Imaginable: How to Create a Hopeful Future--In Your Own Life, Your Community, the World - Paperback

by Jane McGonigal (Author)

* 2023 Nautilus Book Award Winner: Rising to the Moment: Gold *

World-renowned future forecaster, game designer, and New York Times bestselling author Jane McGonigal gives us the tools to imagine the future without fear.

"An accessible, optimistic field guide to the future."-San Francisco Chronicle

"Reading this book is like sitting down with a creative, optimistic friend--and getting up as a new version of yourself."--Daniel H. Pink, New York Times bestselling author of When

The COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly frequent climate disasters, a new war--events we might have called "unimaginable" or "unthinkable" in the past are now reality. Today it feels more challenging than ever to feel unafraid, hopeful, and equipped to face the future with optimism. How do we map out our lives when it seems impossible to predict what the world will be like next week, let alone next year or next decade? What we need now are strategies to help us recover our confidence and creativity in facing uncertain futures.

In Imaginable, Jane McGonigal draws on the latest scientific research in psychology and neuroscience to show us how to train our minds to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. She invites us to play with the provocative thought experiments and future simulations she's designed exclusively for this book, with the goal to:

1. Build our collective imagination so that we can dive into the future and envision, in surprising detail, what our lives will look like ten years from now
2. Develop the courage and vision to solve problems creatively
3. Take actions and make decisions that will help shape the future we desire
4. Access "urgent optimism," an unstoppable force within each of us that activates our sense of agency

Imaginable teaches us to be fearless, resilient, and bold in realizing a world with possibilities we cannot yet imagine--until reading this transformative, inspiring, and necessary book.

Author Biography

Jane McGonigal, PhD, is a future forecaster and designer of reality games created to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is also the author of two New York Times bestselling books, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2011) and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully (Penguin Press, 2016), and her TED talks on how gaming can improve our lives have more than 15 million views. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research group in Palo Alto, California, currently teaches the course "How to Think Like a Futurist" at Stanford University, and is the lead instructor for the Institute for the Future's series on the Coursera platform. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.