AMA with Jason Fried: Work-life balance, avoiding burnout, defining success, company culture, and more

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Jason Fried. You may recognize that name as Jason was a guest on the podcast we released in October of 2019 At the end of that discussion, both Jason and I sat back and thought, on some levels, boy, this was kind of outside of what I normally talk about, but at the other level, we thought there were a lot of topics that we could have gone deeper into. And once the podcast actually came out, we were surprised, I suppose pleasantly, by the number of questions that people put forth. And so we decided to do a follow-up AMA on that initial discussion. And so we took questions from many of you broadly, apologies for those of you who weren't aware of this. We tried to do it through social media and other channels, but nevertheless, we culled together a pretty good list of questions, and we've done our best to organize those for this discussion. We talk a lot about work-life balance, the role of luck versus hard work and success, some tips on writing, a whole bunch of things. Frankly, I think you're going to fall into one of two categories. Either you remember that initial discussion and you're going to want to deep dive into it, in which case I don't need to tell you anything more, or you felt, hey, this, that episode, you know, I got all I needed out of it. I don't need to go any further, in which case you stop listening now.
So with all that said, please enjoy this special follow-up, Ask Me Anything with Jason Fried.
Jason, thank you so much for making more time to follow up. You've already been gracious once. So, I figured I'd take advantage of you twice.

**Jason Fried** (2:14)
I like being taken advantage of you, Peter. Thank you.

**Peter Attia** (2:17)
Well, after we spoke the first time, you and I both had the same reaction. I remember we talked about it right after, which was, man, did we get off onto some tangents that for us were really interesting, but for others were maybe not so interesting. And I remember saying, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. Maybe we went off too far.
And then Nick listened to it and said, oh no, this is great. People are gonna like it. And sure enough, Nick was right. We were wrong.
And people had a lot of follow-up questions. So I guess for listeners, that's really why we've decided to do this. I just think there was so much great follow-up that I thought, I can't resist a second bite at the apple. And so basically all of the questions I'm gonna ask you today, Jason, have come from listeners.
And I'll probably editorialize a little bit, and I might dig off into a tangent. Should the question lend itself to that? But for the most part, all of these questions I'm about to inundate you with come from people who have been either listening to the first podcast and or just following your pretty incredible work. So with the ground rules set and no time limits in place, let's go to it.

**Jason Fried** (3:19)
Let's do it. I might throw some back your way too, because I'm sure there's some medical stuff in here somewhere that I know nothing about.

**Peter Attia** (3:26)
Very well.
So the first question is one that actually came up several times. And I'm guessing it's a question you've heard before, but it's a variation of the following. If you had taken your own advice about work-life balance at the start of your career, would you have achieved the level of success that you're at today?

**Jason Fried** (3:45)
Yeah, I do hear that one a lot. And let me first admit that that was 20 plus years ago. So whenever you go back that far, there's always some revisionist history.
But I've never really been a super long worker. I'm sure there were nights that I worked longer than I normally would. I'm sure there were times when I was really fired up and just couldn't get something out of my head and worked on it at night, especially when I lived by myself when I was 21 But the two things I remember are this.