Shattered Glass And Negative Leverage

How one better choice can save you hundreds of wasted hours

Kevin

Mar 29, 2025

This post is one of a series about leverage. To read the first post, go here.

I was distracted yesterday and knocked a glass cup off my table. Shards exploded everywhere.

I was barefoot. I remembered my parents urging us to put on shoes before cleaning up broken glass. Sensible.

But I had a novel thought: what if I cleaned up barefoot?

That sounds insane. But there was a method to the madness.

I'm not going to wear shoes forever in my apartment. If I wore shoes during the cleanup, I could miss shards that I'd only find the next time I'm barefoot.

I'd just watched the glass shatter, so I was extra cautious. I wouldn't be thinking about the glass in a few days' time, so I might carelessly step on a shard and get a worse injury. I wanted to find all the shards immediately.

So I cleaned the mess up barefoot. I stepped carefully in clear areas, using any poking feelings as warning signs. Things seemed to proceed smoothly.

My first hint I'd miscalculated came when doing a final sweep at the end.

I'd assumed all the glass pieces would be visible. The size of a pen tip, at smallest.

But what I swept up was glass dust. Miniscule fragments that would have been invisible if I hadn't collected them into a pile.

I'd only stepped in areas that seemed free of glass. But when I inspected the bottom of my feet, they gleamed full of tiny remnants I hadn't felt.

A little shaken, I washed my feet and did a thorough vacuuming.

My sheet brushed my toe while I lay in bed that night, and the sudden stabbing pain told me everything. I'd gotten a glass splinter. I jumped out of bed, but 30 minutes of searching failed to find it.

I'm writing this now as I wait for my body to expel the splinter naturally.

It's tempting to think, "Bad luck... don't clean up glass barefoot again". But there's a deeper principle we can learn here.

Negative Leverage

If I'd been in less of a rush, I wouldn't have knocked the glass over. I would have saved myself all the cleanup.

But even with the glass shattered, shoes would have saved me the time hunting for the splinter... not to mention the mental toll of having a glass shard in my foot.

I define leverage as small inputs causing big outputs.

In this case, I experienced "negative leverage". Small choices costed me hours of work.

Think to your own life. Do any of these sound familiar?

"Just a bit of Instagram" turns into hours of doom-scrolling, sleep deprivation, and unhealthy food choices the next day.
"Just one Netflix episode" ends on a cliffhanger, you're dying to know what happens next, and you're pulled into a multi-episode binge.
A "quick glance" at email after work reveals a stressful email that makes you anxious all night, corrupting your sleep and time with your loved ones.
One thing said in the heat of anger turns into hours repairing a relationship.
"Just one more drink" turns into a night of drinking, sleeping late, a hangover, and a wasted next day.

Everything would have been different if you'd taken a breath before responding, didn't check your email, or opened a book instead of Instagram/Netflix.

Warren Buffet's business partner, Charlie Munger, had this to say:

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent

Before trying to be clever, first stop causing problems for yourself.

Nassim Taleb calls this approach via negativa. It's positive leverage through what not to do.

Making one better choice prevents many negative outcomes in the future.

In Your Own Life

The first step to upgrading your own life with via negativa is recognizing the leverage point: the bad decision.

There were two in my case. I was careless with the glass, and I chose to go barefoot.

Think about your day today. How much of it results from past choices?

Consider...

Your sleep choices: Do you feel tired? Did you prioritize sleep last night? If not, what did you do instead? Was that a good choice?
Your diet choices: Was your diet driven by your goals, or your emotional state and tiredness? Did you take caffeine because you felt tired? Did you drink or take drugs to relax because you felt stressed? What effect did that have on you today?
Your exercise: Did you exercise today? Did you skip it because you were feeling tired or unmotivated? Would that have changed with different choices yesterday (sleep, diet)?
Your emotional regulation choices: Do you choose to ruminate on past bad things? Does that help you, or just stress you out? If you ruminate, why can't you let the past go? Do you choose angry music when you're upset, or calming music?
Your prioritization: Do you know what's most important? Do you use the Eisenhower Matrix to distinguish between importance and urgency? Are you doing what's most important, or are just what's urgent? Are you investing in things that will save you time in the future?
Your focus: Are you doing deep work and completing things? Or are you thrashing between multiple things, making little progress? When your current task gets difficult, do you flee to your inboxes (Slack, email, Whatsapp, Instagram) seeking a dopamine hit? How often do you let those inboxes distract you into something that's urgent but not important?
Your time management: How often do you procrastinate? Do you wait until the last minute to get ready? How often do unexpected complications transform from minor irritations into huge issues because you delayed? Do you blame the resulting stress on the complications, or on your own decisionmaking?

What if you spent 3 minutes answering these questions in a text document on your computer or pen-and-paper journal?

Even one mindset shift can change the choices you make, saving you hundreds of hours in the future.

Conclusion

It's easy to live on autopilot. Things seem to happen to us, we react, and we move on without identifying why.

But look closer: our lives are defined by the choices we make.

Small choices can balloon into big blockers to accomplishing our goals. One better decision can remove hours of future work.

Becoming More

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