Humans, on average, make 35,000 decisions every day. And out of billions of decisions we make in a lifetime, there are certainly times we feel lost. To all students out there, let me make a list for you: What course should I take? What majors should I choose? What career path suits me the best? The next step seems nowhere to be found.

The truth is, we don’t know what we want until we actually see it. We don’t know where to go until we make a move. In the face of ambiguity, there’s nothing left to do but try.

Back in freshman year, my friends and I co-founded MentalBooth. It is a Virtual-Reality enabled meditation hotspot that can be found in a shopping mall, a co-working space, and on our campus in Hong Kong. Our mission was simple back then: to help Hong Kong youth alleviate stress by providing an accessible and safe environment to relax through beginner-friendly meditation sessions.

As fascinating as the idea seems, we were unsure how to push this forward. To bring an idea to life; to grow from zero to one. Luckily we had supportive mentors, and that’s how we learned what we lacked was experimentation. Quickly we gathered materials from IKEA to assemble an enclosed fabric space and played pre-recorded VR sceneries and a simple meditation audio guide. Stationed on the campus, we then invited around thirty students who passed by to try. They told us even though they loved the prototype; the limited moving area was stressing them out. Some even mentioned that feeling trapped in an enclosed space could evoke claustrophobia! It occurred to us that while VR was a great initiative to introduce students to meditation, we should also consider the ergonomics of relaxation. We took this feedback to heart and made another prototype. The experimentation was repeated until we found the optimal solution.

At times, what we are looking for is progress, not perfection. What we need is failures, not answers. We need to put ourselves out there to explore the possibilities. No one knows where the journey will take us. And that’s what makes it fun.