No Time is No Excuse

“There’re just not enough hours in the day!” This is probably the most common excuse people give for not starting something. Well, guess what. There most definitely are a few hours you could probably squeeze in here and there. And, we’re not saying you have to quit your day job to do it!

Show Notes

• 02:10 - Fortnite
• 02:21 - Tetris Effect
• 07:57 - Set Boundaries (Shape Up)
• 09:37 - Jerry Maguire “Who’s Coming With Me?” (YouTube)
• 15:13 - How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation - Anne Helen Peterson (BuzzFeed News)
• 19:40 - Gary Vaynerchuk
• 23:43 - Stripe

Transcript

Shaun: (00:00:00) Could you hear us?

David: (00:00:01) Yeah, yeah, actually, I was saying shit. I was like, oh, actually my waveform is not there, that’s why you’re not responding.

Shaun: (00:00:08) Well, you can’t win them all. It’s working now.

(00:00:09) Broken By Design by Clipart plays.

Shaun: (00:00:11) Welcome to REWORK a podcast by Basecamp about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Shaun Hildner.

(00:00:17) This week on the show, we’re talking about making excuses. Specifically, the excuse that there’s just no time to start that thing you want to start. To build that idea that’s been burning in your brain for years. To learn to play the bagpipes. Well, of course there is. Now this doesn’t mean pulling 16 hour days or ignoring your family. But finding a couple hours a week is probably more than plenty to get going.

(00:00:39) As always, here to convince me that I could be using my time more wisely are the co-founders of Basecamp and the authors of REWORK. Jason Fried, how are you?

Jason: (00:00:46) Doing well, thank you. How are you?

Shaun: (00:00:47) Wonderful. And David Heinemeier Hansson, how are you?

David: (00:00:51) Good, good.

Shaun: (00:00:53) So let’s start off a little bit easy. What are you guys working on these days in your free time? Jason, you said you’re you’re learning guitar, is that right?

Jason: (00:01:00) Yeah, I just started taking guitar again. I used to play guitar, wasn’t very good, but I used to play. Junior high, high school, a little bit in college. I stopped for like, 20 years.

Shaun: (00:01:09) Uh huh.

Jason: (00:01:10) So I just started picking up guitar again, so. I’ve been like dabbling, but I want to, I kind of hit this plateau of suckiness. And I want to get better. So I started taking lessons a few weeks ago.

Shaun: (00:01:20) Fun. David, you’re working on anything in your free time, in your non-work time?

David: (00:01:24) Yeah. So sometimes these things do blend a little bit like I got a real kick of open sourceness for a couple of months, where I just had a bunch of ideas in my head. Some of them related, obviously, to the stuff that we do, and some of them sort of tangential to stuff that we do. And I just had to get it out of my fingers. And I spent a fair amount of free time just working on those things.

(00:01:47) But then, outside of touching, well, I was about to say outside of computers, but that would be a lie, because the other thing I’ve been getting into is video games more.

Shaun: (00:01:55) Ah ha. What are you playing?

David: (00:01:58) So it’s, really the staple, is like Fortnite. I was on a really long Fortnite kick because I play it with the kids. And we’d have a whole squad. And Fortnite is a really nice game. And we had a lot of fun with it. And we played a lot of matches and so forth. And that was good. And then that got back into Tetris. There’s this new Tetris game out called Tetris Effect, I think.

Shaun: (00:02:20) Yep. Yep.

David: (00:02:21) Where they kind of mix music into it in a really novel way. And I’m like, damn it. I’ve been playing Tetris since literally 1986 on a game board, the big chunky one. And that game is still amazing. And what’s even more amazing about Tetris Effect is it’s beautiful. The music is gorgeous.

(00:02:42) But the main thing I like is the one introduction, the one new feature that’s basically been added to Tetris in whatever that’s going to be,

Shaun: (00:02:48) 50 years.

David: (00:02:48) 30 years, is the instadrop. So rather than holding down like the down button, and it goes down fast. You can now push up and it’ll drop right away. And it totally changes the game in such a way I find so fascinating, because so many puzzle games have been trying to take on Tetris. Oh, we’re like Tetris, but our blocks are slightly longer. They’re made of candy or some other stupid stuff, right? And in 30 years, or, I don’t know, maybe someone came up with the instadrop prior to that, but it totally changes the game. And it’s so much more fun, because it’s so much faster. And I find that Tetris is just one of those games where you’re like, this is the stuff. I hope I’m still playing Tetris when I’m 90.

Shaun: (00:03:29) Oh, I’m sure we will be.

David: (00:03:30) This is the stuff that feels like brain plasticity exercises, right? Your brain will stay fresh if you can drop your Tetris blocks really fast to the beat?

Shaun: (00:03:40) Well, this is actually a great segue into my next question, because a lot of this essay is about having the excuse that there aren’t enough hours in the day to start something. To start a business, to learn an instrument, to do that kind of thing. So one of the things you say is, you know, you can shut off the TV, you can stop playing video games. But isn’t there some value and I think this goes to what you were just saying, David. There’s some value of being able to shut off and just go watch some TV. Go play some video games, going to bed at 10.

David: (00:04:11) Yes, but the problem here isn’t that you’re playing Tetris for 30 minutes, right? Is that your on fucking TikTok for two hours?

Shaun: (00:04:19) Right.

David: (00:04:20) Right. And it’s not just like one time a week, it’s every day. And then you’re complaining, oh, I don’t have time. I mean, you do. Maybe you’re too exhausted. I mean, maybe the problem isn’t the time is not your excuse. But your energy level is your excuse. Which there are all sorts of other remedies for, right? Like maybe you’re feeling shit because you never work out and you eat like crap. That’s another possible option in the bucket of explanations.

(00:04:46) I think what we’re trying to attack here is this notion that you’re seeing is, as just like this is fixed. There’s just nothing I can do because I don’t have the time. That’s just not true. Stop telling yourself that because that’s a lie.

(00:05:02) Again, you may rationalize why it is that you’re not taking the time. But it’s not because you don’t have it. Some people it is, if you’re working two jobs and have 14 hour days, and whatever, that is actually the thing. But in our circles, that excuse is used a lot by people where that’s not true, and the kind of people might well fit into hours of TikTok.

Shaun: (00:05:21) Mm hmm.

David: (00:05:22) And then it also gets to the point of the essay we talked about last week is that, maybe you’re saying you don’t have any time because you don’t actually want to get started. Because if you got started, you’d test your ideas. And if you tested your ideas, you might pop that bubble you have in your head that’s protecting your ego from realizing that the idea you have is perhaps not the best idea in the world.

(00:05:42) So there’s all these other psychological obstacles or otherwise, things around it, and we just, at least, that’s what I’m thinking that we’re trying to pick that can out a bit. Just don’t. No excuses, even though there are plenty, just shut that out for a bit. Or shut it out for just a while, right?

(00:06:01) Again, as we talked about in “Just Start” is, oftentimes all you need is two weeks, three weeks, four weeks to just like could you do that? Could you not do the TikTok? Or could you not do Tetris? Or could you not do the guitar? Or could you not do whatever else it is for like four weeks? Could you take four weeks and try it? Of course, you could. So do that.

Jason: (00:06:20) I think the thing that’s interesting about this essay for me is that when we wrote this, neither David nor I had any kids, and I won’t speak for David. But I realized how little, I mean, I literally have like, no free time now.

David: (00:06:33) At all.

Shaun: (00:06:32) Right.

Jason: (00:06:33) Basically, what I didn’t realize is how much free time I actually had before. I had so much free time before, before I had kids. Obviously not everyone’s in the same situation. Like David says, some people work multiple jobs, have to take care of other people and all that stuff, right. But I did have a lot of time, and now I don’t.

