The Icing on the Cake

I’d like to apologize first and foremost to everyone who saw the title and header image and clicked on it to read about some new cake/icing recipe or something. You wouldn’t have clicked on “marbles in a jar”, now, would you?
That said, there’s a lot to learn here if you can get all your marbles in a bunch.
I once watched a video where a man expressed a quite appalling take on life and its marbles. Since I couldn’t find the video to repost, I thought I’d write on as much as I remembered from it. Here’s marbles in a jar.
Imagine that there’s an empty jar in front of you. Say you fill the jar with spherical marbles that measure about half an inch in diameter, it gets filled pretty quickly. Now, marbles that are half an inch in diameter can fill up a jar quickly, but not “completely”. There’s always room that’s not wide enough to fit a half-inch marble.
Now, let’s assume you grab another batch of marbles, this time, let’s say they’re a quarter of an inch in diameter, and you add them to the already “full jar” of half-inch marbles. What happens? The room left by the half inch marbles gets filled, but obviously, there’s still some room just in-between the marbles. Ah, marbles.
Continuing with the goal of filling a jar completely, you can get marbles that are — let’s assume — one-eighth in diameter, and you add them to the jar. Those tiny things will find their way to all the room left by the quarter inch marbles. But alas, there’s still a tiny bit of room.
So how, my friends,how do you fill up the rest of the jar? You add chocolate 😋. The amazingly deliciousness that is chocolate covers all the room that’s left in the jar, giving you chocolate chipped marble? I don’t know how those things are named.
How does all this affect you as a person? Well, the jar is your life, and the marbles are your priorities. While this was a perfect ensemble of marbles, real life isn’t perfect and more than a few of us have some quarter-inch marbles residing with the big boys. Sometimes this doesn’t pose any risk or problem to a person’s life and/or productivity, but it can on occasion, wear down a person’s ability to focus, or reduce max performance.
But because you started by putting the largest marbles in first, and then went on to the not-so-large ones, and then to the not-so-not-so-large ones, everything is in perfect order. This is a lot like the scale of preference in economics where you arrange your needs in order of importance.
The only way to perfectly optimize the jar (your life) is to put the largest marbles in first. You might need to remove all the marbles from the jar and assess them in order to know which ones are large, and not-so-large. But believe me when I say that empires are not crushed by outward forces.
And no, I didn’t forget about the chocolate. No matter how filled up that jar is, there’ll always be room for chocolate, as no matter how filled up (you think) your life is, there’s always room for Jesus.
