IF YOU WANT TO FLIP some facts about your own life, here’s a quick challenge you can try. Make a list of at least five things that are true about your life today. Then rewrite them so that the opposite is now true, or offer a strange new alternative. Whatever alternative pops into your mind first, go for it. For example, on my own list, I wrote,

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

What makes for a useful future scenario is that it seems surprising or improbable or unfathomable at first. It’s ridiculous, at first, but the more you think about it, the more plausible it seems.

Every year on this holiday, you receive $2,000 from the government. You get to keep half. You have twenty-four hours to give away the other half. You can’t give the money to just anyone. This is a holiday meant to honor essential and frontline workers. There’s a national registry of eligible recipients for your thank-you dollars. It includes health

A signal of change draws your attention to where the ideas, technologies, and habits of the future are being actively experimented with, tested, seeded, and invented, today.

Tool #3: How emotionally provocative is your imagination?

the theory of learned helplessness. According to this theory, if we learn that outcomes are independent of our responses—that nothing we do matters—then we will internalize that lesson and carry it with us to other situations. Even if, objectively, we are not helpless, we will feel helpless. And so we will be less likely, whatever future problems

I no longer believe that the most important work of a large-scale social simulation like Superstruct is to accurately predict what people will do. Instead, the most important work of a future simulation is to prepare our minds and stretch our collective imagination, so we are more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient when the “unthinkable”

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.