(00:06:49) So I think a lot of it is contextual to the place in your life that you’re at, and the timing and all those other things and other obligations that you begin to collect as you as you typically get a bit older. It does make it harder. I think it would be a lot harder for me to start a business today than it would have been 20 years ago, purely because I have other obligations to take up my time. But I did have a lot more before than I even thought.

David: (00:07:12) I’d also say though, that, the same thing, Jason. Three kids running around the house, lots of activities. But it focuses your mind in a different way, even more so than we were already in this like, hey, you could just cut out some things. Where I remember I had this idea in my head for a change in Rails, a new approach to something blah blah blah. And I’m like, do you know what? I have half of a Sunday here, I can’t waste the time, this half of the Sunday because then the kids are gonna come home, I’m gonna do something else. And like, that’s the weekend, I have half a Sunday to really sprint on this.

(00:07:41) I think what you continuously realize is that almost, there’s limits, but you can squeeze time so much. And you’re still somehow finding the bulk of the value you end up delivering. This is one of the tricks or secrets about Shape Up, about budgets, thinking like do you know what? There’s a version of this, that’ll take six weeks, there’s a version of this, that’s like 90% as good that’ll take four weeks. There’s a version of this that’s 80% as good, that’ll take two weeks. As you can see, so you’re down to a third of the time with the two weeks, but you’re still getting 80% of the value, because the value is not distributed evenly.

(00:08:18) And the same is true with almost anything, you’ll jump into, whether you’re learning something new, or you’re starting a business, or you’re programming something, or designing something. The first four hours matter a lot more than the last four hours out of a big bucket. But yeah, it does get harder.

(00:08:35) And then you think, again, as Jason and I’ve been talking about sometimes, right? Hey, do you know what, we’re, with kids in a two parent household. And then there are also people who are single parents in a multi-kid household and you think how did they do it? And you’re like, you know what? Humans are pretty good at adapting. And that’s the other thing you learn. Somehow, you’re still able to do things as you have less time and you sometimes marvel at, wow, look at what that person were able to accomplish with the constraints they had on their life.

(00:09:04) So maybe you shouldn’t be whining so much, because almost at every stage. I mean, there are some final stages of difficulty and hardship where like, alright, you’re playing it on ultra mega hard. But most people are somewhere off the ultra mega hard level, even if they’re at medium rather than easy. And just like engage it a little bit on that spectrum.

Shaun: (00:09:24) So one of the things I really like about this essay is that you’re not advocating for people to blow everything up, quit their day job and start something else. It’s not that Jerry Maguire moment.

David: (00:09:34) That’s exactly it. And that’s why to me, this is an inspiring essay, right? This is not about taking the maximum amount of risk. This is actually the hey, you don’t need risk. Could you fit in your time? Are you the kind of person who’s spending two hours on TikTok? That’s probably easy mode in life if you have two hours to spend on TikTok, but clearly plenty of people do by the statistics coming out of modern social media.

(00:09:58) You could take that and trade it for a shot. And that’s going to cost you very little in terms of human opportunity cost here. All right, I’m giving up my TikTok. I mean, I’m really just picking up TikTok, but I’m giving that up for four weeks, right? And I’ll get some of these hours back. And what can I do with five hours? What can I do with 10 hours?

(00:10:19) And I think the reason this feels so personal, is that when we started Basecamp, I literally was selling 10 hours a week to Jason, to do this. Like Jason hired me and I was in school. And not only was in school, I had other client projects. I had actually a bunch of demands on my time. A bunch of other things. I mean, most of it was sort of frivolous stuff, not because I had someone else’s life dependent on me. But as a student going full time to school, and like selling Jason 10 hours a week, what did we get out of those 10 hours? Quite a lot, a fucking whole business, we built all of Basecamp in what, four or five calendar months off that 10 hour week budget.

