SEASON 2 - EPISODE 0085 - NOV 29, 2023

The Outwork Myth

In today’s hustle-centric work environment, there’s a prevailing pressure to showcase constant busyness, sometimes at the expense of genuine productivity.

However, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson present a refreshing perspective in their book “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy Work,” where the emphasis is on the quality of your time rather than the quantity.

Join Jason and David as they sit down with Kimberly Rhodes to dismantle the myth of the “outwork” mentality and delve into the nuances of work ethic, productivity, and career advancement within the constantly changing dynamics of the workplace.

Listen in as they discuss how to gauge authenticity and diligence during the recruitment process. Additionally, a listener question from Keith leads to insights on recognizing and rewarding high performers at 37signals.

Tune in as they peel back the layers of productivity to construct a thriving work environment and a healthy work-life balance.

Check out the full video episode on YouTube.

Key Takeaways

What’s more important than the quantity of hours you work? The idea that working harder than everyone else guarantees success is debunked.
Jason emphasizes the importance of not wasting time and avoiding unnecessary work that doesn’t add value.
David highlights that the focus should be on how time is spent and the quality of work produced.
The pitfalls of busyness and trying to prove one’s worth can lead not only to inefficiency but also to being a nuisance to the team.
The real threat of burnout and ways to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
The pivotal role managers play in ensuring team members do not overwork and have the space to disconnect.
The value of stretch goals—Jason and David discuss the importance of finding a middle ground between a steady state and occasionally pushing boundaries and finding a balance that fosters creativity, efficiency, and well-being.
Why an internal locus of progress is crucial for thriving as a member of the 37signals team.

REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website. Full video episodes are available on YouTube and X (formerly known as Twitter).

If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850 or email, and we might answer it on a future episode.

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes. In their book, it Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy at Work. Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson write that you can’t just outwork the whole world and that work ethic isn’t just about putting in more hours. Here to join me are the co-authors of It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy Work and the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Guys, let’s talk about this because I think for most people they think work ethic is putting in more hours, being more available, always being on, but that’s not what you guys think. So tell me about that. Jason, do you want to jump in?

Jason (00:37): Yeah, sure. I mean the work ethic thing is interesting because it does, for most people, it equates to just putting in the hours. That this person’s got a good work ethic because they put in 12 hour days or they work on the weekends or they’re there at night or they’re there all the time. That just means they’re there all the time when they’re working on the weekends and they’re putting in hours at night, it has nothing to do with work ethic. Ethic is about showing up and helping out and being on time and all the things that it really is about, putting in your best work. Actually, I think a big part of work ethic is not wasting time and figuring out how to make sure you don’t waste the company’s time or your time or other people’s time by creating more work for other people.

(01:17): Sometimes people delegate work that doesn’t need to be done at all. All that stuff to me is really what work ethic is really about. It’s not about the hours and as far as outworking people, I dunno, there’s another myth that goes around which is basically like, and you’ll hear it all the time from big-time entrepreneurs. You just got to work your ass off. You got to outwork everyone. Everyone, if you’re not working, someone else is. Yeah, that’s true. Someone else is. You cannot outwork the world. You can outwork somebody or three people perhaps in a sense, but you can’t say, I’m going to work harder than everybody else and if I do that, therefore I will win, or whatever you want to say at the end of the rainbow. It’s not that at all. That is not what separates people. Now, there might be a few people where that really works well for them because they’re exceptionally good in their working hours and if they put in some extra hours, that really does equate to actually literally being way more productive because they’re so productive to begin with, but most people are not that way.

(02:14): I would say if you’re lucky to get a few good hours of work in a day, for most people in this kind of work, which is, let’s call it information work or whatever professional work, whatever you want to call it, that’s a pretty good day. Four hours is actually a pretty good day. You might do other things for the remaining four, but if you really get four good, strong hours in, that’s a pretty good day in itself. I don’t think you’re actually going to be able to sustain that for eight hours, let’s say, or 10 hours or whatever. Most people are trying to work.

David (02:41): I think part of the problem with this work ethic equation to a lot of hours is that it’s a way to justify the busyness, justify the fact that you feel like this is the main input you have control over. So if you’re desperate for something to succeed, what can you turn on? What levers do you have? The most obvious one that just seems like something you should do is to put in more hours. It’s far harder to actually diagnose how am I spending my time? Am I spending my time well? This notion of busyness that I’m walking around with, is that actually helping anyone do anything? I think the great tragedy is that a lot of entrepreneurs are indeed very busy and they’re very busy being a nuisance to the rest of the company. They’re very busy being in everyone else’s business all the time, when actually the best thing they could do for the business is to just leave people the hell alone for a week, two weeks or six weeks at a time and go off pursuing something else.

