Going regularly outside your zone of comfort is necessary to expand your being, experience positive emotions and prevent stagnation. But it is not sufficient – you also need to ensure that going into the realm of chaos prepared, with a sword, on which your values are inscribed. Indeed, going into the zone of discomfort should be in service of a value you hold and the time and effort you spend in that zone should be proportional to the value’s importance in your life – that way you avoid going into the realm of chaos, where anxiety awaits, without a chance for acquiring anything of lasting worth.

...starting from the observations that experientially we are quickly and enigmatically able to ‘click’ with and relate to specific people, I argue that it’s possible to have that experience with any one and any experience. In the case of people with whom we resonate deeply, the experiences are already well-matched, while in other circumstances we have to scale our own experiences to match theirs. This scaling inevitably introduces noise in our capacity to effectively empathize but with patience and perseverance, we can better calibrate our scaling ability and thus become better at empathizing with one another.

One distinctive feature we have as a species is that we know of the existence of the future and can plan accordingly. It was obvious to me from the start of my degree that there would be a lot of pressure to find a career after graduating, so I took steps to alleviate that. I explored different career paths to find my spark and adopted a proactive and humble attitude. These steps facilitated the process of developing key skills that would increase my career capital in the long term. For me, this is a liberating conclusion: adopting a mindset, based on the three lessons highlighted in this meditation, can make my future self's life just a little bit easier.