(00:10:58) That origin story, at least to me, is actually something I keep coming back to when I think like, oh, man, I didn’t get a lot done this week, or I didn’t get a lot done today. And I’m like, wait, but I spent like eight hours in front of the computer. In those olden days, that would have been the whole week.

(00:11:11) Alright, maybe I could do better.

Shaun: (00:11:13) We talk about having a badge of honor in the tech industry. But there is some sort of romanticism around the story of I quit everything to start this.

Jason: (00:11:22) Yeah. I mean, if someone who’s listening to this is gonna go but. But, but, but, they did this. And the answer is, of course, there’s a million ways to do all these things, right? But this is about the odds and the risk profile and what you’re getting yourself into, and what do you have to do and the assumption that you have to drop everything, risk everything, to do anything. That just doesn’t really add up. You don’t have to do that. Certainly some have. And certainly, sometimes it works out. But you don’t have to do that.

(00:11:51) Again, this is also about being wise with your with your time and your investment. Start small. See where you can go. Get somewhere in a few weeks, see how it feels, before you give up everything else to find out that what you’re doing isn’t going to work anyway. That’s kind of a bad place to end up.

Shaun: (00:12:07) How do you know when that moment has arrived? I’m just wondering if there’s any sort of signposts that you can point to of oh, I’ve been putting four hours, five hours a week into this, and it’s kind of looking like something.

Jason: (00:12:18) I mean, the only thing I would say is it’s a feeling. There’s a sustained like a feeling of I can sustain this, this is exciting. I’m getting somewhere. This is this is going somewhere. You’re not wandering so much aimlessly, but you’re actually headed in a direction that continues to hold your interest.

(00:12:36) Now you can work on some esoteric thing that holds your interest, that’s going to be a terrible product, because it’s so specific and so niche that doesn’t work for anyone else. You can be excited by that. And that’s kind of fine, too. But commercially, that probably won’t end up very well.

(00:12:51) But for me, at least, it’s a degree of feeling. It’s also like when you build something for yourself, it’s like, can I use this thing have already started to build? Like, wow, this is already doing something that I couldn’t do before, that helps to fuel the motivation to continue.

(00:13:02) I Think it’s a bunch of those little things that add up to let’s keep doing this.

Shaun: (00:13:06) Well, I want to talk about this idea that you have in the essay about not being able to start something, especially business, because you don’t want it bad enough. And I’m not entirely sure I believe that I didn’t write that game that’s been in the back of my mind because I didn’t want it bad enough. I’m wondering like, how do you defend that?

David: (00:13:25) I think it is about the psychological safety of feeling like, do you know what, I’m not doing it. And I need a rationale for myself why that is not happening, whether it’s because I’m afraid that my idea won’t actually work. This was what we talked about last week, that that’s a moment of failure that perhaps is too stark to face. That it’s better to live with the fantasy that if I did it, it would work, but I’m just not, because I don’t have enough time.

(00:13:53) Or these other excuses. You get to live in a fantasy for longer. And fantasies can be pretty good, right? Like they could be comforting. And you’re like, well, maybe shit is hard, but like I am actually a person who has good ideas. And if I just had more time to put into my ideas, they would be successful and everything would be great. And all my dreams would come true.

(00:14:14) Putting that to the test when, I mean let’s just face it, the odds of success in any endeavor, business, or otherwise are low. If most people would succeed at most things most of the time. Like, yeah, the world would look a lot different and it doesn’t. I can totally sympathize with that. Like with, it’s almost like it’s a blanket, or it’s a teddy bear. Or it’s somewhere else where you can like, oh, I feel warm and safe in my psychology here. My little fantasy that I have these great ideas, they just they just don’t have time to come out. And in some ways I almost feel bad about trying to squash on that because I can actually, legitimately, not in a patronizing way, see the benefit to that, that we make up stories to tell ourselves to get through life.