(03:42): Go off thinking deeper about the problems that you’re facing. Go on, do your own work. But this notion that business is good is really flawed when it’s paired with the idea that it’s a manager who’s busy and what’s a manager busy doing, telling a bunch of other people what to do. Now, again, at scale, perhaps we’ve talked about Elon about a million times, but it’s still fresh in my mind his biography. He has like five companies and he could be very busy running five companies like you know what, that’s perhaps the maximum amount of busyness that’s good, that having a fifth of Elon associated with your business on a weekly or on a monthly basis, but having all of it all the time at a hundred and hours or 120 hours, you know what? I don’t think that’s a long-term sustainable thing. And the thing with the long-term sustainable stuff too is when it comes to creative work, there’s so much empirical studies on, for example, the advantages of sleep, that if you are maxing out, if you’re putting in the 70, 80 or a hundred hours in some pathological cases, even 120 hours, usually you’re trading something else off.

(04:52): Usually you’re trading off at the very least sleep. And if you’re not trading off sleep, you’re trading off exercise. And if you’re not trading off exercise, you’re trading off social relations outside of work and all of those things diminish you as a human. They make you more tired, they make you more fatigued, they make you more isolated. None of those are good qualities for entrepreneurs or anyone. So I think the reason we always come back to how are you spending your time is the quality of the hours that that’s really matters. That if, as Jason says, if you get four really high-quality hours that are in line, they’re together. It’s four hours in a row. It’s not forty-five minutes here and an hour and a half there, and those hours are kind of born out of being well rested, well exercised, socially stimulated outside of work, they’re going to be awesome. They’re going to be great.

(05:46): And then you can give up on this whole busyness notion and you can give up on perhaps the fear that you’re not trying hard enough. I feel like this is often what comes off or what I see when entrepreneurs are so eager to talk about their personal inputs is that there’s some insecurity here. There’s like I got to prove to maybe my investors that I’m really working hard for their return. I got to prove to whatever everyone else that I’m working really hard when actually a lot of the times you don’t actually have to work that hard. I mean, Jason and I often talk about the fact that being a manager at 37 signals for us is a part-time job. We’re spending the majority of the time in product development, in marketing, in these other domains that actually if we were to spend literally 60, 70, 80 hours on just the management part, we would undoubtedly, undoubtedly make the business worse. We would be interrupting people more. We would be starting even more projects that could not be done within the timeframe that we have. We would just be biting off way more than we can chew. So it’s not a good path.

Kimberly (06:55): Well, and I feel like this concept of outwork just means overwork, which also can really lead to burnout. I know you guys have talked about that a bit and why we do sabbaticals. You want to talk a little bit about that and then the reason we need to pause.

Jason (07:07): Well, the thing is, that’s funny about the outwork thing by the way, is everyone just has twenty-four hours in a day. That’s all there is. The earth turns around once twenty-four hours. You cannot work more than that even. I mean obviously no one should be working as much as that, but let’s say you did. Let’s say I’m going to work a full day straight. Let’s say there’s 2 million people who do the same thing. So now what? You haven’t outworked 2 million people. You’ve equally worked 2 million people. It has to be about efficiency. It cannot be about anything other than that really at the end of the day. So that’s of course an extreme example. What was the question? Now I forget the second part of the question.

Kimberly (07:42): Burnout. I feel like overwork and outwork can lead to burnout a lot of times.

Jason (07:47): Yeah, for sure. I mean, this has happened a handful of times here at the company where first of all, we have a stated policy where every three years we provide a thirty-day paid sabbatical, aside in addition to of course all the vacation time that people are earning alongside that. But it’s an important thing to do to take some extra time off and I still wonder if 30 days is even enough. We might want to think about extending that to six weeks or something instead of four. I don’t know. But the point is is that it’s important to get breaks and it’s important to stay away from work actually. If you want to be better at work, it’s good to stay away from work and it’s good to say, we say 40 hours is plenty. You have nights to yourself, you have weekends to yourself. You’ve got some vacation time to yourself, you’ve got the sabbaticals to yourself.

