“Take chances, pay attention” is a pithy saying that I wrote in the style of a motto. This was after I had been through a series of workshops around the genre of awareness training. I wanted to encapsulate a more powerful approach to personal growth than anything I had learned in the workshops. “Take chances” means that you don’t arrive at a full understanding of your own nature or the nature of life by passively observing, no matter how neutral you can make your observations. Eventually you have to become an experimenter, trying things, stirring things up, actively living your life so that you can discover other things that you would never have seen from where you were sitting. Then “pay attention” means to recognize the value of every such moment and use it for everything you can discover from it. It means being driven by curiosity and an appreciation for the value of yourself, your time, and everything that you experience. It says, don’t let an experience go to waste by not noticing how it came out. “Take chances, pay attention,” is more than just a shaman’s spin on awareness training. With practice, it can become a powerful and rapid repeating cycle in which you reinvent yourself all day, every day.