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

In South Korea, all food waste must be separated from other trash and weighed in community “smart bins” equipped with scales and radio frequency identification (RFID) readers. Individuals must scan an RFID card to open the bin and throw something out, and they are automatically charged per pound of trash. As a result, the country now recycles an as

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.

This isn’t some poetic metaphor; it’s a neurological fact. When you imagine your future self, your brain does something weird: it stops acting as if you’re thinking about yourself. Instead, fMRI studies show, it behaves as if you’re thinking about a completely different person.1

RULE #2: Learn to Time Travel. Simulate in your mind what you might experience, feel, and do in the future as vividly and realistically as you can. This mental time travel, or episodic future thinking, stretches your imagination and helps you prepare for change by creating new memories of possible futures. You can stretch your imagination further b

In my experience, there are four different ways people refuse the urgent call of the future: with distancing, denial, fatigue, or surrender.

But you should try asking people these questions when the occasion arises. If you’re facilitating a group or meeting, try having people introduce themselves by answering one or both of these questions instead of simply sharing where they’re from, job titles, or other traditional biographic details. They open up incredible conversations. And they es

That’s why part of your imagination training in this book will be to try out new behaviors that might prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions. They require you to take no more than five minutes to do something today that you’ve never done before. When you experiment with these kinds of tiny new actions, you expand what your putamen c

Professional game developers will tell you that if you want someone to stick with a game, you have to give them an opportunity to be successful in the first few minutes.

Nearly fifty years ago, psychology researchers discovered something remarkable: if you want someone to believe that a future event is likely, you just have to ask them to imagine it happening, in as much vivid detail as possible.