(08:31): Burnout doesn’t help anybody, and occasionally you’re going to push a little bit harder. Of course, sometimes there’s a launch coming up or some new big thing that you got to get done by a certain time, but you don’t want to keep piling one after another. Sometimes you’ve got this big deadline and you just got to hit it, and so you do put in a 10 hour day or a 12 hour day a day before or whatever it is, but then you can’t follow that up with 10 more of those in a row or 20 more of those in a row. You’ve got to have time off. So it’s something we do tend to build into the way we work and something we’re always on the lookout for. So one of the problems we’ve had in the past is that people actually, and this is one of the tricks with remote work in fact, is that some people end up working longer and more because there’s less of a separation between work and life.

(09:12): Maybe they work at the kitchen table, that’s where their office is, and so that’s where they eat. So it’s easy to have the laptop there as well. You got to be on the lookout for that. And of course we can’t peer into people’s homes, but you can get a sense of this person’s checking in work kind of late and they’re also checking work kind of early and throughout the day, which means it’s not like they took a four hour break during the day and they’re doing some work at night to make up for it. They’ve been working all day long. Or if you see someone check something in on the weekend/ It’s nice to give 'em a gentle nudge like, hey, you don’t have to do that. And they might say, well, I took Friday off because of this, and so I put some time in on Saturday. And you’re like, okay, that’s fine, but you still also don’t even need to do that. Whatever you’re doing on the weekend can wait until Monday. So it’s on us as managers to make sure that we’re tapping people on the shoulder when we see them overworking or working too much to make sure that they understand they don’t have to do that, that’s on us. Otherwise most people will tend to do that for themselves.

David (10:03): I think the other problem with burnout is sometimes really not so much just to the hours, but what those hours are in service of. If I’m being pushed to work mad hours all the time and it’s not serving a purpose, we’re not doing it because there actually is an existential threat facing us or we’re pushing the boundaries of something, we’re just doing it at the altar of busyness, that’s the recipe for burnout. I have actually relaxed my, I don’t know, scorn about this whole domain somewhat over the last few years where there are occasional moments, missions, circumstances where putting in a lot of hours can be sort of beneficial. Not so much in the creative domain, but in the physical domain, in the sales domain, in a whatever, something’s going on, if it’s in the service of something real. It is the height of tragedy when you’re just putting in mad hours on the every week because that’s just what we do.

(11:06): That is just the presentation of who we are. It’s not because we’re actually pushing something monumental forward. I think actually what we’ve seen at 37signals is that occasionally having a stretch is a good thing. And in some ways can be provide another counter to burnout. The occasional stretch of, do you know what? This looks like there’s not quite enough time, there’s not quite enough people, there’s just a little bit too much scope. Let’s see if we can make it happen. Anyway. Actually pushing slightly beyond your boundaries, this is one of those key ingredients of flow in general that you’re not just operating constantly 10, 20% below your capacity. You have to occasionally, or I at least enjoy occasionally, and I’ve found the same thing to be true in others, pushing slightly beyond. Do you know what? I don’t think we can do it. I don’t think we can make it.

(11:57): And then when you do, because humans are these creative, adaptive, amazing beings who very often will think that they’re not capable of something, they put their effort into it and they find out that they are. These are actually really good moments. So I think you can actually, even if it’s rare, you can over tap in the other direction, where you’re never trying to stretch anything where you’re never trying to reach beyond. And I don’t think that’s a healthy state of being either. And I think if you look back on the 20 year history of our company, there are moments or periods where I could think back and say like, do you know what? I think we partially did that. We partially operated below our capacity in a way that didn’t really stretch us, didn’t stretch people, didn’t afford opportunities to do something more and go beyond.

(12:47): And there’s a lot of just true deep human meaning in that to prove to yourself and to others that you’re capable of more than what you think you’re capable of and what you believe you’re capable of right now. So I think trying to find that middle ground of a steady state where we’re rested and we’re exercised and we’re connected and so on, and then also occasionally going, do you know what? I think the corporate lingo is a stretch goal. I mean, just even saying that sounds just so dumb, but I think there is a kernel of something real in it that you do occasionally need to stretch beyond what you believe you’re capable of, and that in itself is also a counter to burnout, even if it occasionally means a few more hours.

