It's a pretty smart way of thinking about life, and it's one that threw up some interesting insights for me. I think I'm pretty smart about the way I approach pleasure, in that I don't persue excessively.

I put far more of my energies into the 'passion' side of things, specifically the persuit of flow. My biggest hobby throughout my life has been video games, and games are great for achieving flow. Other hobbies such as board and card games, as well as social dancing very much fall into this category - when you're in a flow state it feels great.

The problem is purpose. Video games are a lovely way to spend your time, but after spending many hours completing a Impossible Ironman campaign in XCom or hitting legend rank in Hearthstone, you haven't actually made any tangible impact on the real world.

When I was working as a lawyer, I tried to remind myself of the purposive value of what I was doing - protecting the vulnerable and preserving their rights, but moments of real achievement were few and far between. When I try and think about what I want to do with the rest of my life, it's almost always through a passion lens - I want to do something that uses my brain, or a job that allows me to acheive a flow state, without ever thinking what the higher purpose is. It's taken some thought to get an idea of what a purpose I might work towards can be.

I struggle a little with this - I think it's not necessarily the best question to elicit the response Mr Tan is looking for. I think it's going to produce a set of positive, platitudinous adjectives, but hey, here's my list.

The things I value most in both myself and other people are humility, openmindedness and persistence. No matter how talented you are, you need to know the limits of your talents, and be open to feedback and new ideas, or you will never improve. If you aren't persistent in following your goals, you'll never acheive them.

Implicitly, what that means is I value improvement (often for its own sake, hence many hours honing pointless skills in videogames) and acheivement.

Again, this is a weird question. Most people have never had to 'stand for' something, in the sense of defending one value or principle against opposition. Arguably I have, in that I have defended the rights of the underprivileged against the state, or against their relationship partners, but the fact that I found that pretty unsatisfying probably means it isn't the answer to this question.

What it did make me think about was the change I would like to see in the world, and I think it relates to improvement and mastery for people of their own lives (this should come as no surprise). The clearest example I can think of is my finances. Within a year or two of graduating, I decided to sit down, assess how much money I was spending on needs and wants, and to organise my accounts and automatic payments such that I had one account for bills and rent, that would always have enough money from my salary to cover those costs, one for spending money that I could use however I wanted, and one for savings that would receive a substantial chunk of every paycheque.

Once I had this set up, I had the freedom to spend my designated spending money on whatever, and all my bills were taken care of every week, and I was getting richer and richer, with zero effort. It felt amazing - with a small amount of effort and planning, my finances had gone from something that were uncertain and vaguely worrying, to something I had control over, that made me feel better about myself. And, having a good amount of money saved is great - there's nothing you can buy that feels as good as knowing you could get fired tomorrow and still live the exact same life for one or three or six months.

Personal finance is a relatively straightforward example, but there are lots of other things out there like it - job searching, voting, home maintenance, cooking, where a little bit of education pays huge dividends for individuals, their societies and the environment. I can see my purpose being something that brings that education and empowerment to people who wouldn't have it otherwise.

Ok, meditation on moments of failure is really hard, and it sucks. Still, a valuable exercies to do. Firstly it made me realise that all my moments I consider failures are social or romantic - apparently when things go wrong in my career or other fields, I have a healthy enough narrative to feel liek they are setbacks that I can overcome, rather than failures that reflect on weaknesses in my essential nature.

I also found moments of success harder to bring to mind and focus on than failures. I suppose that bodes well for not grasping, but it also means I suffer that classic thing where I overrate negative feedback, and underrate my own achievements because I'm the one that acheived them (the Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again).

So I guess I need to congratulate myself more for my successes and reframe my narrative around my social and romantic life. I think I need to do this exercise semi-regularly (perhaps once a week). Doing too often would dilute the memories of success/failure I think, and 18 minutes is a long time to meditate in one sitting, but I think doing it once a week is manageable.