460: Jane McGonigal - How To See The Future & Be Ready For Anything

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games — or, games that are designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She believes game designers are on a humanitarian mission — and her #1 goal in life is to see a game developer win a Nobel Peace Prize. She is a two-time New York Times bestselling author: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully. Her TED talks on how games can make a better world and the game that can give you 10 extra years of life, are among the all-time most popular TED talks, and have more than 15 million views.

Jane dedicates this book to her sister Kelly... "who lives six minutes in the future." They are twins.
- "It's so helpful having her. If she can achieve something (TED Talks, Books), I could do it too."
Being able to predict the future is not enough. You have to be bale to pre-feel it.
Write down your long term plans. "Talk about a world you want to wake up in."
"Any useful idea about the future should sound rediculous initially."
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
How to think like a futurist?
- In the corporate world... Carve out a role for yourself to fight short-terminism. Fight short term thinking. Play the long game.
- Create future planning habits in your organization.
Dare to daydream.
Take ownership - Create moments of joy... Be of service to others.
A 30 second practical activity:
- Imagine 10 years from now... Where are you? What woke you up? Who are you with?
The 3 questions to give you a baseline sense of your “future mindset”
- When you think about the next 10 years, do you think things will mostly stay the same and go on as normal? Or do you expect that most of us will dramatically rethink and reinvent how we do things?
- When you think about how the world and your life will change over the next 10 years, are you mostly worried or mostly optimistic?
- How much control or influence do you feel you personally have in determining how the world and your life change over the next 10 years?
How to predict the future?
- Unstick your mind
- Think The Unthinkable
- Imagine the Unimaginable
Imaginable - How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything– even things that seem impossible today
One of the issues that cause depression is it doesn’t allow you to imagine a future. For us as leaders, we need to be able to imagine a positive future for ourselves and our team.
Be a spotlight for other people’s good ideas. Bring attention to it. Be known as someone who spreads positive gossip
Living in the present. Giannis – "When you focus on the past, that's your ego... And when I focus on the future it's my pride... And I kind of like to focus in the moment, in the present. And that's humility. That's being humble."