Hello everyone!

Ive just made a massive upgrade from a Vauxhall Corsa 1.2 to a Volkswagen Golf 2.0 GT TDI 140HP, (sorry for posting on the GTI forum) and I am absolutely loving it and wish I had done it much sooner! Still speachless after 2 days of driving it
Now this is a really silly question to all of you i'm sure. But because I am just not used to this level of high performance I wanted to ask two questions.
1) The Golf is such an adrenaline rush to put your foot down especially when the turbo kicks in, however I don't want to ruin everything so as long as I don't red line it am I pretty safe from destroying it? Of course I don't drive like an idiot, not all the time anyway! But it just seems that I must be putting a strain on the car when it surges me forward. Maybe this is because i'm used to an extremely underpowered engine. Am I worrying about nothing? I always wait for the engine to warm up first of course.
2) The second thing I wanted to ask was, how do you guys shift when driving your golf? How long (to what approx revs) do you change from 1st to 2nd because it always feels like 1st is lacking power and the rest sends you into the back seat or am I just changing too early?
Thanks! Great forum by the way! Seems very informative