Kimberly (13:33): Okay, well, we got a question from a listener kind of related to the subject, so I thought I would read it to you guys. You might need a notepad because it’s kind of lengthy, but it’s about productivity and work ethics. So this person wrote in “Hi Kimberly, Jason and David. First off, thanks for publishing the podcast. I look forward to the new episode each week. I’ve heard you say that you don’t reward working harder in your organization. To get super specific here, do you mean input? What about output? In a hypothetical, admittedly impossible world where imaginary employees, Hayley and John had completely equal skills, would Hayley be rewarded for going above and beyond and producing significantly more output than John?” There’s some clarifications. This is like an SAT question. I’m going to keep going though. “Hayley is doing this because she’s extra motivated by the problems her team is solving. She’s not working harder to hit a tight deadline. John’s input is above the acceptable threshold. Hayley isn’t compromising on quality. I guess what I’m really trying to get your perspectives on are high performers at 37signals. I imagine you think about this quite differently than the rest of the tech industry.” And that comes from Keith. David, you want to jump in on that?

David (14:42): Yeah, so first of all, high performance has multiple dimensions in it. One of the dimensions as he mentions is skill. Are you good at what you do? That’s really important. You’re not going to get beyond a senior programmer or senior designer at 37signals unless you’re really good at what you do. But to go beyond that, to become a lead programmer or a principal programmer or lead designer or principal designer or something else, there is more than just individual skill to be part of it. There is this notion we often call showing up. How do you show up? Do you run to problems? Are you the kind of person that others want to go to because they know you’re just going to address it, that you’re very efficient? Those are all factors that are codified in our progression ladders of seniority. What is the difference between a senior and a lead?

(15:32): What’s the difference between a lead and a principal? And one of the things I pride myself on is that we recognize broadly speaking that there are no speed limits. If you’re able to come into the organization and maybe you’re hired as a senior programmer, how long does it take for you to be able to demonstrate lead qualities? That’s less about calendar time and far more about how you choose to engage with the work and how you choose to run to problems and how you choose to take on more responsibility for a whole subsystem or for a whole product or for your team’s ability to be able to deliver. All of those things are exactly in that category that Jason referred to originally of his definition of work ethic. They’re not about more hours. They’re not about just putting in 10 or 12 hours. They’re about doing what you say you’re going to do, finding the problems before someone else needs to report it, running to those problems, delivering on what you said you would deliver.

(16:30): It’s not about fulfilling someone else’s assessment of how long something should take. It’s about your own responsibility to your own statements. So absolutely, there’s a huge difference in those things. And your personal capacity as a programmer, designer, marketing person or whatever is just one track. And there are multiple tracks that go together to form career progression at 37signals and especially when you get up to the sort of more senior levels, you will tap out on skill alone. You will tap out on skill alone at our company at senior. That’s literally codified in the handbook. You can link to them in the show notes. We have all these different levels described. What does it mean to be the different things? And you’ll see, you’ll tap out. You can be the best program in the world. I don’t know, maybe the best programmer in the world could be something else, but you can be a very good programmer and seniors still sort of the level you will rest at here at the company, unless there’s some of these other factors are present too.

Jason (17:28): The other thing I want to add is my guess is I feel like he wants to ask this question, but he’s not quite getting to it, which is like do you bonus people who are performing better than, I just feel like maybe that’s hidden in the question somewhere. No. So the question is he’s like, how do you reward high performers? When you think about rewards, typically in business it’s like financial rewards is kind of how it’s, but different people, first of all, everything David said is correct, which is like if you did really well on this project, well that’s something in the win column for you. It doesn’t mean you get a promotion, it doesn’t mean you get a bonus. It doesn’t mean any of those things. It’s like you have to pile a bunch of these things up that show that over the long term or there’s a trend here that you’re possibly able to move up a level in the company based on a number of different criteria.

(18:14): But in the meantime, we do these things twice a year at meetups and sometimes we do them actually every six or seven weeks when we do an all hands, which is that there’s this idea of employee recognition or people stand up in front of the company and say, hey, you know what? This person’s doing a great job. I’m not sure they’ve been recognized for it. I’m not sure other people knew about it or whatever it is, or people knew about it, but I want to bring it up. So there’s a reward in that to some degree because for some people that means a lot to them. Recognition is a huge thing for them, and so that’s how they’re rewarded by their peers. But the company’s not going to go around and hand out bonuses or dollar bills based on someone doing a good job on a particular project.

(18:58): It really is the sum total of your work, the effort you’re making over the long term and the trend you’re headed towards, the responsibility you’re willing to take on and how much we think you can actually pull something off that’s above you perhaps. And if you’re your ability to do that at least once or maybe twice or three times before you get to move up. So that’s how we think about it, not as like, oh, you did a great job. Here’s something for it other than your peers recognizing you for it, and also sometimes your manager recognizing you for it. That’s all part of it as well.

David (19:27): And just as important, your personal recognition that you’ve done a great job, the personal recognition and satisfaction of delivering something of impact that moves things forward. We’ve done these things at meetups where we look at the different things that motivate people, and there are some people who are highly motivated by recognition. That’s a thing of others. And then there’s some people who are highly motivated by internal sense of progress. And I find for myself, this is the main recognition or reward that I get out of a job well done is my own personal locus of progress, my sense that you know what? We did something that mattered. We moved the ball forward. Perhaps we stretched a little bit and we didn’t think that we were able to and we did it anyway. It’s a really satisfying thing to do. I wrote about this a while back when the whole act your wage thing was trending or memeing or whatever, I just felt like, gee, oh man, that’s such a sad place to be because you’re just playing yourself to quote as a callot, you’re playing yourself, man.

(20:31): You’re playing yourself when you don’t show up and deliver the maximum of your personal capacity, not for the business sake, although that’s a nice side effect. And if you work in nice business with nice coworkers, hopefully eventually you will be recognized, but that’s not why you do it. You do it for your own progress, your own sense of identity and move forward. Now again, if you’re working a dead-end manual labor job, that’s a different category and kettle of fish and I can see how people arrive and an act your wage thing, but I saw it creep in to creative endeavors. People thinking, do you know what creatively I should hold back? It doesn’t work. That’s not how the pie is cut. You will grow the pie. The more you stretch yourself, the more you show up with everything you have not in terms of hours again.

(21:19): This isn’t about ours, but in terms of dedication and pursuit of impact and all these other things, you will grow your pie if you’re using all of it. You cannot save energy. You can’t go like, oh, I’m just going to coast this week, then next week I’m going to have double. No, you’re not going to have double. You’re going to have less. This is one of the things that were really fascinating to me early on in my career where I sort of acted this way, at least one employment that I vividly remember where I was just like, I didn’t really like the people who were running the company. I didn’t really like how things were assigned, and I thought, you know what? I’m going to coast a little. And I realized that the coasting was hurting one person more than anyone else, and it was me.

(22:01): I had less energy when I came home from coasting a whole day. I had less energy the next week. It was a downward trend, and I think after that experience I really went like, do you know what? It doesn’t matter who otherwise benefits from me showing up with my best all the time, I’m going to benefit me most of all. I will have more energy to do things after hours if I put in the maximum. Creativity is sort of a regenerative force. The more of it you use, the more of it you’ll have. So investing in that sense of your own capacity by using all of it as much as you can is just a wise strategy for yourself and your own career development.

Kimberly (22:44): Okay, last question before we wrap it up. We’ve been talking about work ethic and not just being about hours, as you are hiring someone who’s listening is like, yeah, I want to bring on people who have a great work ethic. How do you find those people? Because in the hiring process, it’s not just like, tell me about your work ethic and we know it’s not just about hours. Do you have any tips as you’re looking to grow your team, finding people who do what they say they’re going to do and follow through and all of those things that we say go beyond just the hours?

Jason (23:10): I think work ethic is a trickier thing to interview for, but I think that you can definitely ask references about that. That’s been my technique for that. I typically don’t put a whole lot of weight in references in general because people are providing them and they’re probably going to be good, but you can ask around the edges and find some of those answers. But I think you can also ask people about, ask them to walk you through some of their work and you can sort of prod at that with a work ethic lens and sort of ask a bit about how you approached this project. What was it like? Who else did you work with? How was that? There’s some questions you can get to around those edges, but I don’t know. In my opinion, it’s not the easiest thing to dig into in terms of interviewing. Maybe David has a different approach, but I found that to be, usually someone else has a better insight into your abilities in terms of your showing up and if your timeliness and your willingness to help and your willingness to run into problems than you typically do, I think everyone else has a better sense of that than you might yourself, especially in an interview situation where you’re going to probably give the answers that you want someone to hear. So anyway, that’s my feeling.

