Anxiety or depression is a disorder of our ability to project into the future. You have to be able to imagine a world where the thing you're inventing exists in the future, right? So that is something that massively unlocked our ability to create and innovate,. On the other hand, it then creates all these problems because when we have a kind of emotional disorders about that future perspective, those can be incredibly painful.
We all face fork-in-the-road moments in our lives. In his 2005 bestseller “Blink,” Next Big Idea Club curator (and this episode’s guest interviewer) Malcolm Gladwell famously argued that snap judgments can be just as effective as meticulous planning. In this lively conversation, author Steven Johnson (“Farsighted”) disagrees, arguing that big, complex decisions require careful thought and scenario-building.