is Stupid
The startup world glorifies working around the clock. Founders brag about 80-hour weeks and sleeping under their desks. This is presented as necessary for success. It’s not. It’s inefficient and destructive.
Workaholics don’t accomplish more than people who work reasonable hours. They just waste more time. When you work extreme hours, you make worse decisions, produce lower quality work, and burn out. The marginal value of hours 60 through 80 in a week is often negative because of errors introduced and rework required.
Working smarter beats working harder. Finding more efficient approaches, cutting unnecessary tasks, and focusing on what actually matters produces better results than grinding through endless hours. A clear head and fresh perspective after a good night’s sleep beats caffeine-fueled marathon sessions.
The worship of overwork also creates terrible culture. It pressures everyone to sacrifice health, relationships, and sanity to signal dedication. This drives away people who want sustainable careers and selects for those willing to burn themselves out. Neither leads to great outcomes.
Enough with Entrepreneurs
The word entrepreneur has become a badge of honor divorced from meaning. People call themselves entrepreneurs when they’re really just starting businesses. The term creates unhelpful mystique around something straightforward.
Starting a business doesn’t require special breeding or personality type. It requires having an idea and taking action. You don’t need an MBA or special training. You don’t need to be a certain type of person. You just need to start.
The entrepreneur mystique also creates excuses. People who want to start businesses convince themselves they can’t because they lack whatever special qualities entrepreneurs supposedly have. They psych themselves out before trying. The truth is simpler. Anyone can start a business. Most fail, but that’s true whether you call yourself an entrepreneur or a business owner.
Drop the pretension and just build something. Whether you call yourself an entrepreneur, founder, or business owner doesn’t matter. What matters is creating value for customers and building something sustainable.
Make a Dent in the Universe
To make something great, you need to feel it matters. You need to believe your work makes things better. This sense of purpose provides the motivation to push through difficulty and the standard against which to judge your work.
Your dent doesn’t need to change everything. It can be focused and specific. Making accountants’ lives easier is a worthy dent. Creating beautiful furniture is a worthy dent. Helping parents track their kids’ activities is a worthy dent. The scope matters less than the genuine belief that what you’re doing improves something.
Without this sense of making a dent, work becomes hollow. You’re just going through motions, optimizing metrics, chasing revenue. These things matter but they’re not enough to sustain you through hard times or inspire your best work. The dent is what makes it meaningful.
This belief also attracts others who care. Customers sense when you’re genuinely trying to make something better versus just extracting money. Employees join missions more readily than they join jobs. The dent becomes a rallying point that aligns everyone’s efforts.
Scratch Your Own Itch
The best businesses solve problems their founders actually have. When you scratch your own itch, you understand the problem intimately. You know what existing solutions get wrong. You can evaluate whether your solution actually works because you’re the customer.
Basecamp started because Fried’s design firm needed project management software and couldn’t find anything that didn’t suck. They built what they needed. This gave them perfect knowledge of the customer because they were the customer.
Scratching your own itch also keeps you honest. You can’t fool yourself about whether the product works when you’re using it daily. You feel every rough edge and limitation. This creates natural pressure to make it genuinely good rather than just good enough to sell.
The alternative is trying to solve problems you don’t have for people you don’t understand. This requires extensive research and guessing about what customers want. You’ll often guess wrong. Even when you guess right, you lack the intuitive understanding that comes from living with the problem.
Not every business can scratch the founder’s itch, but when possible it provides enormous advantages. You’re building something you wish existed. That authenticity shows.
Start Making Something
Most people spend too much time thinking and talking, not enough time making. They debate business models, research competitors, and write extensive plans. Meanwhile, they haven’t built anything customers can use.
Making something real forces you to confront actual problems rather than hypothetical ones. You discover what’s hard. You find out what customers actually want versus what you thought they wanted. You start getting feedback based on reality rather than concepts.
Making something also creates momentum. Progress generates energy and enthusiasm. It attracts attention and opportunities. Staying in planning mode feels safe but it’s actually stagnation. Nothing happens until you build something.
