If you want a good destiny, there is much to it — it comes down to learning not to contend, and learning to adapt.
Just look around you: people with stubborn, rigid, extreme, and combative temperaments almost universally walk a difficult path.
Their lives are like constant head-on collisions with one stone mountain after another — always hitting walls through sheer pigheadedness, always ending up battered and bloodied.
When they grow old and look back, they find that for decades they have been spinning their wheels over a handful of trivial, low-value matters.
There is a phrase you have surely heard: the highest good is like water; goodness flows with ease.
Yes — of all things that move through this world, nothing is more flexible and fluid than water. Nothing can contain it; nothing can trap it.
And water’s greatest quality is that it knows how to adapt. Adaptability is evolution. Evolution opens the way forward.
So it is often those who are gentle, easy-going, and adaptable who best handle life, career, family, wealth, and opportunity.
The I Ching teaches: the looper worm bends its body in order to stretch forward; the dragon and serpent hibernate in order to preserve themselves.
Life is the same. Never be imprisoned by circumstance — always surge forward with vitality, yet never lose your softness and flexibility, like the water that fills every river, lake, and sea under heaven.
Never fixate on grudges. Never be consumed by private enmity. Never be limited by where you stand today.
Those who understand adaptability this way — their path through life will surely be smooth.