Enduring difficulty and adversity acts like medicine that forges and refines a person's character and resolve, while a life of ease and pleasant surroundings quietly dissolves one's discipline without the person noticing. The ruin from comfort is harder to detect precisely because it feels agreeable.
In wealth, achievement, speech, and favor, one should stop short of the full extent and deliberately keep something in reserve rather than exhausting a situation to its limit. Reaching fullness invites reversal, so the unused margin is what preserves safety and continued goodwill.
Intense flavors, strong wine, and rich meat are not the real taste; the real taste is plain and mild. Likewise a person of extraordinary virtue appears ordinary rather than dazzling, so true quality shows as plainness, not as spectacle.
In dealing with the world one should neither be entirely accommodating nor entirely rigid: keep inner principles strict and uncompromised while making outer conduct supple and adaptable to circumstance. The division assigns firmness to the self and flexibility to relations with others.