The first version doesn’t need to be complete or perfect. It needs to be real. Build the simplest thing that could possibly work and put it in front of people. Then improve based on real feedback rather than assumptions.
This applies to all aspects of the business, not just product. Don’t debate your marketing strategy endlessly. Write something and publish it. Don’t perfect your sales pitch in your head. Go talk to a customer. Action beats theory.
No Time is No Excuse
Everyone claims they don’t have time to start a business or side project. This is almost always false. What they mean is they haven’t made it a priority. Time exists for things that truly matter to you.
You don’t need huge blocks of time. You need consistent small blocks used efficiently. An hour a day adds up to a full work week every month. Early mornings, lunch breaks, and evenings provide plenty of time if you actually use it.
The lack of time also forces focus. When you only have an hour, you can’t waste it on unimportant tasks. You do the essential thing. This constraint often leads to better decisions than having unlimited time would.
People who succeeded started with the same 24 hours everyone has. They just used them differently. They cut television, reduced social media, woke up earlier, or used commute time productively. They made time by deciding it mattered.
Stop waiting for the perfect time or big blocks of free time. Start with whatever time you have. Make progress in small chunks. Consistency beats intensity.
Draw a Line in the Sand
Stand for something. Take a position. Some people will disagree. That’s fine. Actually, that’s great. When you stand for something specific, you repel people who want something different and attract people who want exactly what you offer.
Companies that try to please everyone end up pleasing no one. They sand off all the edges trying to avoid offending anyone. The result is bland mediocrity that nobody loves. Better to have 100 customers who genuinely love you than 1000 who find you acceptable.
Taking strong positions also simplifies decisions. When you know what you stand for, you know which features to build, which customers to serve, which opportunities to pursue. Your line in the sand becomes a filter for everything.
Basecamp stood for simplicity against feature bloat. They believed most project management software was too complex. This position alienated people who wanted extensive features but attracted people who valued simplicity. Both groups found tools that fit their preferences.
Your position doesn’t need to be revolutionary. It can be an opinion about how something should work. The key is having conviction and expressing it clearly. Bland statements trying to avoid disagreement communicate nothing.
Build Half a Product, Not a Half-Assed Product
When resources are limited, the temptation is to build everything poorly rather than some things well. This is backwards. Build half the features but make them great. A half-assed product frustrates everyone. A focused product with limited scope but excellent execution serves its target market well.
Cutting features feels painful because each one seems important. But most features serve edge cases or reflect someone’s pet idea rather than core customer needs. The essential features, the ones that define the product’s value, are usually a small subset of the total wish list.
Building half a product forces clarity about what really matters. You can’t include everything so you must choose. This process reveals the core value proposition. What remains after ruthless cutting is the essence of what you’re building.
A focused product is also easier to explain, easier to learn, and easier to use. Complexity creates friction. Every additional feature is another thing to understand, another setting to configure, another edge case to handle. Simplicity isn’t just aesthetically pleasing. It’s functionally superior.
You can always add features later if they prove necessary. But removing features or simplifying after launch is much harder because existing users resist change. Starting simple gives you freedom to grow complexity deliberately rather than fighting to reduce accidental complexity.
It’s a Problem When It’s a Problem
Many problems people worry about aren’t actual problems yet. They’re hypothetical problems that might occur at scale you haven’t reached. Solving them prematurely wastes time and often leads to worse solutions than you’d create after understanding the real problem through experience.
Common premature worries include scalability, hiring, competitors, and edge cases. These might all become problems eventually. But probably not today. Solve today’s problems today. When you actually hit scaling issues, you’ll have revenue and resources to address them. When you actually need more people, hire them. When competitors actually threaten you, respond.
Premature optimization creates unnecessary complexity. You build infrastructure for scale you don’t have. You implement processes for teams that don’t exist. You defend against competitive threats that never materialize. All this complexity slows you down and diverts attention from real current problems.
The flip side is recognizing when something actually is a problem. Some founders dismiss serious issues as not yet problems when they’re already causing damage. The key is distinguishing between real problems requiring immediate attention and hypothetical future problems better addressed later.
