Which world will you wake up in first? “The Road to Zerophoria”: Wake up in a world where a public service you take for granted disappears virtually overnight. Get ready to rethink every aspect of your daily life. “Welcome Party”: Wake up in a world that is working together to move one billion people across borders. Get ready to pick your new desti

In studies, when individuals complete an EFT challenge—challenges very much like the one you completed at the start of this chapter, such as, “Imagine yourself meeting a friend for breakfast a year from today,” or “Imagine yourself taking a walk ten years from today”—they subsequently perform significantly better on various tests of creativity.

Living concrete: Traditional concrete is responsible for nearly 10 percent of global carbon emissions today, but a new technology that creates living concrete bricks out of bacteria, gelatin, and sand absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen. Living concrete self-regenerates; one brick cut in half heals and forms two bricks; those two can be cut

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?

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.

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

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 w

And when he watched what was actually going on in the brain, he discovered that the original theory had it all backward: We don’t learn helplessness. The brain assumes helplessness when exposed to adverse conditions. If we want to feel that we have any control over our own outcomes, we have to learn that we have power.

MOMENT OF CHOICE: Imagine waking up on Thank You Day ten years from now. Are you going to say “Thank you” or “No thank you”? If you do choose to participate, whom will you send your thank-you dollars to today, and why?