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Take advantage of being alive! Dare to ask yourself what you'd like to do today.

It's important to have some sense of the great potential of the world and the number of things to do in it, even if only a fraction of them are presently visible.

Study your life so that its direction is not accidental. You can still take advantage of opportunities, but perhaps you can also create some by your own good navigation.

Seize opportunities while you're still young and have few if any commitments to children or mortgages. Don't wait for some green light. Don't waste your youth with all its energy and possibilities and everything in front of you. Get up and go make things happen for you.

If you want to go into business, try creating the kind of product or service that you personally would like to experience.

Invention is problem solving, and the way forward is through invention. Think about what you could invent for the different worlds that you inhabit: the products, the services, the tactics, the techniques.

Find something that really needs to be done, and then set out to persuade the world of it. Good ideas are not rare, getting them done is.

In business and in many other areas of life, it can help to look for the elevators that are going up, then think big and do it quickly. 'Fish up stream' before the best catches have been taken.

Everything seems "impossible" until you try it. 18 months before, none of this seemed doable, but you just move forward one step at a time.

The "yes, but what ifs" can cut our dreams to shreds.

Go for it! You're likely to lead a more interesting life, to meet more interesting people, and to become a more interesting person yourself.

I wouldn't want to be a concert-level pianist exactly, but I do wish I could play a musical instrument just well enough so that I could express how I felt through playing it, and through singing a few songs. It would also mean I could make a special contribution at parties and get-togethers. I'm always very impressed when someone else can.

Paradoxically, to be too careful can also be dangerous.

Gambling is a compulsion, an addiction. On the other hand, a "calculated risk", is something very different. It is recognising the odds very clearly, and then choosing to accept them.

Never do anything to damage your reputation for being honest and trustworthy. Never do anything that would weaken your sense of self-respect for yourself as a decent person at heart.

Can you make your own luck? Yes, you certainly can! You get up and go find it. The more you try and the harder you practice, the luckier you get.

No one on their deathbed ever wished they'd spent more time at the office, got drunk more often, or had done more drugs.

What 3 skills would you most like to learn? Out of all the people you know, which 3 individuals would you most like to spend a long weekend with? Name 3 activities you would really like to experience? Now ask yourself how you could make some firm plans to do so.

Some real pleasures come from hindsight, even if the journey has been hard.

The most wonderful times are spent with other people on little adventures.

Test out your fears and prejudices. Treat yourself to your dreams and hopes, so that you can move beyond them.

The more you dread something and don't want to do it, the more you will probably learn from it.

One of the worst feelings is walking away from something you wanted to do, but you didn't have the nerve to take on.

Have the courage of your convictions. If it feels right, give it everything you've got while that feeling lasts.

Dare to step out of line and break the mold to do something worthwhile and important to you, because although it feels easier in the short term to be normal and invisible, in the long term you'll only look back and regret it.

The most wonderful times are spent with other people on little adventures.

If you've got a dream, pursue it. Follow that dream, no matter how wild and hair-brained. You really don't want to wake up and find yourself at 40 not knowing whether you could have been this or that or the other - whether you could have been a striker for Arsenal or played at the Met. Go and try out for the team and find out for yourself. Don't hold back. Give it everything you've got. Chase your dream and find out for sure. Even if there's no hope, at least you will have got it out of your system and you'll know the bottom line. There are few things worse than the regret of not having tried in the first place. .