From the Jack’s Winning Words blog comes this little saying – “If you only do what you can do, you will never be more than you are now.” (Shifu to Po in the movie, Panda 3) The dialog continues…Po: “I like who I am.” Shifu: “You don’t even know who you are.”
Do you know who you are or what you could be, if you only tried something new; something that you didn’t know that you could do?
We all tend to find our own “comfort zone”; that place where we love to go and stay because it is non-threatening and, well, comfortable. Some may tend to cocoon in their
comfort zone, building walls to keep others out. The trouble is that those same walls keep you held in; you become trapped in who you are and never get to explore who you could be, if only you tried some new things. Your comfort zone becomes your personal prison.
Maybe, like Po in the movie, you think that you are happy with who you are in your safe and secure little cocoon; however, it is more likely that Shifu’s admonishment is more true – “you don’t even know who you are” or who you could be. That advice is particularly true in human relationships. You will never know how your life might change and become perhaps more rewarding unless you make the choice to interact 
with a great variety of people. Choosing to live life with few, if any, close friends is like sitting down with a coloring book and having only one or two crayons. It can get pretty dull pretty quick and you can lose interest. Making friends and understanding their different points of view fills you crayon box with many colors and makes the pictures that you do much more interesting.
Trying different things in life both increases your knowledge and makes you a more interesting person for others to know. Can you imagine attracting “likes” on your Facebook page if all you posted every day was, “Got up ate breakfast, went to work, ate lunch, came home, ate dinner and when to bed”? Sometimes life may begin to feel like that; but that can be changed by just trying something new each day. The easiest way to 
do that is to try to meet someone new each day. Each new person that you meet adds a new crayon to your box and allows you to add a new shade or color to your life story.
It’s much easier than you may think to meet someone new each day. You can start by not ignoring those that we already see or pass by each day – the person on the elevator that always seems to be there when we are in the morning, or the person that is out walking their dog at the same time that you do or the woman down the hall from you at work whom you see in the break room all the time. Don’t ignore those people, stop and say, “Hi, I see you all the time, I’m …” You may be pleasantly surprised that they were also wondering about you, too.
As for trying new things; that can be a simple as trying a new way home. We all get in ruts, comfort zones, about things like our routes to and from work or our routines before 
or after work. Try something new, a different route to or from work or maybe a stop on the way to or from work that we don’t normally make. Maybe you can try something completely different on a weekend; go someplace that you’ve never been or try a new activity that you’ve never tried. You don’t have to go out and try sky diving, but maybe something as simple as going to a sports event that you’ve never been to or actually participating in a sport that you’ve never tried.
It’s amazing what getting a few new things like that under your belt can do for you. Once you get past the realization of “that didn’t kill me” and maybe all the way to “I really enjoyed that”; you will find yourself looking for the next adventure out of your little comfort zone. In fact you may find that your little cocoon just got a little bit bigger and the pictures of your life a lot more colorful for having tried something new. You have 
become more than you were then because you did something that you didn’t know that you could do. And, unless this all happens on a desert island, you will also find that you now know more people than you’ve ever known, because you put yourself out there where they were, too.
Life can be beautiful and colorful if you fill your crayon box with the colors of the others that you meet. Get out there and be more than you are now.
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