Imaginable: How to see the future coming and be ready for anything

rather than drastically reduce what’s on your schedule, it’s much easier to control how far out in the future you’re imagining when you think about changes you’d like to achieve.

WHICH GLOBAL TRENDS—THINGS GOING ON IN THE WORLD THAT ARE bigger than you, and beyond your individual control—do you think will have the most influence on your life, and on your friends’ and family’s lives, over the next decade?

This is how you become a pioneer. And it’s something I’ve seen again and again: it’s so much easier to come up with new innovations, to imagine new products and services and businesses and art forms, when you play with ridiculous, at first, ideas—because far fewer people are thinking about and getting ready for these “unthinkable” futures. You get

This is the final challenge of One Hundred Ways Anything Can Be Different in the Future. Spend some time seriously imagining one or more of the most provocative possibilities. Use your episodic future thinking skills. Immerse yourself in the upside-down world that you’ve just invented.

That’s why, when I create new scenarios, I playtest them just as I would playtest a new game. I run the scenario by as many people as possible to make sure it makes sense and draws them in.

The mPFC is essential to maintaining your “continuity of self.” It’s how you wake up every day knowing who you are, and what you want to do next. More than one hundred brain-imaging studies have reported this effect.2 But there’s one major exception to this rule: the farther out in time you try to imagine your own life, the less activation you show

How much control or influence do you feel you personally have in determining how the world and your life change over the next ten years? Rate your outlook on a scale of 1 to 10.

RULE #4: Be Ridiculous, at First. Be playful as you brainstorm ways that anything could be different in the future. Entertain any possibility, no matter how absurd it seems at first. Keep in mind that future possibilities that seem unthinkable or impossible today are the ones that will be hardest to adapt to, so we need more time to prepare. To bui

RULE #10: Answer the Call to Adventure. Treat every future scenario as an invitation to imagine yourself doing something important. Ask yourself three questions to better understand the opportunities for action: What will people want and need in this future? What kinds of people will be particularly helpful in this future? How will you use your uni