Kimberly (24:23): And maybe it’s something that’s more judged at that six month mark or one year mark than it is in the interview process.

Jason (24:30): Yeah, I think it’s something you have to see and feel, and also because every situation’s different. In some situations, people may have come from a place where they were driven hard by a manager, and so it appears that they had, let’s say, good work ethic in your mind. They got things done on time and they showed up, but it wasn’t their internal drive. So now at our company, people have a lot of flexibility and freedom. So if you come from a place where you’re told exactly what to do when you do that well, that would not translate here because we don’t really tell you a whole lot about what to do. So you kind of do have to feel that out and see it as you go.

David (25:04): And this is one of these reasons why we have the notion of after one year asking the question, would you hire this person again? Now that’s quite late in the process and it’s not foolproof, and I wish you’d have better indicators early on, and there are some indicators, but at the very least, having this sense that given the fact that it is difficult to discern work ethic upfront, at least setting for your company a bar where you say, by this point you’ve given this candidate enough time to find their footing to figure out which way it’s going. Do they have the work ethic that’s a match for your place? As Jason says, there’s some places where just if you just do everything that the manager tells you to do, that’s great work ethic. That would fail spectacularly here. People are generally not going to tell you what to do, certainly not on a daily basis, barely on a weekly basis, mostly on a cycle basis.

(25:56): So you really have to have that internal locus of progress to be able to thrive. Here we call that manager of one that you may very well be reporting to a manager, but your primary manager should be yourself. Now, I will say though, when I look at programmers for example, you can tell a fair degree and it’s not always foolproof, and sometimes there’s sort of whatever, a head fake in it or something, how they approach the tasks that we give the finalists, and some of it is kind of the shape of it. To what extent are you caring about the application itself? Are you putting in the diligence of the code? You don’t have to submit reams and reams of code, but the code you do submit, is it nice? Is it polished? This is sort of a variant of something I also use to poo-poo, right?

(26:45): Or there’d be these higher measure or if there’s a spelling mistake in your resume or whatever, you’re out. You’re just out. And I always thought, do you know what? First of all, that’s silly because, and I maybe think this because I misspell things all the time. I post to HEY world very often and I would usually hear back from readers correcting my typing mistakes. I’d go like, do you know what? I’d probably submit a resume with some typos in it, but there’s still a sense of did you put in some care? This is potentially a job you might have for five, 10 years. Are you proportionate to that task in the care you’re putting into your application? This is something, or one of the reasons why I think the resume or not the resume exactly, not the resume. The cover letter is so important for us because it is actually a little difficult to sort of fake it.

(27:32): A cover letter that’s really good, that’s going to put you in the upper part of the back reflects some authentic drive and diligence and care and specificity. Do you know what? I want this job. Maybe I’m faking it, but then you’re good at faking. That’s the other thing. Do you know what? It doesn’t really matter if you’re faking it. What does that even mean? As long as you show up in such a way that you actually present as having a good work ethic, present as being on time, present as doing things well, whether you in your heart of hearts feel like that’s dumb or I’m just faking it doesn’t really matter. This is about showing up, which is about how other people see what you do. So I’d say to impart that level of work ethic, making sure that the application itself has some of those markers in the specificity, the care that goes into it is one of the best ways of reflecting it.

(28:27): And then as a hiring manager, just going, do you know what? Even with all those indicators, I’m going to be wrong at least 20% of the time at least. So one out of five, I’m going to wrongly assess whether this person will have the work ethic that’s compatible without a company and I will have to let them go. You are delusional if you think that you can hire with a perfect record. There is no company in the world that I’ve ever heard of who over the long run with enough candidates can be just spot on every time. You can look at Google, you can look at Apple, you can look at all the major tech companies. They all talk about this phenomenon of how hard it actually is to figure out whether you have the right candidate or not, and none of them have cracked it yet. So just giving yourself kind of that leeway as a manager where you go, do you know what one out of five? I’m just pulling that number out. Maybe it’s higher, maybe it’s less. Depends on your situation, but there will be a number of people you hire and you have high aspirations for and they’re not going to work out. Alright, onwards and upwards.

Kimberly (29:31): Well, I feel like we could do a whole episode just on that. So we will wrap it up here for now. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter. And if you have a specific question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, you can leave us a voicemail or send us a text to 708-628-7850 and we just might answer it on an upcoming show.