Shaun: (00:15:00) Absolutely. To stick with the psychology aspect for a while, I’ve seen and read that this idea that there’s not enough hours in the day related to burnout, you know, when things start piling up, especially when emotions start piling up, it can feel insurmountable to find the time to start something.

(00:15:19) The example I want to give is the, during the pandemic, I’m really glad that some people were able to learn to bake bread and learn French or whatever. But I found it so hard, just having that emotional pressure to do most of the things on my list. My reading went down. But you know, so how do you sort of deal with the, I guess, not having enough time, but not feeling like you have enough time because of burnout or emotional pressure?

Jason: (00:15:45) I would just say it’s, it’s not always the right time. We’re not entitled to always have the right time in front of us to do something.

Shaun: (00:15:52) Yeah.

Jason: (00:15:52) You know, sometimes it’s just not the right time to find the time to do the thing you need to do and maybe you’re not emotionally there, or there’s other things going on in your life or mentally you’re not where you need to be or physically or whatever it might be. And you kind of have to probably wait for that time to feel right again. I mean, of course, you can brute force it, probably. And maybe you can adjust it so you can make it work. But I don’t think you really want to fight the current on things like that. Personally, I think you just want to kind of find, settle in when it feels right and then go. That’s my take on it, at least.

Shaun: (00:16:25) That’s kind of why I wanted to push back against the idea that it may not be that you don’t want something enough. It could be it’s not the right time. It could be you’re not in the right space, mentally.

Jason: (00:16:36) It could be all those things.

David: (00:16:38) It could. But I think.

Shaun: (00:16:40) All right, here we go.

David: (00:16:43) I think it’s also. I mean, I was gonna say then at least just be honest about it. Right, like, to me the thing I want to push back against this illusion you’re building up about around yourself as to explain why you can’t do the things that you purportedly want to do. And that’s just, maybe there’s some safety blanket in that and I can see the appeal, and I can be sympathetic to it.

(00:17:07) But there’s also a level of maturity to just fucking open your eyes and accept the world as it is. And like, do you know what? The reason I’m not doing my thing is not because I don’t have enough time, I have enough time. Just because like, I just, I can’t right now, right? And then hopefully, the next sentence is a path of trying to figure that out. That you’re not just going to wallow in like, well, I’m just a person who can’t.

Shaun: (00:17:28) Right.

David: (00:17:29) Well, I mean, jeez, okay, that’s depressing. And maybe that’s where the blankets and the stories and so on come from, because coming to that realization is depressing. But perhaps facing reality is also the way out of that. Once you face the truth, like the reason I’m not doing the things I want to do is not because I don’t have enough time, it’s not because of all these other things, because I’m scared that I might fail. I’m sort of exhausted for other things.

(00:17:55) So let me give you a tactical thing. There was this thing about teaching someone how to read. So the way you learn how to read is to read the things you’re interested in long enough until you become interested in reading.

Shaun: (00:18:05) Right.

David: (00:18:05) I think that’s how it goes. And there was even a broader extraction of that is you start doing the things you love until you love to do. You can train some of these things. And sometimes a little bit of that is forcing yourself, is dragging yourself, like this isn’t just about starting a new project. It’s also like mundane things like getting to the gym. Sometimes you kind of have to drag yourself to it. And you do it for four times. And it really sucks because you’re totally out of shape. By the way, this is a personal account, I’m giving here. I’ve been through that several times falling in and out of training programs and like the first three times of rebooting is always like, but I could also not do this because it hurts. But fuck, no, right?

(00:18:46) I mean, what we’re trying to do here with this book, in part, is to give you a kick in the ass. If you’re just picking this book up to be reaffirmed in all the safety blankets you have, like, yeah, that’s not this book. There are other books that can do that. This book is about the kick in the ass. This is, you give it a go.

Jason: (00:19:02) But I agree with all that, too. You know, it’s not going to happen unless you do it. But you got to want it. I think that’s maybe the other thing here is that sometimes I think one of the reasons why people run to these roadblocks is they don’t actually really want it for themselves. They’ll want it because they think they’re supposed to do it. They’ll want it because other people are doing it. And it’s very hard to work through a lull when you don’t really, really want it for yourself.

Shaun: (00:19:28) Yeah.

Jason: (00:19:28) But when you really, really, really do, you just you do figure it out. You have to, there’s no other way around it. But I think that’s where people get stuck. And you see a lot in the entrepreneurial world. Gary Vaynerchuk talks a lot about this. Like, wannabe entrepreneurs. There’s this wannabe business thing where people are busy all the time and connecting and going to conferences and making connections and networking and trying to do all the things, all the motions, thinking that it’s going to ignite something but it really doesn’t because you’re just doing the motions, you’re not doing the thing because you don’t really have a thing to do. You’re just acting the thing. And that’s really hard if you’re not into it and you have to do that. That is hard. That’s harder than doing the thing, probably, to fake the thing.

(00:20:04) That’s the other part of it, is you got to figure out, do you really want to do this? Because it is, like David was saying, it’s mostly probably not going to work anyway. Just how things typically work out. So you really got to be all in to get it done. But you can still slowly make your way there. You can still start simple, start easy. Or actually you get fast to figure out if this is working. But you don’t need to build the whole damn thing to figure out if it’s worth it. That’s kind of what I’m trying to get at.

David: (00:20:29) I think the other thing here is just a sense of like, are you getting more interested in it when you start it, or not? That’s a good way for me. So I tried to learn guitar for a while. And I took a handful of lessons. And like every lesson after the first, I wanted to do it less.

Shaun: (00:20:44) Hmm.

David: (00:20:45) And then by the fourth lessons, I’m like, fuck it, I’m not gonna learn this. Because the things that work, they are generally at least I’ve found with my passions, they’re on a ramp. And they start from like, I’m not sure whether I want it, to, okay, I do it a little bit. Ooh, this is fun. This is exciting, like my brain is firing in some ways that I’m excited about. And then I do another thing and I’m like, ooh, more of it! More of it! Right? If you’re constantly like forcing yourself in a way where it doesn’t pick up, like, don’t stop with the first roadblock right? Like, then no one would start exercising and everyone would be in terrible shape. Like, you got to push it just beyond that. But then it’s got to get its own momentum going fairly quickly.

(00:21:24) You can’t drag yourself through 100 hours of shit you just do not want to do when you don’t have to do that thing. People can drag themselves to 100 hours all day long, if they literally have to do it to survive or put food on the table.

Shaun: (00:21:38) Yeah.

David: (00:21:38) But we’re talking about starting something next to your job, in addition to, right? That needs the momentum of your internal motivation to keep going.

Shaun: (00:21:48) The essay ends with a discussion of some other excuses that you hear. I’m too old. I’m too young. What do you guys hear? I don’t know, when you’re talking in business schools, things like that.

Jason: (00:21:58) When I speak in business schools, I don’t ever hear excuses.

Shaun: (00:22:00) Really?

Jason: (00:22:01) I hear really a lot of curiosity, and a lot of questions. I spoke last night at a class at Northwestern. And everyone’s curious, they want to know, they’re excited. I don’t hear a lot of excuses from those groups. I actually used to hear a lot of excuses when I would go to speak at business conferences with other entrepreneurs or whatever. You’d hear excuses there. But with students, I see a lot of wide eyed, open enthusiasm and excitement and curiosity.

Shaun: (00:22:26) Those were the days.

Jason: (00:22:27) Yeah. It’s very refreshing. I’ve spoken to two schools this week. And it’s, I really enjoy it. Questions are good, they’re genuine. People really want to know, they’re not just going through the motions. It’s nice. That’s been my experience, at least.

David: (00:22:41) It’s probably the number one excuse I hear from entrepreneurs is like, I don’t have enough money. And we had tackled that excuse in a variety of ways otherwise, but a lot of it is like, oh, it’s too expensive these days. The hell are you talking about? Never been cheaper if you’re willing to learn and do the stuff yourself.

(00:22:59) Yeah, it’s never been more expensive if all you want to be is the idea guy, which I think we take down a little later. Because salaries have gone up a lot. So if you’re just like, hey, all I bring to the table, here’s an idea, you damn well better bring a huge bag of money too. But getting started if you’re willing to do the work yourself and connect with others who can do the work themselves. Like, that’s as much bullshit as it’s ever been. It’s actually more bullshit than it’s ever been. There’s never been fewer barriers to get going and start building a business and charging a credit card.

(00:23:32) I mean, Jason and I have stories all day long about how we walked uphill in both directions in snow to just get credit cards processed, right? And now all you do is you sign up for Stripe and in like 30 seconds, you’re going, right? Like, in our day, you really had to convince the banker to get a merchant agreement.

(00:23:52) And now you don’t.

Shaun: (00:23:52) I love when REWORK turns into old man talk.

David: (00:23:56) So I mean, in that sense, perhaps that is how you inevitably get to be a crotchety old man, because progress will inevitably render a bunch of things that were hard in your day, easy today, and then you go like the youth today is too soft.

Shaun: (00:24:11) What are your kids complaining about?

David: (00:24:12) Exactly right? Like, I mean, the fact is, of course, you’re plenty other things to complain about. When Jason I put up Basecamp, the competition were like Two Stooges and Microsoft, right? So there’s also that. Now there’s a lot more, and so on and so forth.

(00:24:26) So every generation and time will have its slew of constraints and it’s excuses. Which is, again, the other way I look at this is, would I regret having started on this and put in all the hours if it didn’t work? That’s a great test for me as to whether I should actually do it or not. Like I look at a bunch of these things. I create technology, and I think like if this doesn’t blow up to be a huge success, and a bunch of other people use it would I feel like my time was wasted? And if that’s true, I’m like, fuck, I’m running away screaming. I’m not staking my time, my life, on things that only feel worth it if they work.

(00:25:06) Like every single product we’ve ever built at Basecamp, I’ve had that sense of like, do you know what, if no one shows up to be here, I was still happy for the ride. In fact, I think Jason and I had this explicit conversation with HEY. Do you know what? Well, HEY could either be a major success. It could be a medium success, or it could not be a success at all. Would we be like ah, fuck, we totally blew two years of our lives building this thing if it was not like a major success? Absolutely not. If all I got out of this journey was I got to build an awesome cool product that I liked, myself, for two years. And I could do it because we had another business that paid the bills. And I ended up with the best version of email that I, just Jason and I wanted to use. Fuck, sounds like a huge slam dunk, homerun success to me.

Shaun: (00:25:50) It’s about the friends we made along the way.

(00:25:53) Well, I think that is a great place to stop. Next week, we’re talking about “Drawing a Line in the Sand.” So thank you both for coming on to REWORK. Jason Fried, thank you.

Jason: (00:26:02) Always fun to be here. Thanks.

Shaun: (00:26:03) And David Heinemeier Hansson, thank you.

David: (00:26:04) Yep, yep. Thanks.

Shaun: (00:26:05) We’ll see you next week.

David: (00:26:08) Late.

(00:26:08) Broken By Design by Clipart plays.

Shaun: (00:26:18) REWORK is a production of Basecamp. Our theme music is by Clip Art. We’re on the web at rework.fm where you can find show notes and transcripts for this and every episode of REWORK. We’re also on Twitter at @reworkpodcast.

(00:26:31) Hey, so I haven’t asked for this in a while. But if you like the show, I’d really appreciate it if you could leave a review on Apple podcasts. You know, just write about how much you like the host or whatever.

(00:26:41) If you have any comments about the show or questions for Jason and David, I’d love to hear them. You can leave me a voicemail at 708-628-7850. Or better yet, record a voice memo on your phone and email it to hello@rework.fm.