There’s a lot of focus these days on living longer by eating healthy, taking exercise, avoiding stress and taking supplements. These are all really positive things to do.

But it’s easy to confuse quantity with quality. Simply cranking up the days and reaching a ripe old age is great if you can look back on a life well  lived.

But many people end up with regrets, and more often than not, they regret the thing they didn’t do. Missed opportunities and times when they chose to play it safe rather than do something different.

Lots of us are reigned in by fear. We have no desire to challenge the status quo, because it is what we know and what we have become comfortable with, like that shabby old pair of slippers we know we should throw away, but they’ve got so comfortable.

If we throw a pebble into the pond, the ripples will extend and affect those around us. We might not be where we want to be, but change involves risk and why risk failure, we ask ourselves. We might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. If we reach out our hands towards the flickering flame, we do risk getting burnt.

Let’s face it, life is risky and the more we avoid it, the smaller our life becomes. If you’re always in your comfort zone, you’re probably playing it way too safe.

So expand. Open your arms and embrace new experiences, new projects, new adventures and new people. Take your space in the world.

Live a bigger life!

‘The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.’ Helen Keller

‘Don’t go through life, grow through life.’ Eric Butterworth

‘The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.’ Jimmy Johnson

‘Defeat is not bitter unless you swallow it.’ Joe Clark

‘To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.’ Fred Shero

‘In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing.’ Theodore Roosevelt

‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’ William Bruce Cameron

‘I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.’ Winston Churchill

‘If you want to make your dreams come true, the first thing you have to do is wake up.’ M. Power

‘A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it isn’t open.’ Frank Zappa

‘Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.’ Anon

‘Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.’ Mark Twain

‘Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self-evident.’ Arthur Schopenhauer

‘The only way to have a friend is to be one.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.’ Bill Cosby

‘Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.’ Robert Brault

‘If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.’ Joseph Cossman

‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’ Aristotle

‘Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.’ Henry Ford

‘The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.’ Chinese Proverb

‘That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.’ Friedrich Nietzsche

‘It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.’ Vince Lombardi

‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’ Alan Kay

‘Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.’ Charles R. Swindoll