Trust that you’ll figure things out when they become actual problems. You’ll be smarter then because you’ll have more information and experience. Worrying about future problems is free. Solving problems that don’t exist yet is expensive.
Hire When It Hurts
The default answer to needing more capacity is hiring. This is often wrong. Hiring has huge costs beyond salary. Every person added increases communication overhead, slows decisions, and adds management burden. Most tasks expand to fill available time, so adding people often just means more people working on things that didn’t need doing.
Before hiring, try everything else. Can you solve the problem with better tools or automation? Can you eliminate the task entirely? Can you simplify the product to reduce support needs? Can existing people work more efficiently? Usually the answer to at least one of these is yes.
Only hire when the pain of not hiring becomes acute. When customers are suffering because you can’t keep up. When opportunities are being lost because you lack capacity. When existing team members are burning out despite reasonable hours. These signals indicate genuine need rather than desire for growth.
This approach keeps you lean and forces creative problem solving. When you can’t just throw people at problems, you find better solutions. You build tools, improve processes, and focus on what matters. These solutions often work better than adding headcount would have.
When you do hire, hire slowly and carefully. A bad hire costs more than the time it takes to find the right person. Bad hires drain team energy, produce work that must be redone, and often require painful firing. Take the time to find someone great who fits your culture and working style.
Pass on Great People
This sounds crazy but it’s important. When you meet talented people who aren’t needed for current work, don’t hire them hoping you’ll find something for them to do. Hiring without a specific need creates pressure to justify the hire by inventing work.
Great people doing unnecessary work is waste. It also distorts priorities. You start pursuing projects because you have someone who could do them rather than because they’re important. The person becomes a solution looking for a problem.
Finding great people is hard so the temptation to grab them when you can is strong. Resist it. Wait until you have real work that needs their specific skills. They might not be available later, but hiring them prematurely creates different problems.
This discipline keeps your team lean and focused. Everyone works on important things because they were hired to address specific needs. You avoid the bloat that comes from having more capacity than work and the make-work that emerges to fill it.
Meetings are Toxic
Meetings are where work goes to die. They’re costly, usually ineffective, and proliferate beyond usefulness. A one-hour meeting with five people is five hours of productivity lost, not one.
Most meetings have unclear purposes, wrong attendees, and no concrete outcomes. They’re scheduled because that’s what companies do, not because they’re the best way to accomplish something specific. Half the attendees don’t need to be there and would contribute more doing actual work.
Replace most meetings with writing. When you write something down, you clarify your thinking. Readers can absorb it on their own schedule. They can reference it later. They can respond thoughtfully rather than reacting in real time. A well-written document is almost always better than a meeting.
When meetings are necessary, make them productive. Set a clear purpose. Invite only people who absolutely need to attend. Set a timer. End with clear decisions and action items. Meet at the site of the actual problem when possible rather than in a conference room.
The culture of constant meetings signals dysfunctional communication. If you need meetings to know what’s happening, your regular communication is broken. Fix the underlying communication problem rather than compensating with more meetings.
Good Enough is Fine
Perfectionism paralyzes. Chasing perfection means never shipping. You find one more thing to improve, one more edge case to handle, one more feature to add. Meanwhile, customers aren’t getting value from your unreleased perfect product.
Good enough doesn’t mean low quality. It means recognizing when something is ready to ship even if it’s not perfect. It means accepting that you’ll learn more from customers using an imperfect product than from continuing to refine in isolation.
Perfect is also a moving target. The better something gets, the higher your standards become. You can chase perfection forever without reaching it. At some point you must decide the current version is good enough and ship it.
Customers rarely notice the imperfections you obsess over. They care whether the product solves their problem. If it does, minor rough edges don’t matter. You can smooth them in future versions based on actual feedback rather than guesses about what matters.
The perfect-seeking mindset also applies to other decisions. Waiting for perfect timing, perfect market conditions, or perfect resources means never starting. Good enough conditions for starting exist now. Perfect conditions never arrive.
