Imagination Habits Work Better When You Plant Them in Your Mind

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We can't just conjure up realistic possibilities unless we are looking around the world and collecting the signals. Try to find evidence of some form of change that is, it's now starting to happen. And then youshet planning that in your mind. It works better when you do it with other people. So make a commitment to text a friend once a week. You're going to have, you know that i'm sending you a signal, and you'r gon have to send me a few coffee meat ups. O, like lit brown bag lunches at work. Iu, try to make it social. Just like games, you're more likely to play a game of somebody

The future grows out of the present, but it manages to consistently surprise us. How can we get better at anticipating and preparing for what the future can be like? Jane McGonigal started out as a game designer, working on the kinds of games that represent miniature worlds with their own rules. This paradigm provides a useful way of thinking about predicting the future: imagining changes in the current world, then gaming out the consequence, allowing real people to produce unexpected emergent outcomes. We talk about the lessons learned that anyone can use to better prepare their brain for the future to come.

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Jane McGonigal received her Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a writer and Director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She teaches a course at Stanford on How to Think Like a Futurist. She has developed several games, including SuperBetter, a game she designed to improve health and resilience after suffering from a concussion. Her recent book is Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything–Even Things That Seem Impossible Today.

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