Prioritizing Your Health, Glass vs. Rubber

Guiding Principle: Your physical, mental, and emotional health is a glass ball that cannot be dropped

As a reminder, the OS is an opinionated framework. Naturally, there will be exceptions and edge cases to the advice provided. However, we challenge you to resist the temptation to draw yourself outside of scenarios as much as possible to increase the guide’s potential benefits. With that said, let’s begin to discuss the glass and rubber balls in our lives.

The rubber balls in our life describe the things that, when dropped, will come back to us (within reason, of course). Work and hobbies are a couple of examples of rubber balls. At work, if we miss an email or end the week with an incomplete to-do list, we can recuperate this. The rubber ball will come back to us; work is never-ending, and we can continue forward.

The glass balls in our lives describe the things that, when dropped, shatter. They remain broken indefinitely or require extensive repair to fix. Even fixed, they are not quite ever the same as before. Our physical and mental health and close relationships are examples of glass balls. If we betray our commitments to our partners, they may no longer trust our word. If we stay in workplace situations that don’t respect our personal time, we may develop life-long stress-related illnesses.

The fast-moving tech industry focuses heavily on the maximum short-term gain. “Move fast and break things” is the famous Silicon Valley mantra. However, sometimes the “thing” that breaks is people. The challenge in this section is to examine our lives in terms of glass and rubber balls.