Chewing Glass
Work on the problem your company needs, not the one you want.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 82%
Chewing Glass is Hala Taha's reframing of Elon Musk's line that running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss. It means doing the unpleasant, necessary work your company requires rather than the fun, innovative work you'd prefer. The abyss is the constant threat of extinction (90% of startups fail), and the glass-chewing never fully stops, but it does earn you a cash cushion that removes existential fear. Taha stresses this is uniquely hard for neurodivergent founders who crave dopamine, which is why the rest of her system exists to make glass-chewing less painful.
Origin
Taha adopted the concept after watching Elon Musk break down his own quote in a video, and reframed it as the central discipline every founder must master, then built her productivity tactics around making it survivable.
Core principles
- 01Founders have insider knowledge of every broken thing in the business, and only they can fix some of it.
- 02The work that matters is rarely the work that feels fun or gives you dopamine.
- 03Doing the unglamorous, necessary work builds the cash cushion that ends existential risk.
- 04For neurodivergent founders, forcing yourself onto low-dopamine tasks is the single hardest discipline.
How to run it
- 1
Identify the glass
Name the problems in your business that only you can solve and that you keep avoiding because they aren't fun.
Pro tip Ask: what breaks if I never do this? Those are the highest-priority glass.
- 2
Separate need from want
Explicitly split the work the company needs from the work you personally want to do, and be honest about which list you gravitate toward.
Watch out The things you want to work on will always feel more urgent than they are.
- 3
Do the needed work first
Commit your prime focus time to the needed work before allowing yourself the wanted work.
- 4
Build a cushion, then relax the grip
Keep chewing until cash flow and emergency savings mean a single mistake no longer means extermination.
Pro tip The glass-chewing eases once you have padding; the first years are the hardest.
In the wild
Taha has Penguin Random House and Hachette repeatedly asking her to write a book, something she badly wants to do, but she declines because it isn't in her current plan and she needs to chew glass on her existing business.
→ She protects her focus on what the company needs now rather than the exciting opportunity she'd rather chase.
Common mistakes
Chasing dopamine work
Choosing the innovative or fun tasks because they feel good, while the survival-critical work rots, especially common for ADHD founders who need novelty.
Chewing glass on the wrong idea
Grinding endlessly on a business with no market need; disciplined effort on a dead idea still fails.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early-stage founders and solopreneurs in the first two to three high-risk years.
Not ideal for
People whose issue is overwork on the wrong idea rather than avoidance of hard tasks.
From the transcript
“running a startup is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss”
“you have to work on the problems your company needs you to work on not the ones that you want to work on”
From the episode
Hala Taha: Skyrocket Your Sales with My Proven Webinar Blueprint
Hala Taha