Your Estimates Suck
People are terrible at estimating how long things will take. Every project takes longer than expected. The solution isn’t better estimation techniques. It’s breaking work into smaller pieces.
Instead of estimating a three-month project, break it into dozens of small tasks that take hours or at most a few days. Small tasks are easier to estimate accurately. They’re also easier to complete, creating momentum and revealing problems early.
This approach exposes unrealistic expectations quickly. When you break a supposedly one-month project into tasks and realize you have six weeks of work, you know immediately rather than discovering it a month late. You can adjust scope or timeline before making commitments.
Small tasks also reduce risk. If you discover something is harder than expected, you’ve invested hours rather than weeks. You can pivot or adjust without massive sunk costs. Big tasks lock you into approaches that might not work.
The discipline of breaking work into small pieces also improves the work itself. It forces clarity about what you’re actually doing. Vague large tasks hide complexity. Small specific tasks expose it.
Long Lists Don’t Get Done
Every todo list grows faster than tasks get completed. You keep adding items while finishing them slowly. The list becomes overwhelming and demotivating. You can’t possibly do everything on it, so why start?
Keep lists short. Include only what you’ll actually do soon. Everything else goes in someday-maybe or gets deleted. This keeps your list functional rather than aspirational. It represents actual work, not wishes.
Short lists also force prioritization. When you can only keep ten items, you must decide what matters most. This clarity improves execution. You’re working on important things rather than whatever is easiest or most recently added.
For projects, break them into small tasks and only plan the next few. Future tasks depend on learning from current work anyway. Planning too far ahead commits you to tasks that might not make sense by the time you reach them.
The psychological benefit matters too. Completing a short list feels good and motivates continued work. Never finishing an endless list feels discouraging and saps energy. Design systems that create positive momentum rather than constant feelings of being behind.
Make Tiny Decisions
Big decisions are hard to make and harder to reverse. They require extensive deliberation and carry high stakes. Tiny decisions are easy and reversible. Making many small decisions moves you forward without the paralysis of big choices.
Break big decisions into smaller ones when possible. Instead of deciding your entire marketing strategy, decide what to try next week. Instead of committing to a full redesign, improve one page. Small decisions reduce risk and maintain flexibility.
Tiny decisions also provide feedback faster. You learn whether the decision was good quickly rather than waiting months to discover a big decision was wrong. This faster feedback improves future decisions.
The accumulation of many small decisions often leads to better outcomes than single large decisions anyway. Each small decision incorporates learning from previous ones. The path emerges from walking it rather than being planned entirely upfront.
This applies to product, strategy, hiring, marketing, and everything else. Any time you face a big decision, ask whether you can break it into smaller pieces. Usually you can, and doing so will improve both the process and the outcome.
Why Rework Matters
Rework matters because it gives permission to do business differently. Most business advice assumes you want to build a traditional high-growth venture-backed company. This path works for some people but it’s not the only option. Many successful businesses stay small, grow slowly, focus intensely, and operate sustainably.
The book’s power comes from demonstrating that unconventional approaches work. Basecamp built a profitable, sustainable business by ignoring most standard advice. They stayed small, avoided outside funding, worked reasonable hours, and built something simple rather than trying to be everything to everyone. This proves an alternative path exists.
For people building businesses, Rework offers liberation from assumptions that don’t serve them. You don’t need to work insane hours. You don’t need to raise money. You don’t need to hire aggressively. You don’t need complex planning. You can build something simple, sustainable, and successful by focusing on fundamentals like creating value for customers and operating efficiently.
The contrarian perspective also surfaces important truths buried under conventional wisdom. Meetings really are wasteful. Workaholism really is counterproductive. Planning really is mostly guessing. Growth really isn’t always good. These truths are obvious once stated but rarely acknowledged in business culture that celebrates opposite values.
The book won’t resonate with everyone. People pursuing traditional venture-backed startups will find much of it irrelevant or wrong for their context. That’s fine. Rework isn’t trying to be universal advice. It’s offering an alternative for people who want to build sustainable businesses without sacrificing sanity. For those people, it’s essential reading that validates a different approach and provides practical guidance for executing it successfully.
