Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything—Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

Whenever they got into a heated conversation, they would stop, take a breath, and say: “Strong opinions, lightly held.” And then they would take a closer look at their assumptions.

What do I take from this data? Freedom clearly has a wider range of meaning to young people today when it comes to cars—not just personal mobility or control over a machine but also freedom from debt, freedom from feeling guilty about the environmental impacts, freedom from anxiety about risky activities. To me, these clues alongside the advance of

want to help you create a more balanced mindset between hopes and worries for the future. At the Institute for the Future, we call this using your positive imagination and your shadow imagination

But procrastination, paradoxically, is more likely to happen when you feel time-poor.5 When you feel like you have less time to get things done, you do less. And when you feel you have ample time, you do more. Studies show this is true completely independent of how much “free” or unscheduled time a person has. What matters is whether your brain per

Make a note of your score for the three questions above. (Write your numbers in the margins or send yourself an email you can search for later.)

Interestingly, brains respond to abundant space in the same way as they do to abundant time. Studies have found that we also think more creatively and set higher, “maximal,” goals for ourselves when we’re in rooms with higher ceilings or outside in a wide-open environment.3 With maximal goals, we focus on the upper boundary: